5 Steps to YOUR Mini-site Success

Mini-sites (minisites) are great arent they? Theyre quick to create, and they focus on one thing only - making the sale! Either you sell your own product on the mini-site, or - and this is what this article concentrates on - you PRE-sell someone elses product, and make affiliate commission on the sale.

But where do you start with mini-sites? And how do make sure that your mini-site is a success time after time? (If youre going to create one mini-site you may as well create ten!)

Simple. Follow these 5 steps to success:

Step 1) Choose High-Demand Low-Supply Keywords
Step 2) Find A Good Affiliate Program
Step 3) Build A Mini-Site That Gets The Sale
Step 4) Promote Your Mini-Site
Step 5) Measure Results

Let me explain...

Step 1) Choose High-Demand Low-Supply Keywords
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Quite simply this means discovering niche keywords; popular keywords with little or no competing websites. Wordtracker, an outstanding webmaster tool, does exactly this for you, free.

Wordtrackers free top 500 keyword report shows the 500 most popular search terms on the web. Use suitable keywords from this report, or choose your own keywords and feed them into Wordtracker. Wordtracker then generates many similar keyword combinations and quite literally tells you the chances of achieving search engine success with those keywords.

Wordtrackers free trial will probably be good enough for most mini-site owners needs:

- http://www.wordtracker.com

(To find out more about high-demand, low-supply keywords visit:
- http://www.AnyoneCanSellOnline.com/learn-more.shtml )

Step 2) Find A Good Affiliate Program
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What makes a good affiliate or associate program? Is it a program with high commission rates, or lifetime commissions? Is it a program based around a product that people *actually* want to buy? Is a good affiliate program simply one that has a high visitors-into-customers conversion rate (Amazon.com comes to mind, here!). Or does the affiliate program just need to provide excellent tracking and reporting?

A good affiliate program may have some, if not all, of the qualities mentioned above. The following sites can help determine a good affiliate program for YOU, too:

- http://www.AssociatePrograms.com
- http://www.affiliates4u.co.uk
- http://www.LifetimeCommissions.com
- http://www.shoptour.co.uk/webmaster-profit/

(The first two sites both have affiliate forums, where you can find out what others currently think of as good (and bad) affiliate programs. (Never be afraid to ask for advice.))

Or, a good affiliate program may simply be determined by answering this question: would YOU buy products from the site?

If youre really keen to know more about what makes a good affiliate program, then I highly recommend Dr Ken Evoys FREE 5-day Affiliate Masters e-mail course. This intensive course shows you what to look for in a good affiliate program, how to pre-sell and so much more. To take the course send a blank e-mail

- tamsshopping101@sitesell.net

Step 3) Build A Mini-Site That Gets The Sale
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Firstly, its important that you design a clean and easy-to-use website. Its vital that the links work on your site, that the pages load quickly and view correctly in a variety of browser versions; and, there should be no spelling mistakes! Good web-authoring tools like Dreamweaver allow you to check these things before your mini-site goes live; otherwise use Netmechanic once your site is up:

- http://www.macromedia.com/dreamweaver/
- http://www.netmechanic.com

And heres a beautifully-designed web-site that can also help, providing free website design advice:

- http://www.jessett.com

You must choose your words (website copy) carefully, too; use the often-cited acronym AIDA in crafting your copy - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Also, there are many online resources that can help you build a website that sells. Use one of them! Here are a couple of resources I recommend:

- http://myss.sitesell.com
- http://www.minisiteprofits.com

If you really want to understand the importance of words in selling - including a better explanation of AIDA - Id recommend you take the free 5-Day NetWriting Masters email course! To take the course send a blank e-mail

- twmsshopping101@sitesell.net

Step 4) Promote Your Website
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The first step in promoting your website begins with steps 1) and 3) above. You MUST design search-engine friendly pages, making full use of keyword meta tags, and inserting your keywords sensibly in the copy of your pages (including headings tags H1 or H2 etc.). A brief explanation of how to design search-engine friendly pages can be found at:
- http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?keywords

Once youve created a reasonably search-engine friendly site then you can either hand submit your site to the major search engines, or let JimTools or AddMe take the burden. Its your choice:

- http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?site-submit
- http://www.jimtools.com/submit.html
- http://www.addme.com/submission.htm

*Do* make sure you get a link on the following search engines and directories:

- Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
- DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org
- Inktomi: http://169.207.238.189/search/search.pl

Google is becoming *the* search engine of choice for more and more people (it even powers Web Page searches on Yahoo!). A listing on DMOZ (or Open Directory Project) can definitely help your Google ranking. And Inktomi provides search results for a large number of search engines including MSN, AOL and even Overture.

Inktomi provides a service which guarantees your page is revisited by Inktomis spiders every 48 hours. This means your mini-site can be listed on many of the major search engines within 48 hours of creation! Sign up to Inktomi here:

- http://www.howipromotemywebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?search-engines

One extra (and recommended) way to promote your new mini-site is to link to your mini-site on other sites that you own. Not only do inbound links increase traffic, it also helps your Google listing too. However, do make sure that you:

a) Link to the mini-site using your chosen keywords, and
b) Submit that linking page to the search engines too (particularly Google)

Step 5) Measure Results
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Youre nearly done. Now you just need to measure your results, and adjust or tweak your site a little if youre not happy with those results. Dont be hasty, though - you need to get a reasonable amount of website traffic before you can really know if your mini-site is a success!

Measuring your site traffic means knowing how many visitors your website attracts, how many page views it gets and which search engines are bringing the visitors to your site, etc. For more information about monitoring website traffic read these articles:

- Analyse Your Website Traffic:
http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?web-traffic

- Learn From Your Visitors Using Cookies:
http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/cookies.html

Or you could just sign up to the free version of Webtrends and let Webtrends do all the work for you:
- http://www.webtrendslive.com

(Your web host may well provide adequate site statistics, however, so using Webtrends may not be necessary.)

You also need to measure the success (or otherwise) of your affiliate program. The best affiliate programs offer great tracking and reporting, so that you can quickly determine what works and what doesnt. If your affiliate program is a little bit lacking in this respect, then learn how to track your own links:

- http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com/bin/ap.pl?know

The combination of affiliate stats and site stats should allow you to measure your results. If you *do* need to change anything on your site, make sure you change one thing at a time, so you can truly measure the effectiveness of that change. (Mark Joyner, famous Internet Marketer and owner of Aesop.com, explains the importance of controlled testing in his article, Why Test?:

- http://www.AnyoneCanSellOnline.com/why-test.shtml )

But if mini-site success still eludes you, then you may need to review steps 1) to 4) again.

And thats it - five steps to your mini-site success!

If youre willing to be patient theres absolutely no need to spend time and money on pay-per-click search engines, either! (Its becoming harder and harder to get your mini-site listed on Overture now, anyway!). Simply rely on Google and the modestly priced Inktomi instead.

So, to summarise, if you want to make money from generating small 1-or 2-page mini-sites simply follow these five steps:

Step 1) Choose High-Demand Low-Supply Keywords
Step 2) Find A Good Affiliate Program
Step 3) Build A Mini-Site That Gets The Sale
Step 4) Promote Your Mini-Site
Step 5) Measure Results

I wish you success!

Steve Nash

PS No idea what a mini-site is? Its all explained here...
http://www.AnyoneCanSellOnline.com/build-minisites.shtml

About the Author

Steve Nash is webmaster at http://www.taurus-graphics.net - website hosting, design and promotion at prices YOU can afford. He also edits the newsletter Promote! Promote! Promote! - great ways to promote and grow your business, online! Why not subscribe?

smnash@bigfoot.com
http://www.HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com