Having had both mini sites and flagship websites in the past, I thought it would be worthwhile comparing the differences between the two. I’ll highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each type of site. To start off, we’ll begin with the definitions of these site types.

A minisite is a small website of less than 20 pages that targets specific keywords for a niche topic, usually earning income from affiliates and Google Adsense. My Gucci Bags and Spy Gadgets sites are perfect examples of mini sites.

A flagship website is a much larger website that covers a topic area and usually has at least 100 pages, but can easily have 1000s of pages. Income can be from a variety of sources, such as subscriptions, banners, paid links, PPC advertising and affiliates. My old website Spy Review is a good example of a flagship website.

Minisite Advantages

  • Better affiliate conversion ratio. Mini sites are used for targeting a niche product or service. Therefore a visitor to the minisite is more likely to purchase the product you are referring them to since they stumbled on your site looking for that type of product in the first place.
  • Little maintenance. Minisites, once created, require very little effort to maintain them. Unless you are adding products or changing the layout of the site, there is little reason to make changes to a completed minisite.
  • Small footprint. Minisites by their very nature are small, and therefore have low space and bandwidth requirements.

Minisite Disadvantages

  • Gaining backlinks is hard work. Many webmasters look down on minisites and consider them to be very spammy, low quality and just made for adsense (MFA). Therefore building links to your minisite will be hard work. This is the main reason why my fondness of minisites is diminishing.
  • Only patience will lead to good profits. You may find that it will take a long time for a mini site to cover its costs (9 to 18 months). The traffic for a mini site is relatively low (I’ve seen up to 30 uniques a day on the Spy Gadgets mini site), therefore this is a small number of visitors from which to earn money.

Flagship Website Advantages

  • Many revenue streams. If you have a much larger website with good traffic, then the website lends itself to many ways of making money. You are not just limited to Google Adsense or affiliates with a large website. You can charge a fee for premium content, have banner advertising, paid blogging, use PPM advertising, etc. Since you have more traffic compared to a mini site, you have more ways to derive income from this extra traffic.
  • Organic traffic through longtail keyword searches. Something that always surprises me is the odd phrases that people use to find my websites. By having a great deal of interesting and unique content on your website, you inadvertently create phrases that someone will probably type into a search engine and thus find your site. Therefore the more content relating to your website’s topic you have, the more likely you are to gain visitors who use odd search terms.
  • Larger sites have more potential for growth. It’s quite clear that the larger the website, the greater the opportunity for growth. As the following and community surrounding a website grows, so does the rate at which it grows. This assumes that the existing community tells others and recommends them to your site, which is a fair assumption. Typically a larger community leads to more income.
  • Quality websites are easier to promote. If a website is well liked by the community, then it stands to reason that it would be easier to gain backlinks to such a site. You’ll gain some backlinks from the community for free, but having a reputable website will make it easier for link exchanges or deals with websites to gain backlinks.

Flagship Website Disadvantages

  • Large websites need continual nursing. A large website will need constant looking after to keep it in top health. You’ll have spam to circumvent, link building to do, emails to answer, content to write, template modifications to improve usability and revenue streams, and more. As long as you can outsource the tedious or time-consuming tasks, the work should be enjoyable, satisfying and worth the money you earn.
  • It takes time and money before you make a profit. As with most websites, it will take a while before you are generating profit, let alone worthwhile profit. Particularly with flagship websites, you’ll be spending money and working on the site for perhaps as long as 12 to 18 months before making any decent money. With experience and hard work, you should be able to minimise the time it takes for a website to establish a firm base of traffic and profit.

Conclusion

Any website takes time and effort before it makes money, but mini sites require much less effort to maintain compared to flagship websites. However, the potential profits are much higher and potentially can grow with flagship websites. With mini sites, its likely that a peak profit will be reached and is unlikely to climb. The old saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is very true when it comes to owning a portfolio of websites!

Please do share your own perspectives on either mini sites or flagship sites!


  • Filed under: Debate, Lessons Learned, Mini Sites