How to Erect Commercial Mini Sites to Sell Products?Sonam Goyal1
October 22, 2008
Mini sites are highly powerful sales tools to promote and sell products
be it digital like e-books 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 making
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.
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 i.e. 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.
Sure,
you can build a simple mini site with as less pages as possible in
order not to distract your visitors but it depends on your methods of
generating traffic. If you are building this type of mini site, you
will probably focus on pay per click advertising because such a site
will unlikely get good rankings in the search engines. Usually, it's
recommended to drive pay per click traffic to a landing page like a
small mini site because you don't want to lose that visitor quickly due
to the fact that you are paying. Otherwise if you want to get some
search engine traffic and probably some repeat visitors, you might want
to focus on a super mini site.
Mini sites are responsible for
selling thousands of dollars of products because they work. And
depending on the way you generate traffic, you might want to think well
before you design your mini site because it can have a positive or
negative effect on your efforts. For example, it can have a negative
effect if you consider building a small mini site and hoping to get
search engine traffic or on the other hand, a super mini site and
planning to generate pay per click traffic to it.
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