TropicalBirds.com – Mini Site Launched

I went a bit overboard with the launch of my latest mini-site, TropicalBirds.com. Instead of a small site, as the “mini-site” moniker would seem to indicate, I decided to build a fairly large website filled with tropical bird information, videos, shopping affiliate links, and resources. As I was building the plan for the site, I decided that since it is an informational site, I needed information – the more the better.   With hundreds of types of tropical birds, I figured I would build a site about some of the most common birds.
The website isn’t completed yet, as many of the bird articles are still being written. While some people might not like the strategy of launching a site with several unfinished pages, I don’t think this is much of a problem since the name isn’t in the Google algorithm yet, and the 404 errors shouldn’t harm the non-existent ranking. While 404 errors may look bad to some visitors, the type-in traffic is fairly small, so I am not losing out much here. I anticipate a “full” launch in about a week and a half.
So what’s the end-game with this site? As time permits, I will continue to add new pages, videos, and pictures to the site, growing the reach of it. I will be in touch with other bird sites offering reciprocal links in an effort to improve the search engine optimization of the site, and I will also be selling advertising space and links. Ultimately, my plan is to grow this into a revenue producing website with the Adsense and affiliate links. My 6 month goal is to earn a modest $10-15/day, which would make this a $36-50,000 website based on a 10 year revenue multiple.   Ordinarily $10/day in 6 months would seem small, but the RPC for is fairly small.
If I have a dozen sites like this built, it will generate some passive revenue while increasing the liquidation value of my domain portfolio. Additionally, sites like these can be a fantastic test bed to try new things with Adsense placement, image placement, links and other things.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. TropicalBirds.com is an excellent name. The site looks good and you have plenty of categories to fill out on the right margin. You have a winner here.

    Suggestion: put a page up about the importance of buying these birds only from reputable breeders. Poaching and smuggling them into this country is decimating some species.

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Great suggestion. I will also write an article about conserving the land where most tropical birds live.

  2. Elliot,
    Just a minor thought, it took so long to develop your geodomain site, how did this happen so fast?

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Many more elements like affiliate deals and research go into geo websites. With tropical birds, the research was easy and most of the articles about the birds is outsourced. I am writing the Burbank.com content.

  3. Very nice! At first, it looked like you were using WordPress (which I think more developers should start doing for non-blogging sites). That will be great if you decide to add a blog to the site because you can easily create a WordPress theme to match.
    Good luck with this adventure!

  4. Cool site! Love the logo! Who designed that for you?

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Thanks! The logo was designed by LogoJeez.com under my direction. The actual layout was designed by a friend.

  5. Elliot….if you are worried about the 404 errors, just deactivate the links until the pages are created. You will still get the SEO benefit of having those keywords on the homepage.

  6. To play the other side – you could be in for a bit of trouble. Your PR is n/a, and while it is still new, it is a bit disconcerting (no pages indexed by Google). Make sure to add the site to Google Webmaster Tools – I’ve known Google to blanket ban any domains doing PPC and then take years to lift it (even when unparked).

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    While that is a big concern, I’ve applied to get reinstated aready through my Webmaster Tools account. I would like to think that all of the content is a good faith effort and will be rewarded. We shall see!

  7. Elliot, I am with AhmedF on this one.
    Your site’s quality score is low already since you have no backlinks and no site: listing in google. I’d play it on the safe side and take down the google ads and instead build some backlinks and add a page per day of fresh content over the next 30 days.
    Then check that google has done a deep crawl on your site and also started to list some of your backlinks. Once you see that, put the google ads back up again. Your quality score will be higher which means you will get more per click from google and you’re less likely to look ‘spammy’ to google.
    Unfortunately a lot of spammers are buying old domains and throwing up mini sites packed with google ads.
    Good to see that you have renewed the domain for longer than one year, btw. 😉
    – Richard

  8. Elliot,
    I like the look of the site.
    I’m also looking to put up some minisites and was wondering where you got the photos and videos from? did you have to pay – or were they free images?

    James

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Photos are from Wikipedia.org and all have Creative Commons releases to use for free,

  9. Hey Elliot,
    I like the site a lot. Its really cool and pretty flawless. The only things that i would change are the adsense placement and the change of one of the ad blocks.
    First i would take the block on the left side that is above the sites internal links out. I would then move up the links there and under them put like 4 125×125 affiliate ad blocks one under another. This will liven up the site and give the visitor something else to click other than boring links.
    Second i would put a 468×15 adsense block above each article, this will make it look like the links are small nav bar. People tend to click these because they think it will bring them to another place in the site. An example of this can be found at a minisite i just did the other day http://www.LoanVeteran.com . That ad block has made me more money than any other placement on the site.
    Just some ideas for you. Great looking site and obviously the hard work shows. LOVE the logo by the way ;)!

