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?

Your Subscribers Opt-Out - Fastest Way to Get Them To

Fastest Way to Get Your Subscribers to Opt-Out

Keep pitching them and deliver no value.

Worse than that - keep pitching someone who sends three emails a week selling his own product and nothing else.

Value. The only thing that keeps content King.

How to keep your subscribers forever:

Keep delivering valuable content with every issue - and don't make these issues more freguent than

1. You can really find useful content.
2. They can digest your data.

And you'll have those subscribers only as long as you continue 1 and 2 above. Only that long.

First, I found out about Matt Cutts (from Colin MacDougal).

Then I found Mat Cutts' blog.

Now I'm busy digesting this entity also-known-as Matt Cutts. [My comments and understanding in this type style.]

His March 10th blog goes:

SEO Advice: Getting Links

Okay, here are some ways to get high-quality links without emailing, paying, or even paying attention to search engines:

Provide a useful one-time service.

It really doesn’t take very much. [And then he gives some examples. Service has to be useful. For each one-time service, you would need to get their email so you could continue the conversation.]

Provide an ongoing service:

• Web-based services like Bloglines are a great example.

Become a resource:

• You can do this with a personal or company blog. Blogs are a great way to get link love or just to get your word out.
• If blogs sound scary, start out with newsletters. Or studies. Or surveys. Or white papers.
• Once a company (I’ll call them site A) that does language translations asked me why they didn’t rank as highly as another website (I’ll call them site B). When I checked it out, site A had very little content, just 5-6 pages with contact info and a short description of what they did. It was like an online brochure. So what did site B have? They offered a tutorial about the difference between Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji, plus they showed how to write a few characters. Who would you link to, the empty brochure site or the site with tutorial pages? [KEY POINT HERE. Content is king. Also-rans are wannabes.]
  

Provide valuable information.

Be the first. Be the first means coming up with a creative idea that catches the fancy of the web.

Who appointed Loren Baker the judge of the best search blogs? No one at all: he just saw a creative opportunity and took it.

Get an article written about you. Be aware that controversy gets attention, but can also affect how people perceive you. If you bait people too often, that affects your reputation. [Last point is key, and I remind people of it in Maven Matrix Manifesto Exposed - you can be polarizing to get attention and start a discussion, but the "Rich Jerk" is actually cutting his own throat by driving away potential traffic.]

Open up your product:

[Here Matt tells of his proclivity to hack and build with Linux. What these producers are doing is opening up their product to the community - to allow people to contribute to their product.]

- - - -

The Nutshell:

Provide a one-time or continuing service.
Just ensure you get subscriptions so you can continue the marketing conversations
Become a resource; provide information.
Internet is built on Information, Choice, and Speed. By becoming a de facto authority, you then are providing another service - people can go to you for information and compare your story to others.
Open up your product. Host a community.
Some do this with their blog, others will form a wiki. Communities are powerful things.