I love minisites… I mean I really LOVE minisites. You see, minisites are easy to deploy, low maintenance, and if you build your templates right you can just plug them into your favorite CMS and really make things easy for yourself. Which means you can target niches like crazy. Which is good.
This also means I manage lots of domain names. I target locally as well as a niche. So if I put up a minisite to sell gas caps I’ll have domain names like londongascaps.co.uk, stlouisgascaps.com, gascapsoftoronto.ca, you get the idea. With each site targeting a local area (remember, “go local” is a movement now).
I also target multiple niches.. Gas caps, Oreck Vacuums , Bunn Coffeemakers, Wordpress Themes, etc. So you do the math.. 10 niches in 75 markets = 750 minisites (for example). that’s alot of sites. And building a mesh of links between my niches and sites just can’t be done manually without driving yourself crazy. But this is fixable. It would be easy if you had your own advertising network, wouldn’t it?
With your own advertising network you can pre-build your link code for each site as your building out the site… Copy/Paste the code, upload the banners, and your done. And they rotate too. I use broad patterns like Oreck ads on my Coffemaker sites, hubcap ads on my gascap sites, etc. Niches that go well together. With a slight dose of my other niches at a lower priority which will bring in a stray nugget often enough to do it.
And if I want to push affiliate offers through my network of minisites? Easy, I plug my affiliate program links and banners into my advertising network system, enable the campaign, and I’m off to the races. In less than 10 minutes I can search ShareASale or Affiliatefuture, or CJ, or whomever and find a program I like, get approved, and deploy up to 750 of my minisites with the offering.
So people find my minisites because they want what I’m selling. If they buy, terrific, if they don’t, that’s the breaks, but I’m offering my visitors links that will take them to other niches and offers I’m promoting through the banners, badges, and text links from within my own network of minisites. In other words, I’m maximizing the potential for my site visitors to buy.
And it’s fairly straightforward and not difficult at all to run an advertising server of your own. I use OpenX (GPL, Open Source Software) that runs extremely well, is easy to manage, and I don’t even have to host it. OpenX has a hosted solution for lower volumes that is perfect for affiliate marketers. At no cost. Oh, your a control freak? Not a problem, many control panels (like Virtualmin) will install OpenX for you. Now that’s almost as easy as the hosted solution.
And that’s how to take the networks of minisites you build in your localized niches and cross promote them.
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