  10. look at all those types of birds – talk about getting long tail traffic…
    as for the 10x earnings potential, this fascinates me in the domain world. Domainers will pay 10x on a site, but if you go to sitepoint most people won’t pay 2x….maybe a good opportunity to flip, buy at sitepoint, sell to domainers

  11. I have a question about Creative Commons images release. I saw the following three. Can I use images with the 2nd and 3rd release without attributing them?

    — 1st – seems to be free to use for sure —

    I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

    In case this is not legally possible:
    I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

    — 2nd – do I need to attribute it to the creator? Or is it free to use with no restrictions also —

    Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation license”.

    — 3rd – This seems to require attributing. Do I need to attribute images after every image, or can I attribute all images on one page dealing with all tm issues? —

    This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. Official license

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Sorry, but that is more of a legal question that should be fielded by someone else. The images I selected were all free to use and distribute, although a couple made mention of not being on the cover of a book or something like that.

  12. I put up HomesForTheBirds.com in March using a 1930 bird catalog for content. I’ll let it age for a while and eventually the traffic may justify some sort of ads. It would probably make a few bucks with Ebay affiliate ads for bird related auctions.
    In the meantime, if someone who builds birdhouses wants us to build a site to help them sell their products I have a nice captive site from which to obtain an on theme link.
    I always like to have some fruit ripening on the vine for future use 🙂

  13. Great site. Where did you find writers to write the outsourced content? Can you provide any resources?
    Thanks,
    C

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Thanks. Maybe down the road I will or in private, but my writer still has a bunch of articles to go, so I want to make sure they are done on time 🙂 I am also in the process of re-editing things.

  14. Great job on the developemnt, memorable logo using the name to brand it, colors, layout of adsense and content etc…!! Are you going to add a forums or any high end CPA lead gen stuff? Also, do you plan to do this type of site with a lot of onther non geo names? (BTW…on the link to parrots.com, did they really have a cartoon of a parrot pooping the “.com”…lol

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Thanks for the compliments. Ideally, there will be other lead gen stuff (various affiliates), but I haven’t really had the time to explore as of yet. I am still developing Burbank.com at the moment, but I wanted to launch this, as it’s less important to me than Burbank.com.

  15. for birds w/ -0- content why not write “coming soon” on the main page – i think error messages devalue a site.

    ***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
    Generally I agree, but since there aren’t any pages indexed, it would be more of a pain to change the links for all pages each time I update it, than it will hurt rankings. The few sites I own weren’t crawled initially by Google until a couple weeks after launch. I am uploading about 5-7 articles a day, so it should be about a week until they are all there.

  16. Elliot says:
    “…my plan is to grow this into a revenue producing website with the Adsense and affiliate links. My 6 month goal is to earn a modest $10-15/day, which would make this a $36-50,000 website based on a 10 year revenue multiple.”
    “If I have a dozen sites like this built, it will generate some passive revenue while increasing the liquidation value of my domain portfolio.”
    Isn’t it amazing how so many folks miss this simple yet crucial point in getting started in domaining and site building?
    It does not have to be a big site. It does not have to be a $10K name.
    All anyone needs is a plan of action and execution to take a name for ride as a live site.
    Like you said, a dozen or so sites like this…

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

2024 Global Domain Report Released Today

0
The annual Global Domain Report, produced jointly by InterNetX and Sedo, has been released and is now available to download at no cost. The...

Grok Knows .com

5
Grok is a generative AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company, xAI. Grok has been promoted within the X / Twitter ecosystem, and X...

Dynadot Now Offering Cryptocurrency Payments

1
Dynadot just announced that it now offers customers the ability to make payments using cryptocurrency. The offering is made via Bitpay, which supports more...

Sedo to Host .AI Auction

0
.AI domain names have become a popular topic of late. Some of the most popular domain industry auctions these days are the monthly expiry...

Scaffolding Company Gets Industry Matching .com for Under $50k

0
Sedo’s Senior Broker Dave Evanson reported the sale of Scaffolding.com yesterday. The domain name sold for $46,666, and it was the largest domain name...