Micro sites or mini sites are a good way to take a profitable offshoot of your main business and build a totally focused site of around 5 – 10 pages.
What are the benefits of this?
Well micro sites allow you to branch out and create something totally focused on a single topic. For example, an insurance website could include a huge raft of personal lines and commercial insurance products. On one site, it will be difficult to rank highly for all three easily.
Yet a single site on say renovation insurance could help attract more traffic and rankings. It also gives you two bites of the cherry when it comes to web rankings. We have clients that have multiple page one rankings both for their main website and their microsite.
And with the popularity of content management systems such as WordPress, it is easy to create a second or even multiple mini-sites for your business. Simply register more domain names and add a second web host, and away you go.
Instead of cutting marketing spend, lots of companies are reducing their Pay Per Click budgets and investing in Virtual Real Estate (VRE) by building a range of targeted themed mini sites. In this way they are investing their marketing spend in the future not just the right now.
It could be just the thing to separate your from your competition.
Do you need ideas for mini-sites?
They could be product specific, geographic, or even profession based.
Hopefully this will give you a kick-start for thinking about what you can do. And once it is build, start incorporating some of the marketing techniques you will be using for your main website.
Having microsites is a great way to build up your companies VRE and drive more traffic. The cost upfront is offset by the fact that once build and marketed, you have something driving you traffic for as long as you like.