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” is targeted to a very tight niche market, and delivers very unique 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.
Traffic from search engines is just one of the ways to make sales from your own minisite. Since all the really good content is behind closed doors, Google will never be able to index it and gve it proper ranking. Therefore if you want to create and sell mini-sites, 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 minisites, 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 images 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.
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 as an alternative.
With basic GIMP tutorials you can get all the skills you need as far as creating mini sites is concerned, but you probably can’t make use of cool stuff like Photoshop cover action scripts and templates.
