5 Steps to YOUR Mini-site Success

Mini-sites (minisites) are great aren't they? They're 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
else's 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 you're 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
==============================================

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.

Wordtracker's 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.

Wordtracker's 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
=====================================

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 you're really keen to know more about what makes a good
affiliate program, then I highly recommend Dr Ken Evoy's 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

- mailto:tamsshopping101@sitesell.net

Step 3) Build A Mini-Site That Gets The Sale
===========================================

Firstly, it's important that you design a clean and easy-to-use
website. It's 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 here's 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 - I'd recommend
you take the free 5-Day NetWriting Masters email course! To take
the course send a blank e-mail

- mailto:twmsshopping101@sitesell.net

Step 4) Promote Your Website
============================

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 you've 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. It's 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 re-
visited by Inktomi's '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
=======================

You're nearly done. Now you just need to measure your results,
and adjust or tweak your site a little if you're not happy with
those results. Don't 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 doesn't. 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 that's it - five steps to your mini-site success!

If you're willing to be patient there's absolutely no need to
spend time and money on pay-per-click search engines, either!
(It's 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? It's all explained here...
http://www.AnyoneCanSellOnline.com/build-minisites.shtml