====== Minisite ======



A minisite is a website that is focussed on a single topic. The aim is not to build relationships with visitors or provide a wide coverage of a subject but to get users to take an action such as buy a product (typically an eBook), click on an affliate link or sign up to a newsletter, or all three. This should be achieved without burning up a lot of resources such as bandwidth. You could also use a minisite to provide information about a current trend, for example on the 11 November 2006 Hershey announced a recall of their chocolate bars due to Salmonella. I checked and the domains:



  hershey-recall.com

  hersheyrecall.com



were available. According to Wordtracker this was one of the top searches in November. I would not expect much [[type-in]] traffic for this subject but you could register the hyphenated version, slap up a minisite with facts you find on the recall, add some good [[inbound-links]] so the site gets spidered quickly and hope to make some money from advertising before the trend dies. However before you dash off to your nearest registrar I checked on Google AdWords and advertisers were only bidding around 20 cents for clicks on Salmonella, although they were paying a dollar on Hershey.



By being focussed visitor choice is streamlined and product, affliate and content targetted advertising can be extremely relevant. Minisites range from one to a number of pages, there is no hard and fast rule except that they are single topic. By concentrating on one subject there are possibilities for search engine optimization and [[type-in traffic]] in terms of keywords in domains, URLs and on-page elements as well as inter and cross-linking. The generally small number of pages makes it easier to experiment with structure and layout. Minisites will usually have a shallow structure, the famous "2-clicks" rule, which makes it easier for search engine robots to find and index the content.



Although some minisites are extremely popular and earn a lot of money most will bring in much more modest revenue. The aim should be to build the site rapidly and then do very little in the way of updates. A network of minisites could earn more than a single site covering a lot of bases and be much lower maintenance. This obviously has an affect on the subject matter. Spreading effort over a number of sites also spreads the risk if one of the sites suffers a drop in popularity due to increased competition or a change in market.



Building a network of minisites is not simply a case of taking your old macrosite and splitting it down by subject area. The SEO benefit will be minimal, there will be no increase in [[PageRank]] as you have the same amount of content. However there is an argument for spinning off sections of large sites as minisites. You can benefit from a keyword rich domain name. If the site has useful content people will link directly to the site using this domain which has [[PageRank]] and [[anchor text]] benefits.



Because revenue, at least initially, can be very low hosting costs need to be kept to a minimum. Some have had success building minisites on free hosting packages, either using the free host's domian name or by a redirect. However hosting services are frequently parking their own advertising on these sites. The other solution is to run your own web server or virtual web server. Packages are not that expensive. This lets you direct as many domains as you like (and your web server can cope with) to a single Internet address. There is a caveat, having a number of sites on a single address is not unusual, this is how many host packages work, having a deeply interlinked network of sites on a single address may look like a [[link farm]] to a search engine. The aim of your minisites is to garner [[inbound links]].