Mini Site or Content-based Web Site?



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Are you in a dilemma whether to create a mini site or a
content-based web site for your new product or service? The
purpose of creating a web site should be to attract visitors and
convert them to paying customers. Is a mini site with a few
pages enough to do this or should you spend more time and create
a content-based web site which contains many pages?

Let's look at some of the Pros and Cons:

Mini Sites

Pros

1. Easy to set up - you don't have to be a programmer these days
to create a mini site. Web site templates or software allow most
of the work to be done already.
2. Little time - you could create a mini site within one day if
you have your entire content ready to go.
3. Laser focused on selling one product or service - a mini site
can simply be one long sales page with an order button at the
end.
4. No distractions - customers are distracted by other options on
the web site. With no banners or links to other sites, the customer
can be directed to purchase immediately.
5. Inexpensive to create - if you use a free hosting account
(not recommended), you would just pay for registering a domain
name. Paid hosting services for a mini site can be acquired for
only $30/year.

Cons

1. Difficult for search engines to spider - a web site
containing many relevant pages of content will tend to rank
higher in the search engines than a one page mini site.
2. Lacks pages of content - mini sites often lack in-depth
information about their product or service.
3. Difficult to increase link popularity - getting links from
other web sites increases your link popularity. Webmasters form
other sites want to link to a web site which contains valuable
information that expands their visitors experience.
4. Less traffic - less pages means fewer chances for people to
find your site in the search engines, thereby limiting the
amount of traffic your web site receives.

Content-based web sites

Pros

1. Search engine friendly - creating a content-based page for
every targeted keyword will enable visitors to enter from
numerous points within your site.
2. Easy to acquire links from other sites - webmasters want to
link to web sites that will expand their visitors experience by
providing more information (ie articles) or simplify their tasks
(ie software).
3. Become an authority on your product or service - adding
pages of content related to your product, helps people to make
an informative decision before purchasing.
4. Lots of traffic - creating lots of keyword focused pages and
acquiring incoming and outgoing links to and from other sites
generates lots of free traffic.

Cons

1. Too many options - customers can become indecisive if their
are too many options to choose from.
2. Too many links to other web sites - this may take visitors
away from your site and not return. Ideally you want to keep
them at your site.
3. Can be expensive to build - content-based sites can cost
thousands of dollars to develop if you take into account the cost
of graphics and/or hiring someone to build it for you.
4. Takes a lot of time to develop the web site - building
content-based pages takes time. It may take several years to
create hundreds of content-based pages.
5. Attracts 'tire kickers' - visitors want to look around to
glean free information but may never buy.

Conclusion:

Before you decide on what type of web site to develop, first
think of the purpose of your site. If you just need a sales page
and want to drive targeted traffic to your site using paid advertising
(ie paid per click search engines, ezine ads) then a mini site could
be sufficient.

If you plan on becoming an authority on your product or service
and want to attract lots of free search engine traffic, then a
content-based web site will serve you better.

Alternatively, you may create a combination of the two ie begin
with a mini site, leaving room to expand it to a larger content-based
web site in the future.

Increase your pageviews! Or, creating an on-the-fly custom navigation system for new users

Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?

Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?

I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.

This strategy never makes me a passionate user.

What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.

So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.

Welcome Googler, let us help you out

Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)

  1. Check referer string
  2. If search engine, grab query text
  3. Do a full text search on your content to find other articles on your site that are related to their search query
  4. Pass the resulting list to the reader in a user friendly way
  5. Maybe keep that list persistent for the session, unless they close it

What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.

Placement etc.

We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).

We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?

As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.



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