Why Create a Mini-Site?

A mini-site is a great tool to use when you have found a niche or a market, or even a specific product that is converting well. in this case, I was using a technique called “google cash” to send prospective buyers directly from my Google Ad to a landing page with my affiliate link. Google Cash can be expensive due to the fact that google will only display one ad per top level domain in each search. So if other people are “direct linking” to the same landing page that you are, you have to compete against their keyword bids, and either pay a premium price, or not have your ad shown at all.

Despite these limitations, I’ve found a product and a niche that seems to be converting well. Despite trying to increase my daily ad impressions and clickthroughs in order to increase my daily sales, I seem to be stuck at 10-14 clicks per day.

Time to set up a mini-site!

With a mini-site, you first purchase a domain name that is keyword rich, or at least relevant to your niche. My favorite technique is to go to www.GoDaddy.com to look for the domain, since GoDaddy gives you a variety of name options if your primary name is taken. When I find a domain name that I like, I will head on over to 1 and 1 to register the domain. It’s a little bit cheaper, and private registration is included.

I currently have my hosting set up at HostGator (the Baby Croc package), so my next step is to set the Name Servers from 1 and 1 to my HostGator assigned nameservers.

The final piece of this puzzle is to log into my HostGator Cpanel account, and add my new domain as an addon domain.

In 24-48 hours, all the pieces of the puzzle get connected in the ether and the files I upload to my HostGator account will show up when someone types in my new domain name.

Phew! That is a bit of work just to get a new domain going. It’s not really that hard, there are just a lot of steps if you’ve never done it before. For that reason, I like to purchase several domain names at once…they are cheap, and when I’m ready to set one up, I’ve saved myself a step and a lot of time searching for a name.

Site Rubix to the Rescue

The next step is to create a landing page. I used this free template for a landing page and pasted it into Site Rubix. With another window open that contained the sales page of my product, I began typing up a landing page. I didn’t have a lot of great direction, I just scanned the sales page and typed up some text that I thought sounded Relevant, and not too pushy. The goal of an affiliate’s landing page is NOT to sell…that is the job of your product’s sales page. The job of the affiliate is to PRE-SELL.

I put myself in the shoes of someone who had been helped by the product, and wrote a review style page. I actually own the product, so that makes it a lot easier to write good Pre-sell copy. The author of the ebook mailed me a copy, plus his bonuses after I sold a few copies of the ebook.

Site Rubix helped me by allowing me to drag and drop modules, drop in a nice looking header banner, overlay some text, and it even has a nice page layout with shadowed borders and bottom. It also allowed me to upload a photo (that I had obtained at iStockPhotos), and an “Order Now” button that came with the free landing page template I talked about above.

After I had a nice looking site designed, I downloaded the files in a zipped format to my hard drive, unzipped them and then opened up Dreamweaver on my desktop.

Why Dreamweaver when you had already used Site Rubix?

In order to comply with many affilate programs’ terms of service, I wanted to add a privacy policy and terms of service. In addition, a form based “Contact” page gives a professional touch to the site, while hiding your email address from automated email scrapers.

To do this, I simply rename the index.html from Site Rubix to index.php using Dreamweaver, and use an “include” PHP statement to pull in a simple “footer.html” file.

This footer.html contains just 3 links. The first is a copyright link that connects back to the index.php page. The second is the contact form and the third is the privacy and terms page. Each of the linked pages (contact, privacy, terms) is also renamed with a PHP extension, and the footer.html is pulled in with an include file.

This allows me to make changes to the footer as needed without having to update each page. I could do the exact same thing with the header portions of each page, pulling in the header graphic, but it wasn’t really necessary in this case.

The final result…

The final result is a mini-site with three-four pages, with a dynamic footer that’s nicely styled, clean looking graphics thanks to using Site Rubix and a mini-site that meets Google’s demands for a privacy page, that will also lead to reduced ad costs when sending traffic to the page.

What next?

Next I have several choices in order to drive traffic to the page. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is fast, but costs money. Article Marketing on the other hand, is slower and requires a lot of time to set it up (write articles or have them written for you), but it’s free to do. Many people find success with Article Marketing after about 30 days of posting articles, but I don’t want to wait that long.

My next post will talk about how I set up the Adwords campaign for this site, and in a few days I can give you updates on how the campaign is running.

Seeing as my first affliate income goal is a sale a day, I”m getting there.  Even better, I’m close to my first $100/day, which is my next goal, to take in $100/day affiliate marketing.

Now there are some expenses assoicated with the PPC campaign, but it’s still all profitable.

My opt-in list only has 4 subscribers so far (six if you count me twice), but I’ve already had one sale!  That’s a SWEET conversion ratio, 25% of my list has purchased the product!

I am learning so much so fast it’s hard to make sense of all of it. I no longer am wondering what the “secret” is to making money in internet or affiliate marketing…I’m doing it!  Now I just have to continue to tweak, refine and experiment in order to get my best ROI for marketing efforts.

If you guys are intersted in what i’ve been learning, please leave a comment. What do you want me to talk about first?

Also, please *join* my opt-in email course over on the right…it’s a series of five emails that constitute a mini-course in email marketing, I promise you’ll learn a lot from the mini-course…

I suppose my next post will be about my clickbank/PPC campaign and how I set it up. It’s no big science to it, and you can find similar information all over the net, but the trick is choosing a good product to try and market that is in demand and converts well.

Let me know what you want to talk about …

I’m having a few difficulties though.  Everytime I try to expand my adwords campaign, I either get  a lower Click through, or seem to get even fewer impressions. I’ve changed my daily budget from $10 to $1000 (yes, one-thousand dollars), but still only get a few hundred impressions on my keywords.

At least I have a product that converts though, and is profitable.  According to Wealthy Affiliate, this is  a vital step. I know that people are buying this product, so now it’s a matter of making my campaigns more profitable.  I’m also trying to collect opt-in subscribers to a list, in order to have a list I can market to again and again and again.

So I actually have 2 different campaigns going on.  I have 2 domain names, and one is dedicated to trying to get the opt in lists, and the other is dedicated to trying to get direct sales from clickbank.  Now that i have my own domain name, I will set up a mini-site so that I can customize my landing pages to maximize my AdWords accounts, and match up the keywords with the landing page.  This should help me get a better quality score, which will lower my cost per click and increase my placement in the ad results.

Phew…lots to keep track of!

But just now I put up a new landing page, targeting a keyword that I know is converting for the product.  Lo & Behold, I now have some “great” keywords!  Not all of them, but a handful…a step in the right direction.

It may be a small success, but its a success nonetheless, and you deserve to know about it.