What Are Niche Mini-Sites And Why Should I Build One?

[RedHat39]

This is a basic primer for anyone new to niche mini-sites and niche marketing. I hope you enjoy it.

Well first let's define what a niche mini-site is for those of you that are new to the Internet and web design. A niche is basically a broad term subject that is specialized or targeted to one aspect of the general broad term.

For instance, if you went to Google and did a search for dogs the search would result in millions of "hits" or listings. However if you did a search for "dogs barking" you would get significantly less hits and you could even refine the search even more by searching for say, "dogs barking sounds" or "stop barking dogs".

Okay so the idea behind a niche mini-site is to take a specific niche term and design a small website of 4 - 20 web pages around the subject. By doing this and actively maintaining the website and not letting it grow stale, more on this later, when someone does a search at not only Google, but other search engines as well, for the niche idea you selected your website will be one of the listings on the results page. Hopefully near the top of the results, more on that later as well.

The reason why the Internet needs niche mini-sites is much like the idea behind Squidoo, to bring focused information about a specific topic to the front for people that need that information. If for example you were having a problem with your dogs barking all night long wouldn't you rather see a mini-site designed around that particular subject rather than having wade through millions of other websites only to find bits and pieces of the information you are needing? Sure you would and so would millions of other Internet users.

So now you have a general explanation of what Niche Mini-Sites are and why the Internet needs them. So why should you build one?

The obvious reason would be to become an authority on a particular niche and dominate in the search engines. The second reason and the most popular is to monetize the niche subject. In other words, to build a small niche mini-site and have on the pages links to either products or eBooks that associated to the niche that the readers can purchase. One can even have links to external products or eBooks by others that you would gain a commission from the referral sale.

If you were lucky enough to capture a good niche subject early and obtain high search engine rankings a small niche mini-site could provide a steady stream of revenue for months or years. The good thing about niche mini-sites is that they are easy to create since they are small to begin with and being small they are easy to maintain.

[Linda Buquet]

WOW RedHat39!

What an AWESOME addition to our great collection
of niche marketing tools and ideas.

Sincerely appreciate your contribution.

What do you guys think???

[DiDi]

Great explanation , this article can be good for people who want to understand Niche Marketing
I think that mini niche on the internet is a big niche if you look at the potential to reach thousand or more customers a month.
the benfit for mini niche like RedHat39 mention is that they're easy to build and also you can better SEO your niche site.

[Sparky]

Using "mini sites" as a stand alone marketing effort for information and products related to a niche is a good tactic, but you have to take care that your mini sites aren't perceived as "doorway pages" or as "spamdexing" sites or you'll quickly find your site being removed from the search indexes. The key is having good stand alone content that actually delivers some value, not just a page/series of pages full of ads/links to generate commissions. If you're merely attempting to develop a "mini site" to generate links/leads for your larger/main site, consider using creative "landing pages" instead.--Google & yahoo didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday...More importantly, if you don't take the time to have the "mini site" really be of value by virtue of stand alone content, then it's likely a waste of time because an average searcher will see right through your tactics.

I used to work for a company that used what they called "mini sites" before I came on board. My perception was these so-called mini sites were verging on doorway pages in terms of how they were being used and managed. After I got on board and got engaged with my team, we quickly got these things under control and starting managing them as real content sites (mini sites) so they had some better value as stand alone sites. We certainly linked to our normal landing pages in the appropriate locations, but I'll admit we were walking a thin line. Suffice it to say, that wasn't the only thing going on, but I don't work there anymore.

Not tryin to be preachy, but content is still king and is the hardest part of any site to develop and maintain. It's too easy to fall into the trap of slapping up a domain and trying to monetize it without taking the proper precautions and investing the right level of effort in a professional manner.