Pave a path for more profits with minisites.

The growth of online merchants has brought with it a series of marketing tools ranging from banners to social network platforms. Nowadays the idea of long, painstaking and often expensive practice of developing and building websites is being eclipsed by the rise of minisites that are niche driven and directed at people looking for specific information on specific products. The message carried on minisites is often succinct and provocative.

As a way into internet marketing, minisites are thought to be more personal and direct unlike conventional websites that can be long winded. Like eBooks, minisites contain information geared towards a specific industry and a specific type of customer.

Having a minisite is more like casting a net in an area where you know you will find the kind of fish you are looking for and using bait that only those fishes that you want will take a bite of. This allegory attempts to define minisites as small, niche specific sites. Anyone who is in that site wants to be in that site so much so that some will pay for the privilege to become members.

The internet can sometimes seem to lack a sense of humanity, and sometimes sites are run by programs and auto-responders. A minisite however, is more personal. You as the business person have to anticipate your customer’s needs and react accordingly, solicit feedback and acknowledge the regard you have for people visiting your site. People looking for information or a product to help them on a particular problem appreciate not being treated like a number but as people with genuine needs. Tools like e-books are generic and most websites operate within the premise that there is a universal way of dealing with issues. They tend to be impersonal while minisites can be dynamic and personal. A good minisite is not a static page that will look the same every month of every year as most other sites often do. Big conventional sites stay as they are because of the cost and time that goes into rewriting and updating scripts. Minisites are different because they are relatively easy to put together and cheaper to refresh content as often as is required. Good minisites like blogs have some valuable resource checklists, surveys, discussion forums, event calendars, reviews and even allow the owner to post things like hot topics of the day or share news about the chosen market that prove to customers that there is someone at the other end who is engaged and not some impersonal machine or code that deciphers what has been entered into data that it can process. Internet code can never have human sensibility and sometimes the point is totally missed.

Most minisites are designed to create membership without the bells and whistles you would find in conventional websites. They are called “mini” because they are short and to the point, almost like a condensed version of a sales letter.

The idea behind minisites is to make customers feel special and is given exclusive information that only a select few “members” are privy to. Using minisites in affiliate marketing could help you increase your customer base and also have customers returning for more of the product. Income is not necessarily restricted on one sale but membership fees that most people would have paid to be become members of the program. Membership fees should come with incentives besides the promise of one-on-one relationship. Setting up a discussion forum is one way of making sure that customers are able to exchange information with other members who might have experienced a similar problem or had been in the same predicament. The idea of belonging to an “exclusive group” plays well into most people’s inherent need to feel “special”.
Unique content is one important factor but there are other things that you can do to give you an edge or head start in producing a compelling minisites:

1) Spur browsers to take action by using purpose filled expressions like “subscribe today and get…”, “Join now and get the early bird special” or ‘discover how product can do Y”. Take your customers by the hand and lead them to do what you want them to.

2) Your minisite should contain links deliberately leading customers to that one point they need to know more about. You might not get a chance to say everything you need to I a minisite which makes it a great gateway to a bigger, more elaborate website. This you can do by putting up links but you should distract, keep them at a minimum so you don’t distract visitors.

3) Normally, a minisite would have fewer pages like a link FAQ’s, and testimonial pages to engage visitors. Most people tend to embellish, it’s tempting ploy but it should be done cleverly. Do not attempt to oversell yourself or to embellish any product.