Using Mirror Pages Effectively

 by: Willie Crawford

Thought I would share with you a very effective technique for adding new customers to your mailing list. These are individuals who would not otherwise discover your products or services - because they did not come to the internet specifically looking for your products or services. This is through using what some call a mirror site or mirror pages.

To construct a mirror site, chose a topic of interest and build some content rich pages around it. You have to provide lots of interesting or valuable information to get and keep visitors coming to this site. You can build this mirror site on the same server as your business site or you can use one of the many free webpages available. You can visit my site mentioned below to locate a suitable provider.

The best topics are those you know a lot about and have a real interest in. For example, I have practiced karate for over 20 years. So I built a site around martial arts tournaments. This site is often in the top 20 in many search engines and indexes. It was number 15 at Alta Vista and number 12 at HotBot when I checked on August First 1998. Another site I built around free webpages was number 1 at InfoSeek on that same day. This site just describes what various firms offer in the way of free webpages and can be found at: http://www.angelfire.com/biz/williec/favoritefreewebpages. It saves time for my visitors by providing a convenient summary. Both of these sites provide what people come to the internet searching for - FREE INFORMATION!

Properly format your web pages - to included meta tags and a good descriptive title. This helps with the search engines. Include links on this site to your main site or links for products you market. Be careful though not to have too many banners. Slowing down your pages too much will lose potential repeat visitors. Also, don't push too many products from this site or even your main site. If your visitors feel a hard sell, they will be turned off, and will click away to continue their search for information on the topic that brought them to your site in the first place. The idea behind the mirror site is not to sell as much as make customer contact.

The links on your site are what draw interested surfers to your other site and products and services. Include a link on every page! Also include an opportunity for the visitor to join your site mailing list or sign up for your ezine if you publish one. Over time, many members of your site mailing list or subscribers to your ezine will become customers.

This is a very effective technique that has worked well for me. Give it a try, and let me know how well it works for you. Email me and I'll even check out your site - IF- it's on a topic that interests me. After all, that's the only reason anyone will visit your mirror site.