Beer sites… that’s a term I coined for sites that will only cost the equivalent of a beer or two to develop and, if monetized, are unlikely to earn more than a beer or two per month.
Basically these are sites that are either free to develop and own, or will cost you a few cents at most. So why should you bother to create sites that don’t make any money? It’s simple… if you own the sites you control the link juice!
Think about it – if you have 100 sites and each of those sites have 1000 pages indexed, that means you have control of the link power of 100 000 pages! Sure you could get the same amount of links by comment spamming, directory submissions and other “cutting edge” techniques but that will take years and never be as effective!
You beer sites don’t have to be that good – they could be as simple as basic WordPress sites with auto-generated or scraped content because you don’t have to worry about things like duplicate content penalties on you beer sites. You don’t necessarily want them to rank high on the search engines – you just want them to be spidered and indexed!
You can get the domains for free, and either host on free accounts or a cheap hosting account that allows unlimited add on domains. If you have Fantasico on you hosting account you can create Wordpress sites, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB and God knows what else at the click of a button!
The only problem with add on hosting (or even reseller accounts) is that you will be leaving a huge footprint by having all your sites on the same server with the same IP, so you’ll want to spread your hosting around a bit.
One of the many projects I am developing at the moment is http://www.beersites.co.cc (God only knows when I will get around to completing it!) but when it is done, it will be a forum where people who own beer sites can get in touch with each other in order to trade links between beer sites. This way we will all be able to boost our PR and link equity without leaving massive footprints for Google to find and negate.
