Mock Not the Humble Mini-Site

I look back at my original money-making concepts, and while they were valid, they leave me
with the same conclusion.

I goofed.

It’s not that I got the principles wrong, because you can make money from content sites and
blogs. No, it was more a question of a resource mismatch. My manpower consisted entirely of me and any task I happened to outsource as I needed. That isn’t so good when you’re trying to maintain a blog or content sites.

Those types of sites take a lot of work to keep fresh unless you’re a scraper, and you never want to become one of those because some people consider scraper sites to be unethical. You can’t just let them sit, because fresh content is the only way you get repeat traffic and in the case of blogs, syndication. This means you’re always adding or changing content, which adds work you could be spending making money with something else less effort-intensive.

Mini-sites are another matter entirely. For those of you unfamiliar with them, a mini-site
is a tiny site built specifically to do one thing well. This includes such things as:

• Get you to buy something. If you’ve ever landed on a sales letter page, you’ve seen this type of mini-site.


• Get you to opt-in to a list.


• Get you to click and buy through an affiliate link.

In fact, when it comes to making money online, mini-sites are ideal for the single individual entrepreneur. They don’t take much to maintain once they’re optimized and working, don’t require regular content updates, and aren’t megabytes worth of code in size. Once you add the fact they focus the attentions of their visitors on a single thing, you have a good concept for a low-cost, low-maintenance sales tool. In other words, less time in building and maintaining the site, and more time to promote and profit from it.

I grasped this myself, but my other mistake was to make my mini-pages part of my existing web site instead of giving them their own URL’s. This won’t work well because:

• The URL will be unattractive, or at the very least not memorable.


• It gives your visitors too much of an opportunity to be distracted.


• It makes it impossible to brand with a catchy URL of its own and perhaps go viral.

So learn from my goof, and mock not the humble mini-site. You can make money in other ways, but the mini-site is ideal for a single individual to make and then use in list gathering,
affiliate page promotions, or sales of ebooks. It’s the reason I won’t be using anything else in the future.