Nowadays, everyone is looking to develop an online presence, from the dry cleaner down the street to someone applying for a new job. Not everyone needs a full website, though, which is why learning how to sell microsites can be a great way to build a new revenue stream.
? A microsite is exactly what it sounds like – it’s a simple site that just offers the basic functionality that an individual or a business needs for their online presence.
The “traditional” way of creating a site like this would be to set up a fresh WordPress install for each client and build a site from scratch. However, that’s overkill for these types of sites.
If you set up a separate WordPress install for every single site you sell to clients, that’s going to up your hosting costs and add complexity, which means you have to charge more (which might scare away the types of clients who need a microsite).
?? In this post, we’re going to show you a better solution for how to sell microsites.
Instead of creating separate WordPress installs for each site, you can use a single WordPress install to power all of your clients’ microsites, all without the complexity of using WordPress multisite. But at the same time, you’ll still be able to give each client their own unique domain name.
This helps you keep your costs low, which means you can reach a whole new pool of potential clients while still earning enough money to keep the lights on.
Let’s get into it…
A quick overview on why and how to sell microsites on WordPress
As I mentioned in the beginning, many people need a website, but they don’t need the full flexibility of their own WordPress install.
Here are a few examples to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
⌛ These types of clients usually have very simple needs, but also very small budgets.
If you were to build them a complete site from scratch, the money wouldn’t make sense for you, and the product that you would deliver would be way overkill for their needs.
By using a single WordPress install and selling simple microsites, you can eliminate those issues:
- You can keep your costs lower because you eliminate hosting costs and complexity.
- Your clients get a product that’s tailored to their needs.
Because everything is so simple, the finances could still make sense even if you price these microsites low – maybe around something like, say, a $200 setup fee + $10 per month ongoing.
In order to sell these microsites, you only really need a few things:
- A WordPress site where you can create one or more pages to act as the client’s microsite. You could design them with your favorite page builder to save time, even using templates to avoid designing from scratch.
- A way to map those standalone pages to a custom domain name. That way, each client can have their own domain name (e.g.,
clientsite.com) instead of being forced to use a URL
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This article was written by Colin and originally published on ThemeIsle Blog.