Minisite Education
There are a variety of ways to earn income from your mini site(s). The combination which works best for you will depend on the content of your site and the direction you want to take it. You can be certain it will take some trial and error experimentation to find what works best for you. Every site is different and in spite of what you will read, no one really knows all the answers.
For the sites I build Google's AdSense program often does well. If you are writing about subjects for which there are lots of advertisers your pages will be served relevant ads which will get clicked. The more obscure the subject of your site the fewer and less relevant the ads. Of course if you try to build a site targeted at the most popular subjects (Ring tones anyone) your site will never be ranked high enough to get any traffic.
I like to write about collectibles so Ebay's affiliate program also works well for me. Ebay will pay 1/2 of their final value fee as a commission if a person follows a link from your pages to an Ebay auction and buys something.
I really like this program because I can write about collectibles I think are interesting. That gets my site ranked and others who are interested in the same items find their way there. I don't have to try to sell them anything; I just display interesting links. If they want to look at that auction, it is up to them.
When you first see the income mini sites generate you will not be impressed. Your parents, friends, and spouse or kids won't be impressed either. You will get comments like "So, you worked for a month building the mini site and made $10, I earn that in 30 minutes."
There are two responses to that. One is ask them how much they earn if they don't show up for work. A properly targeted mini site it will keep earning even if you stop working on it. If you want to keep your earnings growing you have to keep adding pages of course, but that's a different issue.
The other answer is to ask how much money you would have to have in the bank to generate the same income. If Bank CD's pay 5% APR then you have to have $2,400 in the bank to pay $10/month in interest. (That's before tax of course).
You may no longer be able to save or invest, but if you can build up mini site income you create the same effect.