Creating a minisite without writing any html
// July 12th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Wordpress
Over the last year or so I’ve been collecting a few domain names in the hope of making a few quid by either selling them on for a profit or developing them to try and earn some sort of regular income from them. I will be the first to admit that some of the domain names I have collected have been a total waste of money and I’ve also been a bit slow to produce sites for some of the better ones.
I’ve been reading more lately about domaining, buying and selling domain names, and one blog post got my attention and gave me the motivation to actually build a site for one of those domains that might work well. Elliot’s Blog is a blog all about domaining, and a post where he created a mini site and blogged about it’s development made me realise I should really be doing a similar thing.
As my day job is a web developer, I write a lot of html and css, so I didn’t really fancy spending all weekend writing more of it, so I thought I would see just how much of the site I could make by using Wordpress and various plugins to do all the mundane stuff for me.
Now, it’s a good time to point out here that I am no expert at this type of thing. I have one or two one page mini sites which bring in a few quid a week and I haven’t got a tried and tested technique. Most of it is common sense and tips I have picked up from reading how other people have done it.
So first of all, what was the domain. Well I picked bestdslr.com for this task. It is a theme I am interested in which is important, creating a site on a subject that bores you doesn’t really give you the motivation to follow it through.
I already had an adsense account and an amazon.co.uk affiliate account, so I thought I’d use them first of all as they give you all the code you need to add widgets and ads to your site, so no html writing was needed. All good.
Next I got Wordpress set up. I’m a big fan of wordpress as it lets you get a web site up and running very easily and as my web hosting account has it as a ready to go script there was no fuss with uploading files and creating the config files. So still no html required.
Now came the choice of theme for the wordpress site. I made a conscious decision to find a theme that was largely text based. This site was going to be purely for getting traffic to it, so the more space I had for content and ads, the better. I found the 1024px 2.7 theme by Andreus Vikland suited my needs perfectly so now was time to get a few useful plugins.
I needed a good SEO plugin to allow me to write custom meta content for each page, and I also needed a good plugin to manage my ads on the site. So the plugins I chose were All In One SEO Pack and Advertising Manager. With wordpress’ simple one click install process these plugins were installed, like the theme, via the wordpress dashboard. Nice.
So now I had the site, the theme and the plugins. Now all I needed to do was write some content, set up a few ads and away I could go.
It’s at this point that I fired up my google adwords account to use the keywords tool. When you write content for a site such as this, it’s important to make sure you are using keywords and key phrases that people are actually searching for to help people find your site. So my site was about dslrs, so I typed that keyword in and looked at the suggestions I was given. It was clear that terms like Canon DSLR, Nikon DSLR and Sony DSLR were popular terms so I decided that they would form the main sections of the web site. This meant that I could create sections of the site for each brand of camera and the page titles would match popular key phrase search terms. With wordpress sorting the urls for me, I knew the urls would be great for search engines.
So what about the content for those pages. Well as it’s a subject I am interested in, I knew I could write a few paragraphs on each brand without too much effort. All I had to do was make sure I used lots of good keywords and key phrases in it.
So that was the content written. I kept it to six pages to start with, a homepage and a page for each of the major manufacturers, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and Olympus. Along with the content I added keywords taken from the adwords keyword tool to the All In One SEO plugin and some other custom meta content.
So all that was left now was some ads. Now some people get sick of ads all over a web site, I am too, but this was an experiment to try and get a few quid from the site so ads were a simple choice. For each manufacturer page I used an amazon widget that would display a selection of products relevant to some keywords I typed in so I could make sure the product were relevant to the brand on each page. I then created some adsense ad link strips and some ad blocks for the site. So hopefully the ads aren’t too over powering, but might help bring in a few quid over the next few months as I do a bit of link building to help get traffic to it.
I have, of course, added google analytics to the site to help me track how it’s being found and what I can do to improve the site.
So that’s a very brief over view of how I created bestdslr.com and just how easy it could be to do it yourself too without writing any html yourself. I’ll be working on it some more of the next few weeks and adding content for dslr accessories and possibly looking for some alternatives to adsense if it doesn’t perform.
Let me know what you think and if you have any tips I could use to improve the site further.
