MiniSiteGallery.com

Before you get eager about marketing on the Internet with mini-sites, I think you should be clear about the types of mini-sites that you can build. These mini-sites are different, depending on the objective of the site and also the structure.

In general, I consider mini-site as a website that is easy and simple in structure and very narrow (probably deep) in topic.

1 - Sales Letter Mini-Site

This is normally a simple 1-page website (not including download page, support page, etc). It contains a direct response sales copy convincing the website visitors to buy a product.

I am sure you’ve seen a lot of these. You can go to any websites from the ClickBank Marketplace and 99% of them are Sales Letter Mini Sites.

Whatever you do online, ultimately you want to have your own product. You make more money that way. And when you do, this is the type of website you want to have.

2 - Content Mini-Site

Some people build website to generate income from advertising programs like AdSense. These are the type of people that are very good and fast at writing articles. If you are somebody like that, you can consider building Content Mini-Sites.

A Content Mini-Site is a website that is very simple in structure and contain information on a very tight niche topic. I have always pictured Content Mini-Sites as a site with 10 to 50 articles. But I have seen marketers building a 200-page Content Mini-Site.

With Content Mini-Site, your objective is to achieve a steady stream of traffic from the search engine. With traffic like that, you can easily monetize with Adsense or maybe related affiliate programs. You can also try putting advertisement to small reports you own, those you write yourself or even from private label rights.

3 - Squeeze Page Mini-Site

A Squeeze Page Mini-Site has one clear objective - to generate leads.

What do you do with leads? Sell to them of course. If you are not very familiar with the concept, you may be wondering why you want to do this. Some products may require further convincing. Therefore, with a squeeze page, you can put your prospects into a sequential email system (autoresponder) and keep contacting them automatically day after day.

Plus, when you save your prospects’ contact details, you can contact them again when you have other products to sell. Those other products can be your own or other people’s where you have set a commission arrangement with. The simplest form of such arrangement is an affiliate program.

The structure of a squeeze page is simple. It contains information about your offer and a sign-up form for website visitors to take up on your offer.

And the offer could be in the form of information (reports, ebooks, CDs, etc) or sign-up for a newsletter or ezine.

Putting up a squeeze page is good way to get started online. You can create a simple report about something, and then start offering it for free. They would have to sign-up to your autoresponder first, of course.

And then, you can work on making your first sale in the email you send to your subscribers.

4 - Landing Page Mini-Site

Unlike Content Mini-Sites, a landing page Mini-Site does not have as many pages. The objective of a Landing Page mini-site is to pre-sell and then redirect the traffic to the website that you are promoting.

Both affiliates and merchants use this. If you are a merchant and you sell mobile phones, you may need to create different landing page for different models and brands. You do this because when you drive traffic, especially using pay-per-click advertising, you segment your traffic effort in models and brand.

You don’t want people who are searching for a Nokia N95 to just arrive at a general Nokia product page. Even worse, just a Nokia page. You want those who search for Nokia N95 to arrive at a page about Nokia N95. And those searching for a Motorola MotoRazr to arrive at a page specifically about that model. Once they are the, you can later redirect them to the actual product page.

As an affiliate, you may also use this technique. But there’s also a technique where you review and recommend products to your website visitors. As an example, you may create a landing page where you write your personal experience using an anti-virus software. And later down your story you can compare the software with 3 other similar products. You can strongly recommend one product, or you can recommend all three. Of course you are affiliated with all three.

Remember that I said Landing Page Mini-Site is about redirecting traffic. With a landing page, you always want to see how many traffic you get versus how many really proceed to the next page you want them to go to.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.