How to Build Profitable Mini Sites to Sell eBooks, Software or Physical Goods
By Jean Lam
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.
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