Important Factors of a Minisite

In making a minisite, there’s of course, the design factor which plays a huge part in really making your minisite profitable. But there are also other factors that are important that we need to consider, things like navigation, content and ad placement plays a big role in really getting your visitors to stay…

… The target of your minisite should be to keep your visitors as long as you can. A high pageview can sometimes be better than just high traffic. The main target of our minisites should be to convert these traffic and pageviews into revenues. Here’s what you need to really focus on:

Navigation

This is one of the most basic element in web design, to focus on if you want your visitors to stay longer, rather than just one landing page looking minisite. By giving a navigation, they could find more articles and more about your minisite. What you need is to establish credibility that you’re not just a one pager, and you’ve got lots to offer.

Content

Contents must be relevant and useful for the person searching for the keyword. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher, how do you find the article? is it useful to you? Make the content entertaining and useful. I really recommend adding images or videos, give it more life and get their imagination going. The advantage with images is that you are able to write shorter contents or more engaging than bore your readers to death.

Ad placement

One of the biggest problem when I started in minisites is I wasn’t making money even when I had visitors. I realized that my ad placements were not really effective and is not attracting clicks. One of the mistakes I learned was not to put the ads in the header, it was because when you first visit a website you do want to check if the content is really what you want and you tend to ignore the header. So where’s the best place? Wrapping the ads in the content. Think about it, the visitors are after the content and that’s where they are focused. Also leave out a space on the “sidebar” of your website for an ad, a 336×280 or 300×250 is what I really recommend. The goal is to increase our Click Through Rates (CTR).