For more info see...Killer Mini Sites at HB&M

The other day someone interested in buying my book Mini Site Profits wrote and said they could only spare an hour a day to make money online, and wanted "a return relatively quickly and without a lot of sweat, blood and tears."

My first thought was to tell them to forget it, so I did.

Making an online income, or rather, building a web business, requires a lot of hard work. Work and time and energy and ideas and enthusiasm.

But they persisted (a good sign) so I thought about it for bit and emailed this to them:

"Ok, it's true that my book gives step by step instructions on how to build small direct response sites that sell.

But like everything else it takes work.

There's just no way around it. You've got to put time and effort in.

What I used to do is get up at 4 every morning to get stuff done before my family got up. It knackered me, of course, but I did it for a year and achieved a lot.

Anyhow, I reckon you could probably build a mini site a week by spending around 1 hour a day on it. That's 7 hours. But you've got to work hard. Not get distracted.

Here's a very simplified look at how to do it.

Monday - you could spend an hour researching what to build site about.

One of the best ways to do this is take a good hard look at what people are searching for. Different things are hot at different times. Right now you might want to look at selling a season-related product. Computer gear and software is always hot. So are USB Pen Drives (I've got one, they're great for moving stuff between computers, mini disc and mp3 players, and other small electrical items).

You need to find a desirable online product to promote. A little research will go along way here. In many cases it will tell you exactly what you should be selling online.

Tuesday - Visit Overture to see what people are willing to pay for high rankings on your chosen search terms. If people are paying for a high position they're probably making money from it. Taking USB Pen Drives as an example, discover that 23 cents will get you top spot in Overture and 5 cents will get you 8th spot. See... http://www.overture.com

Wednesday - you spend an hour looking for a good affiliate program to promote from your site. One that ties directly in with the hot keywords you've chosen. A good place to start is Allan Gardyne's http://www.associateprograms.com another is Commission Junction at http://www.cj.com

Thursday - check out the opposition. Take a look at lots of other sites selling the product you want to promote and work out how they're doing it. Which site are you likely to buy from? And why?

Start gathering material/info you can use for content on your site. Don't just "borrow" writing that someone else has done. There are plenty of free article resources on the net, but preferably write some of your own material too.

Friday - Look up available domain names, and ideas for domain names by using Name Boy http://www.nameboy.com which lets you enter your chosen keywords. Register the name you choose with Name Boy or your favorite domain registrar. I usually use http://www.godaddy.com or http://www.namebargain.com

Get your web site hosted. My book Mini Site Profits lists a number of reliable web hosts which only charge $1 a month.

Saturday - build your web site. Make it at least a couple of pages, but for the best search engine results put together a site of 5-8 pages. Make sure the site "presells". Don't use hard sale copy. Just get people interested so that they click through to the merchant site in a buying mood.

Sunday - Go through your site again to check for mistakes. Make sure the links work, especially the ones to the affiliate program you've chosen to promote. Upload it to your new web host.

Then spend the rest of your hour buying slots in the pay- per-click search engines. ( The very best place to decide which one's to use is http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com which lists 380 of them and reviews the best) and also take a good, hard look at using Google Adwords.

Finally, when you have time, submit your new site to the top search engines. Your mini site is not likely to rank well unless you've taken a lot of care over the content - stayed on topic, keyword density, etc - but if you build a number of mini sites covering the same niche from different angles, and link them all together, you're likely to rank a lot higher.

I go into all this in great detail in Mini site Profits, of course."