Getting traffic to your mini-site	2.3/5.0 (4 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin February 25, 2009

A mini-site is not worth anything without some sort of traffic. Traffic can be converted any number of ways or combination of ways but the amount and quality of the traffic is critical to the success of a mini-site. Since content on a mini-site is a lot less than that on an ordinary website, can you really compete for organic search traffic? Are there other sources of traffic you should be looking at? The answers in my view are “maybe” and “yes” respectively.

Can you compete for organic search traffic?

Maybe. It depends which niche you have chosen for your mini-site. A well established website in a competitive niche is near impossible to beat with a mini-site in my opinion. If you want organic traffic from a search engine, then pick a less competitive niche and aim to take a piece of the pie and not the whole pie.

The advantage of doing this properly is that those visitors may convert very well because they are more targeted. If you can convert 1% of your traffic and earn 50 cents per visitor, you need 200 visitors a day to earn $1 a day. However if you can earn $5 per converted visitor, then you only need 20 visitors a day to earn $1 a day on average.

So the lesson for a mini-site is to maximize the revenue per converted visitor because you are less likely to be driving large amounts of traffic through your site.

Other sources of traffic for a mini-site

Type-in or direct navigation

This is the traffic that parking depends on and if you have visitors already on your parked domain, then you are likely to continue to have that direct navigation traffic.

Traffic from links

Because your mini-site is going to be lighter on content, you may find that one way inbound links are hard to get. This is where having high quality unique content that meets the visitor’s needs is very important. However even if you don’t have link bait content, there are other ways.

Reciprocal links

Reciprocal links (I link to you and you link to me) have been downplayed a lot lately but they shouldn’t be. Much abused in the past, they are really the thread that holds the web together. The key is to get reciprocal links from sites with related topics. This looks good to the search engines but more importantly, you have a flow of visitors that will find your site useful and relevant and can be more readily converted.

Some people go as far as to ignore the search engines and get extensive reciprocal links. They put up with being penalized in search engine ranking and rely instead on the traffic flowing through those links. There is life without the search engines!

I have several websites where the major source of traffic is from other websites and not search engines. So do not overlook this valuable source of traffic.

Social media, viral marketing etc

There are many other ways to get traffic such as social media with myspace, facebook and twitter being some of the largest. Various marketing campaigns such as viral videos etc can work too.

Low maintenance mini-sites

What I aim to create are low maintenance mini-sites because I do not have the time to babysit them. So I generally aim for organic search engine traffic, one way links if possible, direct navigation and reciprocal link traffic. This requires the least amount of work and you can spread out your efforts over time as you want. The relative balance of each of these traffic sources varies depending on the niche, competition and revenue stream I am aiming for.

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