Microsites

Microsites: An Unfair Advantage for Affiliate Marketing

If you’re looking for an unfair advantage in your affiliate marketing efforts, a microsite is probably right up your alley. A microsite can get you higher positions in SERPs, improve your CTRs and ultimately, improve your cost per acquisition. It accomplishes all this through the tight product focus and high relevance resulting from a small website designed to promote one product or service.

Landing PageMicrosites

A microsite is a stand-alone mini site, ideally with its own keyword rich domain name. Navigation is minimal since the site should be designed along the lines of a conversion path, basically one focused landing page leading to another as the visitor is led closer to the conversion point. Banner advertising is also minimal in order to maintain visitor focus, similar to what you would do with shopping cart pages.

The big kicker of course is that you must promote only one affiliate product or service. This has two sets of advantages, the ability to create high relevance for search engines and the ability to focus completely on that one product. Below is a small list of must-haves for effective microsite affiliate marketing:

  • A keyword rich domain that clearly describes the product or service.
  • A small set of extremely relevant keywords, matching ads and landing page(s).
  • Original and focused site content.
  • Extensive product specifications, benefits and photos.
  • Video(s) of product in actual use.
  • Customer referrals.

SEO
Microsites are relatively easy to optimize for organic listings. The inherent focused structure of the site will automatically raise you above most of the affiliate marketing competition. A great keyword rich domain name will get you listed quickly. Original and unique content will put you over the top. It’s difficult not to do well with a microsite as long as standard SEO concepts are followed from the start.

PPC
Well designed microsites can generate great quality scores. How does that impact your affiliate marketing campaign? Higher ad placements, improved CTRs and eventually, lower costs per click. That all translates to more money in your pocket at the end of the day. What must be done is to develop keywords, ads and landing pages that are extremely relevant to each other. The conversions will follow automatically.

Affiliate marketing usually involves promoting one product or service. Light efforts typically involve text ads or banners and purchasing placements for them. A squeeze page may be considered an intermediate effort. However, if you are really serious about affiliate success, you should consider a microsite. Yes, it will be initially more expensive than the other options, but the ROI will speak for itself.

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