Debate re landing pages/mini sites

Great question. I think you can get away with minisites for organic traffic, but with PPC you definitely want a landing page with a very strong call to action, and single goal for the visitor to accomplish.

That being said, I have seen PPC traffic being driven to mini sites over extended periods of time, so presumably that was profitable too.

Hmm. That wasn't very helpful!

lol i think i know what you ment dae!

PPC traffic should always go to a targeted landing page. It should not have links to other parts of the minisite.

Organic traffic can come in through other pages but they should all direct the reader to go to the order page (can be different than the landing page).

Every thing should be centered around getting the reader to become a customer.

So kevin those would work for an opt in.

If however you are in a mini niche where you could sell on product and not much else, would you need and opt in?

And if you didn't are we saying ppc would be the only way to go for a one product site as it'd be too hard to rank organically?

Very intelligent questions I must say.

In terms of whether you need an opt-in list for a niche where there is only one product available, it depends on how much value you think you can gain from having that customer's details. Typically its more than you think.

For example, it is quite possible to cross sell to a customer even if they only came to your site for the purpose of wanting one product, as long as there are other products they might be interested in that are complimentary or supplementary to that product. People often want to buy multiple products, you just need to think a bit laterally sometimes. If they liked a book they may like a movie, if they liked a bike they may like a book on the best bike tracks in the world or something. You get the idea, im sure.

In terms of how hard it is to rank for a one product site, it can definitely be done (i've done it quite successfully) and a way that you can get around your site appearing to be only one page to google, is to have a few other relevant articles on the site as well. You can get them from Ezinearticles for example.

They don't even have to be linked to from the product page, just make sure you submit a sitemap so that google sees your one product page as having a few relevant pages.

Obviously how high you rank will depend on your competition, and all things being equal google does appreciate more content, but its definitely possible.

Ladning page with some content will rank better, than simple sales page. You can use blog with relevant articles and place the link to your affiliate product sales page

I will use a combination of both. When targeting with SEO, will use 'mini sites' while with PPC will use landing pages.