Mini-Sites, Affiliate Programs, Pre-Selling And Traffic: Your 30-Day Internet Marketing Plan

Previously, I wrote about the four different types of mini-sites your can build to start earning on the Internet. This article is going to show you how you can start earning money from the Internet using the fourth mini-site - Landing Page Mini-Site.

A landing page mini-site is a simple website where you set your website visitors in a pre-sell mode, before sending them off to the website that you are promoting. What do I mean by pre-sell? By pre-selling, you are making a suggestion in your website visitors' mind to go check out the product that you are talking about. You build a good image about the product, without any hard-selling.

So with pre-selling, there's no "Go buy this now", "I want you to get it", "This is a must have". With pre-selling, you get the website visitors to decide for themselves.

If you are new to building websites, you can check out some really good free mini-site templates at MiniSiteGallery.com.

There's also DIY Mini Site, a place with huge collection of videos, templates and resources to get you started.

If you want a good software to build mini-sites, the best that I can recommend is XSitePro 2. Basically, XSitePro is like marrying a website builder with a content management system. In case you wonder what XSitePro is like, it's a software for Windows. Read my XSitePro 2 Review over at my blog.

If you need a web hosting, I strongly recommend DreamHost. Both of MiniSiteGallery.com and DIYMiniSite.com is hosted on DreamHost. DreamHost has great features other web hostings don't have, like allowing you to host your own newsletter mailing list with their Announce List, and also a built-in digital file e-commerce system called File Forever.

Apart from that, DreamHost is also very proactive with support and very helpful when you needed help. I know, I tested them.

Alright, back to the real story. Let me share with you two ways where you can effectively pre-sell. Product review and tutorials.

Before we can pre-sell a product, you need to find a good product to promote.

To get started with Landing Page Mini-Sites, you can promote products with affiliate programs. This way you don't have to spend time and money to create your own product. Later when you are more successful, you can consider creating your own products. But to get you started, for now, we will just stick to affiliate programs.

I like promoting digital products such as ebooks, software and website memberships. These types of products offers high commissions to justify your marketing costs. You can search the ClickBank or PayDotCom such products.

To effectively pre-sell, you need to find a product in a niche topic that you are familiar with. Maybe when you get better at pre-selling and copywriting, you can consider branching out into other products. But to get you started and see faster results, let's start with something that you are most familiar with.

If you are a massage therapist, you can consider products about stress relief, massaging, back pains, neck pains, and others in that area. I am sure you get what I mean.

When looking for a product to promote, start with popular products with the most expensive price. And then work your way down. I am not suggesting that you get greedy here, but you are only looking for products with the best returns. When you found a few products, look at products you feel most comfortable promoting. At this point, choose one.

I do recommend that you get that product. But before you do, perhaps you should search Google for that product. Take a look at how other people are promoting that product, what others are saying about it and more. Basically just find out as much as you can about it. Doing this will help better understand about the product, the pros, the cons and also help you decide if that's the product you want to promote.

If you start to feel comfortable with the product, it's time for you to buy it. Yes, you have to buy it to get a better feel from it. No matter how much you know about it, it nothing compared to actually go through the product itself. Plus, when you really have it, you can create screenshots of the real product.

It's now time to create the content for your Landing Page Mini-Site. Remember, pre-sell - don't sell.

Remember I said there's two really effective ways to pre-sell? I can't really say which is best. It depends on the product itself. If you feel it's better to review, then perhaps you should do that. If you feel it's better to create a tutorial for that product, just do it.

Generally, a product that requires some learning curve, like software, you can create a tutorial. With a tutorial, people will better understand the features and what it can do. When they understand it better, there's a chance they'll might want to get it.

Your tutorial doesn't really have to focus much on the product, but focus on features that website visitors may want. For example, a software that generate website screenshots, you can create a tutorial titled, "How To Generate Better Website Screenshots With Software ABC". The focus is on what it can do.

Of course, at the end of your tutorial, you can end with a link that sends visitors to the product's website. You can have something like, "Click here to learn more about Software ABC%u2026" This is also known as the call-to-action. The final thing you want your website visitors to do.

Now, for reviews. If you feel that it's better to do a review, then you need really go through the product. Most of the times when I read reviews, I see people simply lists the features, what it can do and all that general stuffs that people can simple read from the product's website.

What you need to do is write personal experience. Yes, get personal with your website visitors. A good strategy I learn from an affiliate marketing ebook is to raise doubt about the product as an opener. Raising doubt will create curiosity and get people to read your review. You can start with something like, "Do You Really Need Product ABC?"

And then you continue with your personal experience. Tell them how the product has helped you. Share with them your personal results. Something like this will really turn your website visitors into a buying mode.

Just like writing the tutorial, you end your review with a call-to-action.

When you are just starting out, I can understand how worried you are about spending too much money online. To keep your investment low, why don't we just stick with free traffic at the moment. But I do want to you stress out that you can expect faster traffic and faster result with paid traffic. However, not tracking them well can send you straight to the dump.

With free traffic, the best way to do it is to write articles. Write short articles around 400 words. And then start submitting them to websites like EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.

You should also consider writing longer articles and host them outside your website. You can use websites like HubPages.com and Squidoo.com (you are already here) to create special web pages to links back to your website.

Why do you do this? Well, many times content on HubPages.com and Squidoo.com can rank better than when it is on your own website. But since those articles link back to your website, you will get traffic. Plus, you will also get incoming links back to your website, where it help you with your search engine ranking.

How many articles should you write? People who are really into article marketing can write 5 to 10 articles everyday. Amazing, right? Writer's block, well here's a quick solution. I know this is sneaky but you can read other people's articles and rewrite them.

If you are starting out, you need to write and submit at least one article a day. And don't forget to create new HubPages and Squidoo Lenses.

With article marketing, you can start seeing traffic within the first week. Imagine if you submit a new article everyday. What kind of traffic do you think you will get in 30 days?

This may seems like a simple plan. Try putting this plan to work and you will start to see result. When you are starting to see result, find another product to build a mini-site.