How to Market Awesome Minisites August 30, 2009
If you want to make money online, creating and marketing with minisites is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to achieve your goals.
Firstly, a “mini site” serves a very tight niche market, and delivers very specific content, usually in the form of a members area. Unlike content sites, minisites sell access to information instead of giving it out for free. A mini-site can have at bare minimum two pages; the sales page and the download page. Even larger minisites rarely have more than 10 pages,since the content itself is distributed in PDF formats.
Although SEO or Search Engine Optimization is important when building minisites, it’s not the key success factor. Since all the really good content is behind closed doors, Google will never be able to index it and give it a favorable search engine ranking. Therefore if you want to profit from mini sites, you need affiliates – and LOTS of them. When your site is new and you need to make sales fast, a little bit of PPC knowledge comes in handy.
The most important part of any mini-sites, besides the content, is the sales page. You need to understand how to write basic sales copy that sells, and also arm yourself with a lot of sales copy elements and other images you can use to make your copy look appealing. Creating a pure-text sales copy is a big mistake, but most people still do it.
The overall design and appearance of your mini-sites also matters. You can either hire someone to create your design or you can buy web 2.0 mini site templates and easily put together a stunning site yourself.
In the long run, you need to pick up some image editing skills. If you have no money for Photoshop, try GIMP.
With accurate GIMP video tutorials you can get all the skills you need as far as marketing mini sites is concerned, but you probably can’t make use of cool stuff like Photoshop e-book cover scripts and templates.