Resources for Building Your First Mini-Site

Ok I guess the most important question most people would have is, what is a “mini” site and how is it different from any other type of website?

Firstly, a “mini site” serves a very specific niche market, and delivers very specific 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 within. A mini-site can have at bare minimum two pages; the sales page and the download page. Larger minisites may have more pages but generally its not above 10 pages.

Although mini sites do benefit from search engine traffic, it is not the most important 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 create and sell minisites, you need affiliates – and LOTS of them. Knowledge in PPC or Pay Per Click marketing helps as well, especially when your site is new and you don’t already own a list you can market to.

The most important part of any minisite, 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.

Of course, in the long run you’ll also want to learn basic image creation and image editing skills to help lower the cost of creating minisites. Although Photoshop is the best option if you can afford it, you can also use GIMP (www.gimp.org) as an alternative.

With basic GIMP tutorials you can get all the skills you need as far as marketing minisites is concerned, but you probably can’t make use of cool stuff like e-cover scripts and templates that can only be used in Photoshop.

Here are some other resources for building minisites:

• iStockPhoto.com – Get images / icons / illustrations to design or complement your minisite
• SnagIt.com – Create screenshots of images and websites, very useful when creating more technically-oriented information products
• Amember – Create secured members area, multiple-level memberships, and recurring-payment memberships

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