Marketing Insight - the return of mini-sites and mini-webs

(photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kwl/)

Just had to tell you about this one. Too neat.

(Warning: advanced terminology ahead - Geek Alert)

Dr. Andy Williams reminded me about it with his recent newsletter about site building.

I've been playing around with the idea of subdomains as minisites and have finally gotten it working. Mini-sites go back to the days of page-rank as King of SEO, and Michael Campbell (Striking it Niche, Nothing but 'Net, etc.). The idea is that you would build mini-sites around your niche and people would find all sorts of fascinating content within that mini-site and they'd bounce all around within it and build up your pagerank, making your SERPs improve.

Then you'd link these mini-sites together and you'd have a mini-web. Since the links were by related content, you could actually take over a major niche just on pagerank.

But the days of pagerank are ebbing, if not gone. Google doesn't think that metric is as important these days.

However, the concept is a fascinating one. It allows you to group your content by niche and then cross-link to related content on another site you also created and maintain. So link love can still be shared, along with subscribers (if you liked this blog post, other readers also found these blog-posts fascinating...).

Enter the idea of sub-domains. Now for the time being, Google still gives subdomains individual pagerank and treats them basically as their own site. Meaning that when you link from one subdomain to another, you are crosslinking sites. So you are giving authority to another of your own sites.

But this has been tricky to do, since other than hand-coding mini-sites, the best way to build a site was with WordPress (or some other CMS scripting platform). Meaning that if you wanted to set up a subdomain and install WP on it, you'd have several installs on your hard-drive with multiplicitous files duplicated in every subdomain.

Enter WordPressMU. (Multi-User.) It has the option of being able to create new blogs and assigning them a subdomain name - used on WordPress.com and many others. So each person runs a single blog, but the underlying program really runs them all as one huge mega-blog.

Here's the deal: Set up WPMU on a host and then create a new "blog" for each keyword niche. Posts in that blog are all germain to that subject and so build authority within that subdomain. Every subdomain is it's own subject - and so you actually build mini-sites again - and a mini-web, after a fashion.

What makes this really take off is that you can have completely separate look and feel for every sub-domain blog. It looks like it's own blog - which it is. And templates make it much, much easier to configure - but far more powerful - than mini-sites.

An example is Midwest Journal Press - this is set up as a main site for all the books I want to promote as a publisher. Every book is to have it's own blog. My latest project is How to Stop Telemarketers' Internet Scams. Note that the link goes to a subdomain on that main blog. I'm in the process of writing this book right now. And it will have all sorts of links off the site, but also to the other related books which I publish. It becomes an authority for the keywords of "stop telemarketers", if not "Internet scams".

The great part about it is that I can build an opt-in mail list just for that book (coming today, I hope) and so get subscribers on this particular niche completely independent of the other books I write/edit/(re)publish. Also, I'm not limited by a single template's foibles, but can actually grab and install various templates until I have the one which is appropriate to that particular niche. (A person looking to solve their "I've-just-been-scammed-by-a-telemarketer" problem will expect a more dramatic look and feel than the "I'd-like-to-lose-more-weight" person - who needs more reassurance.)

In short, WPMU looks to solve a variety of problems with a single install. Sure, there are some tricks that have to be mastered, but it's not a particular problem compared to learning HTML and coding pages by hand.

And to think - you probably heard it here first!

Your comments? Suggestions?

Wasting your time with extreme SEO

Don't waste your time with PageRank when you should be improving user experience.

8 Arguments Against Sculpting PageRank™ with Nofollow | AudetteMedia

This little page has a great deal to say about "no-follow" as an SEO strategy - both plus and minus.

I'm going to reverse myself where I told you to get Dr. Andy's Website Builder. Or any other. If you're like me and work just at getting stuff online at all, then you don't have time to spend on building these SEO-optimized pages. True, you should build mini-webs, particularly if you can afford to invest in separate domain names for them. But worrying about linking them with no-follow is a no starter. Worry about how the user can find and make sense out of them first.

