Creating A Minisite – What Do You Need?
February 1st, 2009If you want to make money online, creating and marketing with mini-sites is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to achieve your goals.
Firstly, a “mini site” serves a very specific niche market, and delivers very unique content, usually in the form of a membership. Mini-sites are not like blogs or other type of content sites; they sell access to the 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 sites rarely have more than 10 “member” pages.
Although mini sites do benefit from search engine traffic, it is not the most important factor. Since your content is mostly in PDF / audio / video format, Google will never find it gve it proper ranking. Therefore if you want to profit from minisites, 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 page graphics 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 minisites 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.
If you create minisites a lot, you need to pick up the basic web design skills. If you cannot aford Photoshop, you can always try GIMP.
With accurate GIMP video tutorials you can get all the skills you need as far as building mini sites is concerned, but you probably can’t make use of cool stuff like e-book cover scripts and templates that can only be used in Photoshop.