SUB-Ingredient:

The Mini-Site

Training Videos - Requires Adobe Flash Player How to Recognize a Minisite How to create your first minisite page How to create mulit-page Minisites How to Add Formatting & images to your minisite How to Customize a resell-rights minisite page How to Create a Minisite using Front Page How to Create a minisite using dreamweaver How to optimize your Minisite to get free SE traffic How to Upload your Minisite to the web

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Training Documents (PDF) - Requires Adobe Reader Create an Instant Mini-site

Love them or hate them, nothing sells a person on your product or opt-in like a mini-sales site does. It’s statistically proven, and better yet, they’ve been evolving and improving steadily for a decade now (eons in net-time) to be the most effective sales tool this planet has ever known.

We actually have another whole section on this site dedicated to the salesmanship of the mini-site called Sales Page Writing, so this page is going to concentrate specifically about the site building process & technical mumbo-jumbo of the mini-powerhouse sales pages.

First of all, everything that the visitor remembers seeing on a mini-site is just the sales copy on the main page, the index.html. The most effective mini-sites have Macromedia Flash, or streaming audio and/or video displaying near the top of the page.

The site really isn’t much larger than that, but there is more too it. You’ve also got to have a “thank you” page for when they come back from paying or subscribing, and these days, if you care at all about search engine traffic, you have to add a small menu of some kind and place relative articles, a “contact us” page, and even a disclaimer page for Google to give any consideration to including your website in it’s ranking.

This started in the summer of 2006, around the time of the famous “Google Slap.” Big G’s algorithm changed to discredit mini-sites specifically because they didn’t want to offer sales pitches in their ranking results.

Note: This makes a lot of sense because of Google’s business model. Since it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a sales page to have AdSense ads displayed on them, Google knows it will loose that surfer from its’ network the moment it delivers them to a sales page. You can’t really blame them. 

The other Search Engines like Yahoo! and MSN may start to penalize sales pages too, but haven’t yet as of this writing… I really can’t see why they would, but even still, those searchers are miniscule compared to the traffic from Google.

Therefore, we now have a choice to make. Either we forego Google traffic, or we build a bigger mini-page site.

If your traffic is mainly coming from bought traffic such as from Ezine ads, then SEOing your site is likely not worth your trouble. But if you’re on a budget, or if you simply feel that long-term search engine traffic is the best kind of visitor to your mini-site, then you have no choice but to write or find a bunch of articles to slap on your site and do it up like it’s no longer a mini-site in Google’s eyes.  

No matter what else though, the front page of your site can’t afford to lose its’ mini-site feel and flow. If you decide that you must have Google traffic to it, then the menu and other pages you ad cannot afford to be anywhere else than at the very bottom in small words that won’t distract the user from your Most Wanted Response, such as the “Buy Now” button.

The Sales Funnel

The most important aspect of any sales page, even one that is printed out, pinned to a bulletin board, is the flow. It’s the writer’s job to Grab their attention at the top (that’s why the headlines are always so huge) and lead them down the page towards their MWR, or Most Wanted Response.

This is called the Sales Funnel, and we also cover it specifically in the Sales Page Writing section too. However, there are some technical aspects to maintaining & improving your funnel, and those we’ll be addressing here.

For instance, sometimes there are multiple pages in a sales pitch. These should always be handled by creating pop-ups from the page, never a second, continued page in the sales funnel process. Time and time again it has been proven that someone causally reading the page will not bother to click a link at the bottom that says something to the effect of “click here to go to the next page.” That’s the equivalent of plugging your funnel!

Instead, simply let the page run as long as you need it to be. As I mentioned before, people appreciate more information before making their decision.

Sometimes, however, the funnel demands that you don’t include large chunks of distracting information in at a point, because it’s not as related to the sales flow. For these, you can have another page pop up or pop under in a new window, so that surfers have a choice to read it if it’s relevant to them.

The best example of this is lots of testimonials. The use of testimonials, especially those who include a picture & domain to ‘prove’ that they exist, is crucial in most sales pages. In fact, the more the better.

However, nobody wants to READ all 600 testimonials, (yes, I have seen that many before on the big-time Guru sites) they just want to know that they exist. So after placing the most impressive 3-5 testimonials in the flow of the sales page, the smartest thing to do is place a pop-up to another page with all the rest, for those who are still looking for more validation. 90% of the time, it won’t be clicked, but just its’ presence can bring the validation you need. 

Common elements of the mini-site sales page

There are certain elements that ALL mini-site sales pages have on them, or they’ll never be able to create any credibility. This is just a human Psyche thing, but it’s deadly serious that you include them or your sales will never have a chance. –Don’t ask me why, people are just funny that way…

1. Bullet points

• Catch the eyes of people who are just “Skimming” down the page.
• Relay important information in quick bursts.
• Help the lazy reader find important information that he or she would miss otherwise.
• Work well as images too, such as the checkmark, but
• They can be overdone… Only use these things for the most important information, or they lose their effect totally.

2.  Johnson Boxes

These things are great for pulling the reader aside to show something related or outset, and they can even be customized to have an outline in many different styles, like dotted, dashed, thin, thick, even customized pictures… The thing you have to do every time though is to make this background some shade of Yellow… Or your conversions will suffer, I promise.

3.  Opt-in or buy now button

The Culmination of everything this entire pages is begging them to do is getting them to either click on this one button or fill in these two little blanks. Obviously you’ll need to know how these work.

4.  Photographs.

Have you ever seen a sales page with NO graphics on it? For some reason I can remember seeing a few, but I seriously doubt they had a good conversion at all.
A few graphics that are strongly recommended are the eCover of the product, (since people still judge a book by it’s cover, even when it’s not a book!) a photograph alongside the testimonials, and a guarantee logo or something that reinforces safety in their minds.

Some of the Gurus even post a picture with their faces near the top or bottom to establish brand recognition.  Of course you’ve got to be really careful that the picture is extremely open and friendly looking, appealing to all demographics when you try that stunt.

5.  Site menu

Again, just for the people SEOing their sites, a site menu to the other sections like articles should be VERY minimalized, against the bottom edge of the screen. Eventually that trend will be less important, and I’ve even seen a few attempts lately where people place another menu (still small and out of the way of the headlines) at the top edge of the screen, too. Membership sites, where members need a place to log in and they don’t want to scroll to the very bottom, are leading the charge.

6.  Multimedia

Having video or audio clips plugged in and displaying from your sales page is rapidly becoming necessary too. If you buy an MRR product, you won’t likely find one built into the pre-made sales page that comes along with it, but the serious vendors of their own products have all learned that giving people some video to watch, or even just playing an MP3 of their voice describing the benefits makes major strides in the reader’s opinion of credibility. It’s like reaching a person through multiple senses, so tests have show that multimedia in your page, especially video, increases sales more than just a little bit.

For certain products that look or sound more impressive in action than a photograph can do it justice, it could mean all the difference between 10 sales and 10 million sales.

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