Start your own mini-portal business

Don Suter

Make money with your own mini-portal business
One of the most significant developments on the internet recently has being the large growth of mini-portals.

Unlike the major portals, such as Yahoo, The Open Directory and MSN, who cover a very broad and diverse range of subjects and require vast numbers of editors to maintain and update each subject area, mini-portals focus on niche topics or subjects and can quickly become the experts and first point of call for people interested in speciality subjects.

The popularity of mini-portals shows with a number of internet users becoming frustrated with the in-ability of the major portals to provide relevant and up-to-date data on certain topics. Instead they are beginning to turn to smaller, niche portal, that are dedicated specifically towards their subject area.

The good news for the budding entrepreneur is that there is financial reward for setting up mini-portals, with Forrester Research claiming that vortals and niche sites will account for 57% of online advertising revenue by 2004.

More good news is that this market has low entry costs, having found a niche subject that you enjoy, it is easy to begin setting up a basic html based portal. Once you have started building up your portal, you might want to begin incorporating more advanced scripting technologies that you have either designed for yourself, paid an outside company to design for you or bought from one of the many online script distributors.

Unlike a large portal, you will not require a huge army of editors to start reviewing potential websites and syndicating information. To start of with, you can do the editing yourself. Many people run such portals on a part-time basis and only move over to full-time if the mini-portal grows large enough to generate a living from.

So how do you make money with a mini-portal?

To earn money from a mini-portal, you must look to see how the large portals generate their revenues. Banner advertising was the original business plan favourite and is still used today, but there are many more effective ways to generate revenue.

These include paid-listings, where website owners will pay you to link to their site, or you could set up as a niche PPC (Pay-Per-Click). Nowadays, people like to be able to account for every penny that is spent on their internet advertising and you will probably want to purchase some software that will track who has clicked on what adverts and when. This sort of software is surprisingly cheap to purchase and easy to set-up.

When you first set-up your portal site, you are very unlikely to have enough traffic to approach potential advertisers with. Therefore you could sign up to some suitable affiliate programs, where you might earn some affiliate income.

As with all internet businesses, you should not expect your mini-portal to start making money from the moment you launch it. You will have to grow the portal slowly, ensuring that you provide the best quality information and links.

You will want to encourage repeat visitors and it would not hurt to try various strategies like starting up an ezine, hosting a bulletin board, giving away freebies, such as ebooks, etc.

You will also need to promote your website heavily, so that you can generate plenty of targeted traffic. Remember sites that experience heavy traffic can charge higher prices for advertising.

About the Author

With personal online business and marketing experience, Don would like to share with you some of the tried and tested strategies he has developed.