Blogs and business websites are great for building credibility, for getting search engine traffic, and for having central hub for your coaching business. And when done well, they can be very compelling for getting prospective clients and making money.
However, most coaches don’t do this very well – by far.
Whether you have a great website, or a lacking one, you can boost your business with mini-sites.
Mini-sites (similar to micro-sites, squeeze pages, landing pages, sales pages, slide pages) are small websites, often 1-pagers, that are designed to get visitors to perform one task, such as:
- Getting someone give you their email address
- Getting someone to buy a product
- Getting someone to sign up for a service (coaching program)
You’ve seen them. They can feel very wordy, a bit salesy, and often long winded IF you’re NOT the person for whom this page was targeted.
BUT, and a huge BUT, if you are in the target market for this mini-site, then this wordy page will feel very compelling, very motivating, and stir up a lot of emotion in you.
Mini-sites can be very powerful.
In her book, Coaching Millions: Help More People, Make More Money, Live Your Ultimate Lifestyle(affiliate), Milana Leshinsky, highly successful mentor coach, talks about how she used mini-sites along with various other web strategies to grow her coaching business. This is a great book for coaches looking to make 6-7 figures.
Mini-sites work well due to less distraction – just one action on the page.
However, a mini-site is at the mercy of copy. Without compelling content, they won’t do much.
Some keys to successful mini-sites:
- A headline that literally mesmerizes your visitor.
- Great sales copy. Some basics for sales copy include: testimonials, benefit statements and handling resistances to taking action. To learn more, do a search: how to write a sales page
- Use longer pages if you’re asking people for money. Shorter for asking for an email address.
- Have only one call to action and spread it through the page so people can easily click when ready.
- Target your mini site to a specific audience: ex. Real estate investors as opposed to “people who want change”
- For building a list, be sure to give away juicy freebees.
So, for example, if you’re looking to build a big list of prospective clients, a good move for just about any coach, create a mini-site with a list of reasons why to signup, a gift (audio, video, or ebook), and an easy to access sign-up form.
Here’s a mini-site I use for building my email list:
http://www.websiteahas.com
Should you use mini-sites?
Probably so, but what were your goals again? Don’t want to build a list? Just a few clients on the side? An endless supply that pay well and passive income?
Kenn Schroder helps coaches createclient-attracting websites. Get your free copy of 5 WEBSITE STRATEGIES
FOR ATTRACTING COACHING CLIENTS at http://www.coachingsitesthatwork.com
I have a WordPress Site. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to
have a couple of these mini sites to garner email addresses or some
indication of interest in my programs. However, every time I try to
create one, the WP theme intrudes – (I use Tarski so can control
whether the sidebar shows up or not) – and I still have some of the
attributes from the rest of the site that I don’t want. What would
you advise?
Hi Deborah, You might want to look into “page templates” and create
a “sales page” template for your purposes above. This kind of
template would be a very basic page, minimial or no links other
than signup or register or buy. Then when you create a page on your
site using the new “sales page” template. The sweet thing with
wordpress, is that once you do so, wordpress creates a nice url for
it. As a rough example, here’s a client’s site with the sales page
template (void of content): http://oasiscoaching.com/sales/
I want to make a mini-site with it’s own unique url. I have a
hosting account for Happy and Healthy Mom and I can add a wordpress
to subdomains, but will not have a custom url. (I made a non
wordpress sales page http://bbbbootcamp.happyandhealthymom.com I
want all of the pages in the mini-site to have the custom url for
Become Better Brands, not just a redirect. Do I need a whole new
hosting account? If so, do you know of any cheap ones designed for
just having sales pages, squeeze pages, and thank you pages?