As is often the case in the world of affiliate marketing and web site ownership in general, there are many considerations to take on board when you first build your site, and presentation is often pretty high up on the list. As part of the presentation of your site you’ll also need to be thinking about the number of individual pages.

Some of you may even be sitting glaring at the screen right now with worry lines teasing the edges of your eyes hoping that there is a simple answer to this question. As you may expect, when it comes to asking the question whether you should have a Maxi site with thousands of pages of information or a Mini site with just three or four the answer is never a black and white, yes or no: it needs is a little bit of information, a sprinkling of common sense and a dash of self belief.

The Mini Site Argument
A mini site containing just a few pages is ideal if you are planning just to focus on one product or service with a particular affiliate domain name. A properly composed and promoted mini site can be an extremely effective affiliate marketing tool. The mini site is seen by some to be the starting point from which an individual’s affiliate marketing adventure can begin, and in many ways this is true, as I’ve said before there is no point jumping in at the deep end and trying to do everything you’ve read about on blogs at once. This approach will leave you tired, fed up and wanting to quit the affiliate marketing game before you’ve even started. Setting up a mini site can feel a bit like throwing a message in a bottle into an indifferent sea, but if you’ve found a niche market and you know the kind of people who will want to visit your site you shouldn’t have too much trouble generating the initial traffic that will kick start a mini site. It’s also important to realise that a mini site doesn’t just have to be a single unit, but once you’ve got your first up and running it’s only a few more steps towards creating another mini site, related to but different from the first, focusing on a similar product. In this way you can create a network of as many mini sites as you wish, and over time there’s nothing to stop the mini sites you’ve made having the impact of a single maxi site.

Mini Site Design
The most important thing to consider with your first affiliate website is its presentation, and I’m not just talking about flashy buttons and faux-tabbed menu bars, I’m talking about the way in which you present your content to your visitors. It’s no good packing your site with PPC banners and adverts which will just clutter the look of the page, in all likelihood be irrelevant to your content and which may simply put people off because a site with too much advertising just screams spyware to the savvy surfer. With a mini site, all of your information should be available in just a few short paragraphs or spread over one or two pages. Being concise and to the point whilst making compelling reading can be tricky, so practise your spiel and make sure that your content is both original and interesting.

The Maxi Site Argument
Whilst a mini site is necessarily focused and specific to a certain topic, a maxi site can be huge, upwards of 1000 pages and as a result can cover a whole raft of topics. However, even if you choose to take the maxi route you’ll need to remember to keep a modicum of focus otherwise your audience will be too poorly targeted and may not stick around for long or bother coming back to keep earning you commission. The costs of hosting and maintaining a maxi site will of course be potentially greater than that of a mini site given the number of pages and, in all likelihood, the scripting languages and other add-ins that you may need to create and sustain a site of this scale. All being well, a site of this size will also require greater bandwidth, reflecting higher traffic levels than those of a mini site: a nice problem to have!

Maxi sites are, to a significant extent, an ‘all eggs in one basket’ approach. Few start-up affiliates will have the resources to maintain one of them so all search engine and social media optimisation efforts will be directed towards this one domain. OK you will spend a lot less time hunting down, registering and hosting new domain names, creating new logos and site designs as you would with a multiple mini site strategy but this will be offset by the immense amount of work needed to build a site of sufficient value in each of the many areas that it aims to cover.

Maxi Site Design
Whilst look and feel are just as important as with a mini site, you will also need to pay a great deal of attention to navigation and the internal linking structure for both consumers and search engines alike. This will almost certainly require a good degree of automation and some form of content management system to ease the burden of updating the site. In designing navigation, ensure that you keep the site as ‘wide and flat’ as possible for search engine indexing. Very few sites are ever indexed below two levels at the outset and three levels once more established. Make sure that your content will be readily accessible when the search engine spiders come to visit. Also make sure that it is no more than a couple of mouse clicks away for your users. Other than that the design is pretty much up to you, using of course the kind of good on-page SEO techniques we have covered elsewhere here at lammo.net.

Ultimately the choice is yours and many people end up with a combination of the two. Both have their strengths and drawbacks. Whichever strategy you opt for, always remember to drive all of your efforts by the search data. Go for being ‘yetanothermetoomobilephoneaffiliatesite.com’ and you’ll be there in the search engine results – on page 724. Equally, you may have the best xyz widget site on the planet and be number one for the term . . .but if no-one ever searches for them. . . .

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