What the heck am I rambling about? Just my latest domains:

• Dreaming Vespa Dreams; after all, hasn’t everyone dreamt of wheeling around on a little European scooter, at least once? (In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard) ‘Ciao!’
• Not masculine enough for you? Well, just climb up into your Hunter Stand and get a little primal.
• But it sure can be cold out there this time of the year, so don’t forget to bring along a Cheap Generator to bring the heat (and the game) with you!

With each bit of success I’m adding another domain or two or three. I’ve recently decided that, at least for now, I will not take out any profit on any of the income my sites earn. Instead, I plan to just keep rolling everything beyond expenses into additional domains/niches. Each site seems to add another layer to this endeavor’s income snowball. So as long as I can get the individual sites even marginally profitable, adding more seems to be the smart route.

When I have that 1,000th domain earning it’s shiny quarter day in and day out, well, then I’ll decide what the next step is…

I’ve had a number of email/PM conversations since I started exposing myself my attempts at money making in public looking for my opinions on which route I think is the better to take: the full-fledged Build A Niche Store route or the quick minisite mashup route. My answer, every time, has been both.

THE NICHE STORE ROUTE

A well-executed, SEO’d niche store is a wonderful thing to behold. Steady $2, $3, $10, or even $50 commissions roll in with little or (better yet) no effort on your part. That is, AFTER the initial planning and customizing and SEOing has been done. A converting niche store requires a fair amount of effort up front if it is going to succeed, from keyword research to domain name selection to menu customization to look-and-feel to backlink building to… well, you get the picture. Putting up a straight-out-of-the-box BANS site on a broad, competitive niche and expecting the commissions to roll in is simply wishful thinking. It’s not that BANS development is back-breaking labor by any means, but there definitely is an initial effort investment.

THE MINISITE MASHUP ROUTE

On the other hand, the minisite mashups are great because they are so painless to set up. Do a little basic niche research (consisting primarily in determining if there exists enough products in the market for whatever topic you are looking at), paste a couple handfuls of decent keywords into a text file, upload, and a minisite is born. I do a few more tweaks, such as inserting some stat tracking code and setting up site-specific Adsense channels, because I want to see how much traffic — and from where — each gets. But even with those extra steps, I can still put up a mashup minisite in less time than it takes to steam a batch of rice. Overall, the performance on these mashup minisites is hit or miss. I have a few that paid for themselves - meaning, at least covered the domain registration fee - in less than a week. And I have a few that, if they continue performing the way they are now, I’ll be lucky to have them pay for themselves in a year (which earning just $0.63 a month will do). Most of their earnings come from Adsense, but I’ve also gotten a handful of eBay and Amazon sales as well, and it doesn’t take many of those to get that domain registration fee back!

SO WHY BOTH?

Like I said, I’ve had a surprising level of success with a couple of my mashups, whether from a random sale commission or eBay signup here and there. Nevertheless, the main drawback to the minisite over the fleshed out BANS site remains their earning potential. The award for consistency definitely goes to the BANS sites. I can count on an optimized BANS site converting regularly.

So why not just build niche stores? Because my time is finite. The true benefit of the mashups isn’t necessarily the trickle of money they bring in (though I won’t turn it down!); it’s the information I glean from their traffic. Once they are up and getting noticed by the search engines, noting those that perform gives me a decent indication of which ones will do well as a full blown sites versus those that may not be worth the effort involved. I simply have more ideas than time, so using something like the mashup to help decide where to focus is invaluable.

For that matter, I didn’t make it to the weekend either: Fireplace Finds just jumped out at me, and my mind went, ‘Ah, what the hell…‘

More mashing with these two, as I’m waiting until the upcoming release of Build A Niche Store v3.0 until I get back into BANS building. Plus, I’m just having a lot of fun researching niches and keywords and domains right now. As long as I can get them to average 63 cents a month ($7.50 per registration divided by 12) per domain, these sites become technically profitable.

If I can’t even pull that off, well, I’m really not trying…

Luckily, my New Years resolutions had nothing to say about avoiding picking up more domains. As a matter of fact, I haven’t made any New Years Resolutions at all. And I don’t think I’ll be resolving to do - or, more conventionally, not do anything this year. Instead, I’ll be making a few SMART goals. My mind is still clouded by massive amounts of sugar along with the various customary overblown holiday meals, so it may take me a few days to put pen to paper on those goals. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that having fewer domains being monetized in some way or another is not going to be on that list…

All of five days passed since the last purchase before I had to pick up another domain: Get Snorkeling. With this one, I thought I’d have a little fun with it and see how quickly I could do a site. From initial idea through keyword checking through domain search (yeah, I know, quite the shocker of a name from me) through registration to fully populated site: 22 minutes and change. At that pace, it would be a long weekend to get those theoretical 100 domains up and going. But I definitely see some room to tweak the process, mostly involved with the layout of the various customizations each site needs in my minisite script. A little time spent massaging the layout of those items, and I think I could easily get it down to <15 minutes a site... maybe even 10.

I keep catching myself looking up new domains whenever an idea pops into my head, so it is definitely time to start developing what I already have before I get buried in them! The parked minisite are doing alright - .05 here, .60 there - but the developed sites are doing so much better so much more consistently.

I did spend a bit of time this evening working on one of my Build A Niche Store sites, trying to get the look and feel of the site into what I have in mind for it. I’m not going to bother linking to the work in progress, as the search engine bots seem to like BANS sites too well, and they’d just index all the nonsense that is in it right now if they’d stumble upon it. I still get a fair number of random kitchen item searches that got indexed from when I let my sushi site sit undeveloped over a weekend. Not that I don’t appreciate the traffic; it’s just that I don’t expect any of it to convert into a sale, so really, outside of cluttering my stats, what’s the point?

What has me especially amazed about this little script is it’s success. Not necessarily monetarily - I’m definitely not bringing it in hand over fist yet. But the traffic it’s bringing in on each of the sites I have it running on is impressing me. For instance, my ugg shoe site is pulling in just shy of 40 uniques a day, from a high of 2 prior to the new script being installed a week ago. Too early to tell on commissions from the eBay/Amazon items, but enough AdSense/Chitika earnings to essentially pay for the domain registration in that short period.

If I could pull off similar results fairly consistently, considering the minimal effort invested in the site - outside of the initial script development itself, of course - I could see putting up a couple hundred comparable sites in no time. Like, say, over a weekend. The potential is a mind-boggling!

The next couple days has me wanting to spend a little time back in BANS development mode. While the parks have potential for a trickling income (having flood potential with enough trickles), I still believe the more developed niche stores have much greater potential for real single-site passive income. Plus, I like building them…