I've touched on this briefly, but promised I'd write more about it when I found time. So now is the time...
When you start off in direct market design, it's tempting to try to do everything... magalogs, books, websites, etc. After all, no one wants to pass up potential business.
At one stage, I considered doing mini-websites on a regular basis. A mini-site is usually a site that sells one product or service. It's like an online sales letter.
You can see a sample mini-site that I created here.
While I had a very basic web design background, my skill-set was lacking in a number of areas which would make it hard to market myself in this area.
So I was very interested when I heard about the Mini-Site Creator program. I was familiar with the creator of the program, Jim Edwards, and thought that if I was going to take a chance on a program like that, I could probably trust Jim the most.
Good call on my part, because the program is top-notch. Having a preference for visual learning, I was happy to find out that everything Jim teaches is done through short videos. I could easily follow along with him as he showed how to build mini-sites, hook them up to popular eCommerce options, etc.
Even better, he included lots of templates that you can use with your favorite web design program (like FrontPage or Dreamweaver) or the free Mozilla Composer.
If you're not familiar with traditional mini-sites, they're not very fancy. That makes them far easier to create than a traditional business website.
But like most things, just a little knowledge on your part sets you far above people who know nothing about website design. If you can show you can do it without too much trouble, it's much easier for people to pay you to do it for them rather than them banging their heads against the keyboard trying to figure things out.
A happy bonus with the program is that I can use the templates as a starting point for promotional e-mails for clients. This is more than just raw text in an e-mail...I'm talking about nicely formatted e-mails that, again, resemble sales letters.
Here's an example of an e-mail promo I did for a client. Since it was e-mail, the plan was to keep things simple. But doesn't that look far better than plain old text?
The Mini-Site Creator program will benefit two types of people. The first is direct market designers who want to get into this area of site and e-mail design. The second is people who want to sell their own products or services and want to do the site design themselves.
If you have even the slightest interest in this area of design, do yourself a favor and look into the program.
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