Advantages and Disadvantages of Authority Sites and Minisites

People often start building websites without first considering whether they want to create a mini site or an authority site. People just starting out with online businesses may not know how to decide which kind of website to create. Aside from your own business model, you also have to take into consideration how the search engines treat different types of websites.

What it really comes down to, however, is your own personality and your long term goals for your business. What follows is a comparison of mini sites and authority sites, which can help anybody who's trying to choose between the two.

Some people prefer to build mini sites because they want to start making money as soon as possible. You can profit by using this tactic. Yet, to think this way all the time can limit your possibilities in the long run. You could subdivide a niche into much smaller categories, each based on a few keywords. You could then put up a dozen or more mini sites, each based on one of these micro niches. It shouldn't take you long to rank for these key phrases if you chose them wisely. Don't forget, though, that Google is not very fond of this strategy.

As you can probably figure out, authority sites are larger, more demanding projects to undertake than mini sites. How you feel about this will depend on your personality, as well as how much time you have available. The mini site model has a lot to offer people who get bored with the same thing every day and prefer frequent changes. Mini sites don't take long to build, and once you have the hang of it, you can do it in less than an hour. Building an authority site, however, can be a long process. They aren't totally different, however, as you can consider an authority site to be lots of mini sites under one domain.

With either model, you can keep adding fresh content.

A mini site can be especially good for certain types of campaigns. You should be able to rank well if you are marketing to different countries. If you then host your mini site in the country in which you are marketing, and SEO it for local search terms, you could get by with a mini site. There are no guarantees, though, as your success will vary based on the quality of your site and products, the country you're targeting and so forth. You can also keep in mind that Google does not have a total monopoly when it comes to search engines. While Google of course gets the most searches, you also have Bing, Yahoo and lots of other search engines that you can do SEO for. That's something to try if you want your mini sites to be profitable. Because every marketing venture online is unique you should consider them all as unique. Because one venture is so different from the next, it is important to adjust your marketing efforts accordingly. With this in mind it would be completely unwise to imply that either authority or min sites were superior to the other.