What is a Micro Site?
Well in short a micro site is a small website of one or two pages only which is specific to your business or organisation. The micro site might be used to advertise or push a paticular product or service. It might even be slightly different in look and feel to your main site to test marketing in different geographical areas for example.
But wait a second, is that not what landing pages are?
In short, No. Landing pages are pages that are created within your existing website. Normally hidden, they are are created for either a) as reference pages or b) transactional pages usually from Google Adword campaigns - both of which are excellent for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and in the case of transactional pages, a good way to to see how different markets react to different offers and promotions.
The main draw back is that they are restricted to the owners website and although long term will develop SEO is lacking the main power of micro sites.
So what exactly does a micro site bring that landing pages don't?
As with landing pages, you can use them to market test your product or service for different sectors, areas and so on. Even changing the colours and images slightly to see how they affect your visitors retention periods.
Where micro sites start to come in to their own is simply that you can add domain names that are specific to search terms that users maybe using in sites such as Google.
So for example if you are running a store that sells the famouse Widgets and you are based in say Sussex, then a domain name for your first Micro site would be http://www.widgetsellersinsussex.com/ picking up the search phrases Widgets, Sellers and Sussex.
Because the likely hood of the search terms are in your domain name, this increases your chances of getting to the top of Google that much quicker once you site has been indexed.
The trick then is to create more micro sites for different areas using slightly different domain names.
Couple this with the ability to change each site for its relevant geographical area, Micro sites start to become a very powerful tool and do not need to be expensive to produce or even run.
Of course you can always purchase these domain names and point them directly to landing pages on your site, but at least with Micro sites, you have a good platform to continue and add in more pages and even micro stores as certain micro sites do better than others.
Opnes has had varying success with Micro sites, but all in all the early days are showing that micro sites have a place on the internet and are here to stay.
