Why Mini Sites?

A mini-site is an ideal sales vehicle, especially for those just starting out. If you pay attention, though, you'll notice that mini-sites are also a staple of many of the top internet marketing experts. Several of the most prominent marketers use the strategy of having multiple mini-sites linked from one central "home" site.

Being so tightly focused, the mini-site draws the visitor inevitably to the sales link, which, of course, is the objective of any sales site. While the purpose of an affiliate site is to "pre-sell" (i.e., get the visitor in a favorable mood towards the product) rather than to sell, the objective is nearly the same ... lead the prospect to the vendor link.

Mini-sites are easy to create and maintain. A mini-site is easy to change as your market changes. If you want to promote a different vendor for a similar product, you simply change the link. If the terms of your offer change, it's a snap to edit only a few lines on a one or two page mini-site.

Once you find a mini-site formula that works for you, it's easy to "clone yourself" and use essentially the same page design and sales pitch for an entirely different product. Numerous "super affiliate" marketers use this multiple mini-site strategy.

Since they can be tightly focused on one or a small group of highly related key words and phrases, search engines see mini-sites as extremely relevant to those key words and thus tend to rank them higher than a more broadly themed site. Search engine experts indicate that the major engines are moving more and more toward examining the "theme" of an entire site, and ranking the pages according to that theme, as well as or instead of the individual page content. If, in fact, that happens, it would be a huge benefit to mini-sites over larger content sites. As it stands now, a large, diverse content site can have numerous properly optimized pages ranked highly for completely unrelated key words, but if pages were also ranked by the overall theme of the parent site, then mini-sites would have a big ranking advantage over large, diverse sites.

Perhaps most compelling about mini-sites is that if you run several, they can be used to boost each other's search engine rankings through link popularity. Exactly how this cross-linking is done is detailed in Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mini Net. Owners of larger sites can also benefit from Campbell's strategy by breaking the large site into several smaller sites that are cross-linked.