Blogs are great for niches where you want to interact with your visitor base.

They do lend themselves to social traffic, but it’s not a necessity.

However, comments are a great way to get more targeted, unique content, for free…

-Chris

Chris, with social marketing gaining ground wether it is a mini-site or authority site, is it better to build a website, blog, or have both.

Thanks,

Jeremy

Good questions – here’s my thoughts:

1. Yes, definitely. I find proven sellers within a market and then I compete in that market. ClickBank and CJ are a good place to start looking for proven, hot sellers to identify profitable niches.

THEN, do your keyword research, etc.

2. There’s no real time-limit. What I look for is the general “ease” of getting traffic from organic sources, and the conversion.

Some niches are generally quite easy to get free traffic out of, while others have stiff competition, as only a few keywords have major traffic.

(You want to be in niches where there’s TONS of traffic to spare, even on the long-tail keywords.)

Part 1 and 2 in “Confessions” at thelazymarketer.com describe this process in full detail.

Niche selection is by far the most crucial component in all this.

Thanks,

-Chris

This post was indeed insightful. I can attest to what you speak of with respect to trying to build an authority site first with hopes of a big payout.

I built one such site in the Wedding market only to have my Wedding toast page be the biggest performing page in both affiliate sales and adsense on my 50 page site several years ago.

At the time, I didn’t know how to build a website and only had a SBI site platform and let everything lapse.

I knew I was onto something but didn’t know how to capitalize on this because of my technical ineptness.

My question for you is twofold:

1. Do you first research/select your industry and find the most profitable keywords within that industry first?

2. If this is the case, once you’ve found/selected your keywords and set up your mini sites for corresponding keywords, how long do you allow the site to perform before building your authority site.

Thanks!

That’s the idea.

You’ll WANT to scale things up once you hit a gold-nerve anyway. That’s the beauty of this strategy, the motivation isn’t “forced”…

Rather, your excitement based on your current wave of results from “lazy” strategies will drive you to build a business out of it and create massive, long-term profit streams.

Cheers,

-Chris

First of all – congrats on the successful product, great going.

Second – you use the mini-sites as an INITIAL strategy for generating easy traffic and eventual search engine “juice” that can then be transferred to your authority properties, and product sites.

This way you have an easy start with some results already in place BEFORE going full-fledged into product creation, or creating highly valuable content for the niche on an authoritative site.

The idea isn’t to “juggle” 50 mini-sites and try and keep them placed well.

It’s to enter into ONE NICHE at a time (once you’ve got a winner) with a number of mini-sites focusing on different keyword clusters, and then using that traffic, your list (if applicable), as well as your pagerank, to give your “real” assets an instant boost when they’re launched.

Just like how I described in my ebook in the later chapters.

Thanks,

-Chris

Here’s the answers to your questions – and they aren’t “idiotic”, not by a long shot.

You have a better grasp on the fundamentals of this than you might think, based on your questions…
———————————————–

You asked: “I understand the purpose of the PRODUCT pages for the mini site, but what is the purpose of the 13 or so articles?”

Simply to create more avenues of being found via search engines due to more content. It’s not required. If there’s more than 10 competing products in your target niche, you could simply create a quick little 10-pager with a review for each product.

But, as your site gains in ranking and “trust”, meaning that the engines start using your content more frequently and prominently in their results, then the MORE content you have, the MORE traffic you’ll get as well, relating to the keywords, phrases and the overall “theme” of your content.

You asked: “At the end of all these articles I would use my affiliate link to go to a related product correct?”

Not just the end. I recommend promoting the product at the TOP of the pages as well. Test this, but I’ve yet to see less click-thrus and sales as a result of doing this.

Not all of your visitors are going to read through your articles, let alone scroll down. Make it easy for them (and easy for you, too).

You asked: “I plan on outsourcing these articles, do i just give them the keywords to weave in and thats it?”

Your articles need to be well-written and authoritative. DO NOT WRITE FOR GOOGLE. Write for your visitors.

Only worry about optimizing your pages in regards to your title tags, your meta description, your header tags and your internal linking.

Beyond that, just follow the content creation guidelines in Part 1 of “Confessions” and everything will work out.

I truly believe that “keyword density” and those types of factors are something you should overlook, being as backlinks, site-trust and the basics of onsite optimization are WAY more important anyway, and more than make up for having good article content that’s actually useful – even if it’s not “keyword optimized”.

As for how to outsource effectively regarding what the articles should say, there’s two things I can say:

1) Find a competing site with great content, and give the writer some examples from that site. Tell him/her NOT to simply “re-word” the article, but rather to educate themselves about the subject matter and write similar articles of the same quality.

I then give them a headline and a brief synopsis of each article.

2) Choose a good writer from the start. Don’t cheap out and go for the lowest bidders. They’ll just produce garbage – and many are simply in the copyright infringement business, copying & pasting other people’s work and then selling it to you as “original”.

Instead, look at the writers feedback rating AND several of their samples. Then start out with a small project and see how it goes.

If you stumble across a great writer, treat them well, pay them well – and NEVER share your source with other marketers

All the best,

-Chris

I like the minisite approach, it reminds me Mike Campbell’s mininet.

Your approach is effective, and I think I’m even more lazy than you, that’s the reason why I start with only one or two sites (not a full network) and a couple of blogs as well (I love blogs, because you do almost nothing to get traffic).

When I have enough data on my niche, through my blog and newsletter, forums, etc… I will expand or start with the big site that Google will love.

Franck.

That’s my opinion.

Wim

Best,
Wim

-I understand the purpose of the PRODUCT pages for the mini site, but what is the purpose of the 13 or so articles?

-At the end of all these articles I would use my affiliate link to go to a related product correct?

-I plan on outsourcing these articles, do i just give them the keywords to weave in and thats it?

These are total newbie questions, but if you could answer those 3 things Id be ecstactic.
Cheers-
Mark