Mini sites are highly powerful sales tools to promote and sell products be it digital like ebooks and software or physical goods like hardcover books. Mini sites are usually comprised of 5-10 pages and its main purpose is to make a sale. As compared with a content site which can consist of hundreds or even thousands of pages, mini sites don't need that many pages because otherwise that would deter its primary objective which is to get a sale. When building a mini site, there are some fundamental factors you need to consider in order to make it profitable. I am not talking about crafting a powerful sales letter here which of course is important but I am focusing on the design aspect. How you build your mini site can have an effect on your sales. Visitors to your website are in a hurry and it's up to you to control where you want to lead them on your website. You can easily lose a visitor simply by directing them to another site or page or you can make them stay on your site longer hence increasing your chances in making a sale. But how can you make them stay longer and not losing them too early? The answer is in your navigation menu. Don't forget that you have other pages on your website that can contain some content here and there and people are usually distracted by links. Your goal is to make them as undistracted as far as possible and convincing them to read your sales page ultimately leading to the order page. You have different ways to place your navigation menu on your website. You can place it at the top, at the bottom, on the left or on the right. For me, I've seen that it's better to put the navigation menu at the bottom because this is the last thing that your website visitors will see. They might have already clicked on the order button, hence not seeing your menu. The purpose of this method is not to hide your menu because it's visible but rather to focus on the sale instead of encouraging people to click on your links and pages. Another crucial aspect in building a profitable mini site is to go overboard with the usual number of pages which is 5-10. I've discovered that by adding more pages and content in the form of useful articles more or less related to the topic of your site, you build a more valuable site which has more chances to even get repeat visitors and at the same time getting more value in the search engines, hence better rankings. Search engines love content and if you can provide them with that, you will be duly rewarded. Do you think you can build a mini site with 30-50 pages? Why not. Here I will rather call it a super mini site which has the characteristics of a mini site and that of a content site but whose main purpose is still the same ie to make the sale. Of course, you might lose some visitors to your other pages and probably some external links but think about the other rewards like repeat visitors and search engine traffic. Sure, you can build a simple mini site with as less pages as possible in order not to distract your visitors but it depends on your methods of generating traffic. If you are building this type of mini site, you will probably focus on pay per click advertising because such a site will unlikely get good rankings in the search engines. Usually, it's recommended to drive pay per click traffic to a landing page like a small mini site because you don't want to lose that visitor quickly due to the fact that you are paying. Otherwise if you want to get some search engine traffic and probably some repeat visitors, you might want to focus on a super mini site. Mini sites are responsible for selling thousands of dollars of products because they work. And depending on the way you generate traffic, you might want to think well before you design your mini site because it can have a positive or negative effect on your efforts. For example, it can have a negative effect if you consider building a small mini site and hoping to get search engine traffic or on the other hand, a super mini site and planning to generate pay per click traffic to it. To Your Success! |
