WordPress Minisite Experiment: News and Conclusions

First, a quick update on the site earnings for my WordPress minisite, MyHomeCleaningTips.com. Since the last update, I haven´t touched the site nor spent any time to promote it further. The site continued to produce a small, steady AdSense income. From October 2006 until September 2007, the site earned $360.50 - not much, but okay for no work at all.

Total time spent (from the beginning): 11 hours 30 minutes
Total money spent: 159,40 $
Total money earned: 547,33 $
Revenue: 387,93 $

So that´s an hourly “wage” of ( 387,93 / 11.5 = 33.73 ) $33.73

One important point is the unique content that I have used to build the site and the unique articles that I have submitted to ezinearticles.com and a few other directories to promote the site. Without these unique quality articles, I wouldn´t have earned that much. How do I know? Well, in the same time, I have built 5 (!) other WordPress minisites in the weight loss / fitness niche, using only PLR articles and content copied out from PLR e-books.

While the PLR articles are good in quality, they are NOT unique. To promote the sites, I have rewritten 3 articles and thought they would be unique enough to be accepted by ezinearticles.com and other directories. Well, only 1 article was accepted, the other 2 articles got my ezinearticles.com account suspended.

Only some lower-quality, non-authority article directories accepted the articles and therefore the 5 minisites finally got indexed. All 5 sites combined have about 500 pages, 20 times as much as the home cleaning minisite. And I have promoted the 5 weight loss sites in the same way.

In the same time period (October 2006 - September 2007), those 5 sites combined have only earned $57.35 in AdSense clicks.

You see how far better it is to use unique content !

But hey - 350 $ in a year, that means I would have to build about 100 minisites in order to earn a fair yearly income of 35.000 USD ? Well, the answer is: Yes, IF you do nothing but posting 20-30 articles to each site and submit only 1 or 2 articles to half a dozen of good article directories to promote each site … and IF AdSense is the only way you use to monetize your web traffic.

A better option is to build only 10 sites, but to invest more time and money in continuously adding content to them and also very important: promote the sites !

Then, you shouldn´t rely on AdSense alone to monetize your sites. You should search for affiliate programs and write articles to promote products and services. Or if your niche has local service providers, you could generate business leads for them. And of course, the more popular your sites become, the better you can sell advertising in form of banner impressions or static text links.