Main scene: Google is devaluating PageRank and has been for years. Things change. Except for one point this article points out - the key point is user experience and always has been. That's why the search engines are putting social media on the front pages: better content.

So don't worry about Michael Campbell's various diagrams to build mini-webs and so on. Concentrate on building websites with great content. (Now, you can build mini-webs that are subdomain-based and link only within themselves, particularly where you are selling an affiliate link or a particular product. That makes sense. One link on the main page which lets them out - but only to your ecommerce page or to a sales link. But again, we're getting pretty geeky here. Concentrate on great content, user experience and you'll win.)

How you build a top-notch, profitable web site:

1. Make a great landing page that is exciting and tells someone everything they need to know above the fold (first screen-full). Elevator pitch sells them on checking out the rest of the site. Has an opt-in for mail list, plus RSS feed.
   
2. Use templates to simplify your Navigation and page building.
3. Build with WordPress or similar blog function, where you don't have to worry too much about updating navigation links or search (even Dr. Andy is using this right now, as it simplifies adding pages immensely.)
4. Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate on improving user experience for your site.
5. Monetize everything - make everything contribute and everything count.
6. Add pages daily, if possible.
   

The Digg It strategy - and why this social bookmark raises your Google rank

Just so I can find the reference again. Social bookmarking has some which are more unequal in effect than others. Digg is one of those.

ezSEO Blog » 2008 » February:

" 3. Digg It
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Web 2.0 is here to stay. Anyone who dabbled with Web 2.0 strategies cannot fail to have seen their webpages improve in rankings. Here is a little tip that I use to consistently get pages indexed in hours, and usually a few top 10 results as well.

1. Create a high quality themed article and upload it to your site. Make sure the article is of a very high quality, and well themed.

2. Create an account at digg.com if you don’t already have one.

3. Login to your Digg account, and dig your article.

Sit back and wait.

Usually within 24 hours I’ll start to get traffic to the page on my site, and often for quite competitive search phrases.

e.g. over a year ago I used this strategy on a new PR 0 site. I wrote an article and “digged” it. Within 24 hours my page was #1 in Google, and #1 in MSN.

I know a lot of you want to know if the ranking was temporary. Well, today, over a year later, that same page is #3 in Google (and has a PR 2) with around 15,000 competing pages (searched in quotes). The other pages in the top 5 are PR 4 or PR 5.

The page has slipped out of the top 10 at MSN though.

It does not seem to matter if anyone else “diggs” your story. That original story on Digg from a year ago still only has 2 diggs.

Go out and test it yourself. See what results you get."

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Now for part two (don't worry, he explains this numbering down the page...):

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1. Get a link - Part I
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In the newsletter last week, I gave you one great way to get a link to one of your pages on your site. That method not only gets the inbound link, but can often get your page indexed and ranking high in Google in only a few hours (assuming the content is high quality).

While on-page factors are increasingly important, it is still true that off-page factors are more important. In other words, Google wants to know what other sites are saying about your site.

If lots of similar topic sites link to your site, then Google will assume your site is important, and will rank you accordingly.

Getting links to pages is one of the areas that most people neglect. Why? Simply because it takes too much work… Or does it.

Over the next few weeks, I want to give you link building tips that will help build quality, natural links to your site. These tips will build into a good link building resource that you can apply to any and all of your sites.

Let’s say tip #1 was the one from last week.

Tip #2 - getting links back from other people’s blogs. The way this works is that you leave comments on other peoples blogs, with a link back you your site in the comment.

Now, you are probably thinking one of the following:

1. Blog “auto-comment” posting software is spam.

Yes it is. Don’t use it.

2. Leaving crappy comments on other people’s blogs is spam.

Yes it is. Don’t do it.

3. Most blogs use the nofollow tag rendering any link back useless.

Yes they do. Find ones that don’t use the tag.

