Is the MiniSite Dead?

Rick Latona announced AEIOU 2.0 this week and I think the shockwaves from this news are still resonating through the Domaining community. First I’d like to say this is an absolutely brilliant move by a incredible mind and leader in the Domaining world. While to some this may just look like the second edition of his development company – the fundamental change he is making will impact the Domaining world forever – and at a great point in time too!

With AEIOU 2.0 Rick now offers much more than a Minisite – he offers clients the chance to build a web directory, Amazon or eBay commerce site, squeeze page, geo site, or info site. Rather than creating the simple informational minisite Rick allows investors to finally create a site that can monetize from more than just Adsense.

For those who are familiar with my company, Linton Investments, you know that we spend a lot of time developing sites. While some of the sites we build are minisites, many are full-scale websites and we have seen that these sites can monetize very very well.

Over the past few months I’ve started to focus more and more on developing full-scale websites rather than minisites – and the ROI is already evident. This month I have been building Translate.co.in as a major translation website for the Indian market. I launched Tweetn.net last month – a new blog about Twitter. In May I also launched TweetCourse.com – a four part course that teaches beginners how to use Twitter. Not only have I found these projects to be more rewarding than building minisites – they have been more lucrative as well.

As many of you know – blogs can rank well in search engines very quickly. Tweetn is already receiving a nice steady stream of traffic and TweetCourse is selling well in its first month on the market. Yes – these projects take time, but at the end of the day if you believe in your domain then you can do much more with it than a simple minisite.

Rick has very reasonable price-points and offers investors a way to turn their domains into online destinations that can rank well in search engines and grow much faster than a minisite ever could.

So save the date folks because you just might remember June 16th as the day the MiniSite died. In the end this is a huge benefit to web users and domain investors alike and it takes a real pioneer like Rick to make a move like this!

Let me know what you think! Is the minisite dead?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton