A mini net (mini-net, mininet or however you want to spell it) is almost exactly what it sounds like: a small network. But this is a small network of websites - and this network has a very specific purpose. If you’ve done much reading on the subject of SEO, you very likely have heard the term mini-net. For the unitiated, a mininet is some usually spoken of in the context of someone building up one (or more) of their more-valuable (or hopefully soon-to-be more valuable!) websites with the goal of getting that one site highly ranked in the SEs (search engines).
Who would want to do this, you ask? All kinds of people. People who own forums. People who have an online store. People who run membership sites (porn and otherwise). People who sell product via affiliate links. People who give away free information on a website that makes money from pay-per-click ads. You name it - there are lots of reasons for someone to want their website to rank high in Google.
This is a basic SEO technique put toward “boosting” a site’s ranking. It’s been around for years. But it’s still used, and still is useful, and it’s worth learning and worth doing.
[And as a sidenote, I must digress for a moment. It might sound confusing and even contradictory, but a site can get a lot of traffic but not rank too highly in Google. In fact, a site can be effectively banned by Google (de-indexed) but still have many ways of getting a steady stream of visitors. I only bring this up to expand your mind to other possibilities. But I'll save the rest of this thought for another post...]
So, imagine you’re in that position (if you aren’t already!). You have a website and you want to promote it. You want it to rank right there on top…let’s say in the top five positions in Google (for your main keyword). You are selling a product, all via affiliate links. You’re a member of three affiliate programs, all of them for different t-shirt companies that sell novelty t-shirts. So in our example, you have one main site which we can refer to as our “money site“. It’s the money site because it’s the site on which you wish to make sales, and the site that’s hopefully going to make you money. But to do that, you need to boost your rank.
There are a few ways to accomplish this with a mininet, and you won’t find one that’s better than any other necessarily - this is one of those things that can work a few ways, and different methods work slightly differently for different sites in different niches. (SEO is a bit like black magic in that way. It’s not an exact science, it’s not purely an art - it’s a bit of both. And if anyone ever acts like they know the definitive truth about a certain aspect of how SEs rank sites, I advise you to take what they say with a bit of skepticism.)
One way to start your mininet is with free hosts. Find a few of them, and you will have a nice foundation for your mininet. I have a few that I consistently use because they seem to get indexed quite well for some reason, and they offer PHP hosting. (And, I wrote some auto- account creation scripts for them.)
The strategy is to put a site on each of your free hosts. Each site should be full of content, and within that content are your main keywords (the ones you want your money site to rank for!). So for the t-shirt site, you find that that your best keywords are: funny t shirts, humor t shirts, cool t shirts, and offensive t shirts. So these are the words that you put in your content. Now, if I was doing this, I would probably do it the fastest and easiest way possible. And I would also use the best website format for getting all this content out there - which would have the following requirements: I can write/post all my content at once and have it appear on a time schedule, it can be placed in an SEO-friendly format, it will notify the search engines when the content is posted so the new content is quickly indexed, and it is something I can easily duplicate. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Well I’m thinking of WordPress for all those things. It does all that stuff and can be adapted to many other uses as well.
Right about now, you’re either thinking “I know all this” or you’re asking, “What about buying supporting domain names?”. Well if you know all this, why are you reading? Go out and build some sites. I know, I know…reading blogs/forums/reddit/porn is way easier. But if you already know what to do, go do it and stop wasting time. For all you who are wondering about buying domains for your mini net: sure, buy a few. Buy the .net and .org of your domain, and buy a few domain names with your keywords in them. But don’t just build websites on them - no way man. That wouldn’t be the best use of those domains. Instead, only build subdomains on them.
So if you bought (purely as an example) buy-funny-shirts.com, just leave the main domain alone. But put a blog on snorg.buy-funny-shirts.com and make another blog on bustedtees.buy-funny-shirts.com and maybe another couple subdomains. But leave the main domain alone. Just don’t mess with it.
Ultimately, you should end up with ten or more sites. All of them have blog entries scheduled to post every couple or few days (on varying days) and hopefully you have at least a dozen or more articles on each of the sites. These aren’t a mininet yet. They’re just a bunch of websites. What do you think would make them into a “net”? Connectedness? Yeah. Interlinking? Yes. The sites should be interlinked to some extent. But how?
How not to interlink them is to have them all link to each other. “Site 1 links to site 2 and site 2 links to site 1″ is a bad pattern to follow. If you do that, you’re basically saying to Google, “Look at these two brand new sites that popped up. They both use the same sorts of keywords. They both link directly to each other. But they’re just regular unrelated websites and since site 1 thinks site 2 is important enough to link to it so should you, Google.” If Google was a person and you told them that, they’d think you were an idiot. So don’t link sites in that manner. It won’t count for much of anything.
