Mini Nets

[Andy]

I recently discovered the concept of a mini-net. It's where you link your sites via free hosted sites so you break the direct link between your main sites which are often on the same IP address e.g. where you use shared hosting. The reason for doing this is to give extra weight to the inbound links you create by having the links coming in from domains with different ip addresses and whois info.

The free sites you set up though need to be capable of getting ranked in search engines. So always confirm some of the sites in that service have page rank so you don't waste time. One service that I have signed up for is www.squidoo.com It's a free blog service that allows you to revenue share with Squidoo on income generated on your page.

In less than one hour I was able to set up a site with my own content and advertizing some relevant products from Amazon. You don't have to be an affiliate with any of the programs to set up revenue streams and links to your sites. Here's the site I set up: www.squidoo.com/weightlosstips While you are there it would be great if you could rate my site.

After setting up a site there, the aim is to get into the top 100 sites. You do this by getting links and traffic to your site plus user ratings.

[Andy]

Building on this theme...

Anyone totally new to the webmaster game or a seasoned webmaster should join me in this group of weblampers. The reasons are:

• get a prime keyword-based url in an evolving social networking site
• get collaborative interlinking, traffic and ratings to boost your site ranking
• get a professional-looking website and build valuable unique content quickly without the pain of learning code and how to use specialist software
• develop skills and online assets that you can apply to future projects

Just days after I set up my first site there the ranking has jumped almost daily as I apply the techiques I am learning. My competitors sites generally are of poor value so it is quite easy to rank above them over time.

Are you a member yet? If not, go now and sign up for free via the "Make your own page like this" green link at the site in my signature.

Try and grab a very short descriptive name for your first site to get the best result in searches. Don't use any capitals or dashes or underscores. You may be lucky like me and grab a keyword that was registered before, got page rank and got de-activated due to inactivity. Yes, one of the big advantages over this system is that it is much less spam infested than say blogger.com so sites actually get page rank to show they are search engine friendly. My first site had PR0 as expected for a totally new site but my second one amazingly has started out with PR5! I am not going to abuse this by auctioning it on eBay for $100's but I will build the site normally.

I may as well let you know the url of my second site in case I am mistaken in the PR my software is reporting, it is: http://www.squidoo.com/redwine

My first site is starting to shoot up the internal rankings. New sites start at around #40,000 which is the bottom of the pit. After adding my introduction and publishing I got a rank of ~30,000. Then I linked out to other relevant lenses, linked from my own sites, added daily updates to the content and saw the rank halve almost daily. Now, a few days later it is ~3,000. #1 is the top. A figure below 100 is the aim so your site shows up in top list searches.

So if we team up, we can visit each others sites, leave comments and rate each others sites. I'm not proposing any cheating of the system but more like a directory of sites. If a site is poor, then they shouldn't be rated highly. But while a site is being built we should maybe hold off rating it.

If you would like to team up on this sign up here: Join the Team

[jisern]

Sounds interesting... I have been reading and seeing a lot of information about Squidoo but haven't really checked it out yet. I suppose it may be time to give it a look.

-J

[Andy]

Jake, there is little to lose and potentially alot to gain. Rather than umming and erring I would just dive in there, register a site and post an intro. It takes just minutes and you can always edit your site later.

You will get visitors, your page will be Google-friendly and the company encourages you to post commercial stuff, so it is a no-brainer for me.

The ways to optimize sites in this network are fairly easy to work out and I will be sending subscribers to my mini-net club newsletter all the details I have un-earthed. This will allow us to leverage our results as opposed to doing it all alone and hoping other people notice your page and link/comment on it. My initial findings are that people are unlikely to link to or post comments on your page unless you are ranked in the top 100. Well there is one way to easily get comments but I'll save that for my newsletter