Alright, I’ve been blabbing on about “authority sites”, “kindling sites”, “mini-sites” and all the rest of that crap for the last couple of weeks now…
And I’ve also been bombarded with questions, and I am now wading my way through what’s known as ‘email hell’.
So let’s just get to the bottom of all this:
Is it better to build one big site in your target market to begin with?
Or is it better to start off by creating a series of “mini-sites” that target a tightly-focused theme?
The answer isn’t so cut and dry, unfortunately.
My book preaches the latter. I’ve done the latter - it works. Still does, and will for a very long time.
It’s just that it’s hugely profitable to have an authority site, because the traffic is more stable, your rankings aren’t just hanging by a thread, your visitors will build many of your links FOR you, you’re building a BRAND, and over time, anything you add will get indexed and ranked highly - FAST.
When the search engines value your updates, making a fortune from long-tail, mid-tail and even competitive keywords is nearly effortless. You simply slap up pages about a given keyword, link to them from your normal navigation structure and sitemap, and “poof” - you have almost instant, free traffic for practically any keyword you want, whenever you want.
(It takes awhile to get there, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to do THAT then it is to try and get your mini-site, squidoo lens or whatever indexed, ranked and “stabilized” for any given keyword. Each new mini-site you create starts out with no authority, no pagerank and in general, no advantage - other than the “lazy affiliate-style” keyword targeting…)
But, even with all that said - starting out with the Mother Site right off the bat might not be the smartest move.
Why?
Because rolling out 2 or 3 (or more) mini-sites in the market BEFORE releasing an “authority site” gives you the opportunity to fail fast, ride the winners and drop the losers.
No matter how experienced you are with marketing, business, copywriting - whatever - many of your projects will fail. It’s inevitable.
This is why simultaneously testing the effectiveness of:
* layouts
* ad copy/placement
* approaches, overall site strategy
* products to promote
* and so on…
is the SMARTER way to do things.
From there, you simply pick the winner after each site has had a consistent influx in traffic for its target keywords and then scale it up. It’s working the best, the layout’s working and the keywords it’s targeting are currently the most profitable. Or you take the components that made it work and apply those to your main authority site.
This also makes sense because your “mini-sites” can be rolled out easily, quickly. There’s nothing to it - but the test results are GOLD.
Once you have those results - your “winner” - building your actual business around the things that made that site “win” is going to pay off HUGE for you in the end - exponentially.
There’s no sense in building a barrier-to-entry (authority, value) around something that’s untested.
This is why mini-sites, or perhaps better described as “mini-tests”, are still the way to START, in my books. Just imagine the power of having the torrents of future traffic from a massive authority site all hitting offers that outperform your other tests by 200%, right from the start…
Too many marketers don’t realize that it’s those “small differences” that can be the difference between extra cash, or a full-time, residual income stream.
Visitor value is everything.
And speaking of value, well - read the
previous post on what kind of “difference” that can
make 
-Chris