OK, so what is the best strategy to use here to avoid the spam trap?

Well, you need to find on-topic blogs that do not use the nofollow tag, and then leave comments that are high quality and informative. The information you leave should be complimentary to the original blog post.

Great. We have a plan.

One question though.. How do you find related blogs that do not use the nofollow link?

Well, I have a special treat for you, and it is fre.e.

Neil Shearing has created some software that he is giving away, and it does just that. Type in your main niche keyword, set a few options, and the software will go off and find these blogs for you. Just make sure you use it for good rather than evil ;O).

1. Find on-topic blogs.
2. Post genuinely useful comments

You can find the software here:

Real Link Finder

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Part III here - plus comments on it:

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2. Get a link - Part III
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I know, last week was Part I, so why is today part III? Well its simply because the first “Get a Link” was the Digg technique described in newsletter 191, but I hadn’t numbered that one, as I had not come up with the idea of running a series on this.

Part I - Digg technique
Part II - The Blog Technique described last week, using Neil’s excellent fre.e tool for finding quality blogs to post in.

Part III - Forums.

You are allowed a “signature” in most forums. This gives you an ideal opportunity to include a link back to your site. The idea of this link capture method is this:

1. Find quality forums in your niche that allow a link in your signature.

Make sure that the forums are spiderable by the search engines (do the posts of this forum appear in Google?), and look at the source of a page from the forum - are the links in people’s signatures tagged with nofollow?.

2. Read the terms of use for the forum so you stay within guidelines.

3. Spend a few days reading posts in the forum, to get an overall impression of how the forum is run and what type of stuff people post about.

4. When someone asks a question that you can help with, answer it with as much detail as possible. Your post will have your sig, and your sig has a link back to your site.

5. Continue with this for a while, so that you “brand” yourself as an expert in the field.

6. After you have written a dozen or so quality replies helping others, if an opportunity comes up to mention a product of yours, do so. Don’t make it obvious selling spam. Simply answer a question, and then point out that your site (mentioned in your sig) has XYZ that might help them. Or, refer to an article on your site in response to a question.

e.g. Someone asks “Which firewall is the best for Windows Vista”, you can reply something like:

“I personally use Zone Alarm as I found Comodo caused problems with my anti-virus, but you can read a comparison of several firewalls that I wrote here:” and supply a URL. Most forums wont have a problem with this.

The two immediate benefits of forum posts are easy to see:

1. Links back to your site from every post you make on the forum.
2. If you get recognised as an expert on that forum, you will have non-stop traffic from people on the forum who respect your opinion and want more information from you.

As a method of getting inbound links to your site, this one can be very good, and even if the inbound links were not counted (e.g. the forum used nofollow on all links), I would still do it because of the traffic it generates.

I like to find 3 or 4 different forums in a niche, and spread my help around a bit ;o)

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3. Feedback on the Digg Technique
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A couple of weeks ago, I told you about the Digg technique I use to get pages indexed quickly, and ranking well. If you missed that issue, you can read it online at my blog here:

ezSEO Newsletter Issue 191

Anyway, I had an email from Martin who had tried it with an article his writer had done for him.

Here is what Martin wrote:

“Just as an aside, I uploaded my first theme article yesterday and submitted it to Digg like you said. It was indexed in Google within 24 hours and during the next 24 hours it was found for 8 different, new phrases. I feel really good about sticking with it and making sure the writer did a good job (I didn’t know a TQS of 70% was ok so 60% of them are 100% and it feels even better that what you are teaching actually works! It takes work to master the process, but it’s obviously very much worth while. Thank you.

- Martin”

NOTE: TQS refers to the “Theme Quality Score” of the article, as reported by the Fat Content Creator - part of my Fat Content Course.

What Williams discusses under Forums, is covered in the Online Millionaire Plan as Comment Marketing (Right there next to Article Marketing...)