The $5 Mini-Site Formula – Week 1

John S. — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:30:54 +0000

Last week I highlighted my plan to start using The $5 Mini-Site Formula as a way to build and grow a niche website that I own. I have a SMART Goal this year to earn $15 per day from this site. Since I am currently averaging less than $1 per day now, I thought the $5 Formula was worth a shot.

Running a niche website is not entirely a passive income opportunity, but one that can generate significant earnings just the same. Operating a few of these websites is part of my overall strategy to build a solid set of diversified income streams to put me one step closer to financial freedom.

Here are my notes from the first week using The $5 Mini-Site Formula.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important part of the $5 Formula, as it is with most niche website strategies. From start to finish, I spent about 4 hours researching all of the keyword combination’s that will make up my site. I probably would have spent more time, but I already had purchased the domain name and had published some content prior to this exercise.

The process of identifying keywords using this formula were a bit time consuming but a good learning exercise I must admit. If I decide to setup another niche site using the $5 Formula, then I will plan on leveraging the Micro Niche Finder tool I purchased last year. I am always looking to make my processes more lean and cut out the fat – Micro Niche Finder is one way to do that.

Publishing Content

Since I already had my niche site up and running, I didn’t have to spend anytime researching and buying a domain name and setting up the site. I was able to revamp a few previously published articles and spent a total of 4.5 hours writing new content for the site.

Each of the new and revamped articles were very detailed to a subset of my keywords I am using. I choose to write these articles myself, instead of outsourcing them, as I wanted to see how long it would take to write them. Outsourcing future articles for other niche sites will be a way to make this process leaner and take me out of the equation.

Article Marketing

The main driver of traffic using the $5 Formula to my niche site will be through article marketing. I was a bit naive to think this step wouldn’t take very long. I am not even close to completing this step yet and have a lot more work to do. Setting up a niche site that works takes a lot of time and effort.

I have actually decided to outsource some of this work to help accelerate this process. I have budgeted about $80 to hire a ghost writer to create several short excerpts (250 – 300 words) that I will use to post to a bunch of websites. The intent is to drive traffic to my niche site through these articles.

If I am able to earn $5 per day in the near term through this process, then my $80 investment will have been worth it!

Traffic

My eventual target through this formula is to send at least 120 visitors per week to my niche site. I hope to eventually get a lot more than that in order to hit my SMART Goal target of generating $15 per day from this site.

During my first week of implementing the The $5 Mini-Site Formula, I received 59 pageviews to my site, which is half of my goal of 120 visitors per week. As I continue my article marketing efforts, I expect this number to grow. In the 5 weeks prior to launching this experiment, I only averaged 14 visitors per week, so I am seeing some improvement.

Earnings

If I stick to the plan, I should be earning $5 per day from my niche site. I am not really cool with that number and plan to build this into a $15 per day site to align with my goals. As I work to improve this process, I believe that I can hit this target by the end of the year.

The first week I brought in $0.44 in AdSense earnings. Averaging just over $.06 per day is nothing to go crazy about, but at least it gives me a baseline to work from.

Passive Income for the Long Term?

One of the reasons that I like eHow so much is that once I publish an article, I never touch it again. That means that I spend 20 – 30 minutes writing and publishing the content and invest not a single minute after. That is the passive income model that I look for when investing my time.

When it comes to running a niche website, I am not so sure about how passive they can be over the long-term? If I want it to be profitable and earn steady income, I am certain I will need to periodically add new content to the site to keep it fresh.

Since my goal is to earn passive income, I am documenting my steps through the $5 Formula. This way I can look to reduce time and costs through things like batching, outsourcing, and leveraging technology to make it a leaner process. I plan to share my results along the way!

How much time do you invest on your niche websites for maintenance?

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The $5 Mini-Site Formula Review

John S. — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:18:59 +0000

I have decided to give a new niche marketing technique a try. It is called The $5 Mini-Site Formula. I know what you are saying, not another internet marketing system to spend a bunch of money on!

The lure of some of these internet marketing tools promising to make you rich can be very addictive at times. By my product and you will make $100,000 per year. I have fallen into that trap way too many times only to have wasted my money over and over again. It is not to say that the products are not good, I just never tend to follow through on any of them!

There are plenty of things that attracted me to testing out The $5 Mini-Site Formula. I recently outlined my plan to build and grow 3 niche sites this year as part of my SMART Goal setting. The plan is for each site to bring in at least $500 per month on a recurring basis by the end of the year. Since The $5 Mini-Site Formula strategy aligns well with these goals, I figured I would give it a try.

The $5 Mini-Site Formula

Without giving away too many details, here are a few things that I like about this strategy and why I think it can work for me.

7 Days – The $5 Formula claims that you can begin earning decent income in as little as a week’s time. I tend to be skeptical when I hear claims like this, but I think it can still be done. All the tasks required to complete the setup of a niche site using this plan can be completed in a week. Since I tend to have a short attention span, this strategy helps me stay focused and committed on completing all the setup.
Keyword Identification – The $5 Mini-Site Formula uses several different tools to accomplish proper keyword identification. One of the steps is very unique to most niche marketing products, which sparked my interest. Since this step is new to me, I wanted to try it out and see how it works.
Affiliate Marketing – The focus of this plan is to drive very targeted traffic to your niche site through many different affiliate marketing sites. I have always been a believer that it is more important to attract quality traffic as opposed to the quantity of traffic a site receives.
Focus on High Paying Keywords – Nothing new here, but still important. The The $5 Mini-Site Formula stresses to focus on high paying keywords where you can still find the low hanging fruit.
Free – The $5 Mini-Site Formula is free, which I always like! While my time is very valuable to my business, from time to time I need to take risks and explore some new ideas. I believe the time risks involved are worth testing out this product.

Niche Marketing Updates

Once I have completed all of the necessary steps documented in this niche marketing plan, I will provide an update with statistics. I am now making a point to really keep track of the amount of time I spend on various projects. This will help me to make educated decisions on where my time is best spent in the future.

I will detail the effort it takes me to bring this niche site up and hopefully earning over $5 per day once I have executed all the steps in the plan.

Final Thoughts

Regardless if I am successful or not with The $5 Mini-Site Formula, I will have at least built several links to my niche site. In the end, it doesn’t matter how effective a niche marketing tool is if you don’t take action. Ultimately, the success or failure will be measured on the work that you put into the project. If you only read the materials and don’t take action and follow through, you will never succeed.

Have you ever used The $5 Mini-Site Formula? What are your thoughts on the product?