How you should interlink them is in a way more subtle manner. There’s no one right way, but you’d do better to link site 1 to site 2 and to site 3. Site 2 links to site 6 and site 8. Site 8 links to site 1 and it links to site 5. Site 7 links to site 2, site 4, and site 9. And hopefully you get the idea: seeming randomness, where some sites give a little more linking power to just a few sites in the mini net. And guess what? The top 20% of the mini net sites all deep-link to your money site.
To say all the above (about interlinking) in less words: build up 20% of your mininet with the other 80% of your mininet and don’t show an obvious linking pattern. The top 20% is the only part that links to your money site.
You hopefully have a clearer and fuller concept of what a mini net should be accomplishing by now. (Wow you read this far?) But there’s no way I’ve answered all your mini-net questions. So I’ll just list them out below.
What kind of content should I post, and where do I get it? There are lots of ways to come up with content. You simply will have to use your imagination if you want to find the really good methods, but I will outright give you the o.k. ones for free: 1) Write each article yourself, 2) Pay article writers to write articles for you, 3) Buy articles that people have already written. Other methods get into even more “dark” territory than that. But you need content, and it should vary a bit from site to site. A very “clean” method that you should mix in to the equation is RSS feeds. People sometimes give RSS-feeds-as-content a bad rap. But it can be an excellent thing for a site as long as you use it correctly and use it to supplement your “real” content.
How do I run a bunch of blogs on the same domain? There are a few WordPress-centric solitions - WordPress MU, hacking WordPress so that you can run a bunch of WP sites off one install, and then there’s just installing each one separately. Do it manually at first (or via Fantastico), then move on to a better solution.
Should my money site ever link back into my mininet? No. Unless you have a really “good” site in your mininet that you actually want to also promote, maybe…but no. The goal is to lift up your one money site, isn’t it? Don’t forget the mission.
Can I host the mininet all on one host? You can do whatever you want, but it’s way better to host a couple sites here and a couple site there, a couple on one free host, a couple on a different free host, etc. Mix it all up, try to make it look natural, and spread it out as much as you can.
When registering domains, should I use private registration? Sure, it’s fine to do that and is probably the easiest/best option. Or I’ve heard of people putting fake registration info on different domains although you’re not supposed to or the domain police will come get you or take your domain or something. But until that happens, your domains at least won’t be obviously related in the eyes of the SEs.
How do I promote my mininet so that it can boost my money site? Social networking sites, links from other sites (sites actually outside your network), blog comments, and anything else you can come up with. Here’s one idea: create a Google Gadget that does something useful. You have a site promoting the Wanted movie? One of your mini net sites might have an Angelina Jolie picture gallery. The Gadget would show a picture of her each day. You think people wouldn’t subscribe to it? Hell yeah they would. Just one example. There are a billion ways to promote sites.
Which tools or plugins should I when creating a mininet? There are so many out there, but remember: the best tools are the ones you create yourself and only you use. Not that there aren’t some great pre-made tools out there! FeedWordPress is one - I seem to end up using it on a lot of sites, because it’s a great plugin. So is the excellent Post Corrector Plugin by Lord Time (I think he rocks). For images, you gotta have Random Image. Another spiffy image-related plugin I can’t live without is PhotoQ (get it? photo queue?). Other essential plugins that I keep on using are (of course) Google XML Sitemap Generator and All-in-One SEO Pack. BUT…it all depends on what sort of content you are posting, what type of site you are ultimately promoting, and how creative you want to get.
Aren’t mininets bad (or blackhat)? Some certainly are. Some are not. OK…most certainly are, some are not. I can tell you that building a mininet has gotten a bad reputation due to people not seeing past the spammy sites they’ve come across - but you need to think of a mininet more in terms of what Yahoo! has accomplished. What if you had you own “mini-Yahoo”? A bunch of sites that do different but related things, and all point back to your one important main site - it could be a thing of usefulness and value and it’s not that hard to accomplish. So, if you choose to have a blackhat mininet - that’s one thing. But you can definitely build one that’s whitehat (or “mostly” whitehat) just as well (and you should).
I’m still confused! How do I plan it all out? How do I learn the best way to do this? How can I be successful? Well don’t buy the stupid e-book on how to do this, that’s the last thing you need. (More time spent reading!) Just use your noggin, plan it all out on paper, and then get to work. After you do it a few times you’ll be able to write your own e-book. Doing is most important in this business - it’s easy to get sidetracked and spend all your time reading about how to build mininets.
With that, I will end this (hopefully) instructional post.
