Launching a Niche Microsite

Next step is done!

I shared in my last post and video that I have chosen a specialized direction for my web agency—offering SEO services and SEO-optimized websites for wedding professionals.

This week, I took the next step in getting it out into the world: launching a tiny, tiny website about my new specialized service.

It was a pretty quick process, about three hours of writing and three hours of building the site and choosing images.  The result is a simple four-page website with Home, About, Service, and Contact pages.

It took a lot of discipline to keep it this simple, but my goal in this process was to keep it very basic, a minimum viable product to start gauging interest and start sharing this specialized service.

Even though I had my eye on the prize, I still had to talk myself down from overthinking it.  I make websites for a living.  I have a vision for what I’d love the site to look like and the content I want to include in the future.  But I had to remind myself—Only the necessities.

For example, I had created a whole blog section for the home page and had on my original content plan that I wanted to launch with at least one blog post.  Pretty soon, though, I realized a blog post wasn’t in the “necessary” category and that I could add that section back in later.

A  Few Things I Threw Out the Window to Move Toward Launch Faster

I could feel a few things slowing me down in getting this out.  I didn’t want to sit around perfectionist-obsessing over these details when I had a site ready to launch.  So here’s what I decided not to worry about too much right now:

A Brand Name

I don’t have a brand name for this branch of my business.  I tried to think of anything interesting and catchy that would appeal to wedding professionals, and I still feel stuck.

So I let it go and gave up.  I launched it with the name “Sara Does SEO.”  It’s super basic but also clear.

In the future, I’d love to come up with a brand name that is separate from my own name.  But for now, this will work well enough for testing this direction.

A Domain Name

This was frustrating, but it seemed like every single .com domain with the words “SEO” and “wedding” has been registered.  Just another reason I went with Sara Does SEO and saradoesseo.com.

Eventually, I intend to change the domain to match whatever brand name I come up with.

Custom Design

I love going through the design process and collaborating with my co-worker Kristin on custom design.  As fun as that would have been, though, it is overkill for the first stage of testing an idea.

Instead of going custom, I used a great new stock theme from StudioPress called Authority Pro.  It was built for content creators, so it was a great fit out of the box.  All I did was customize colors and the body font.

Why I Chose To Create A Whole New Site

I want to share why I chose to create an entirely separate site on a separate domain from my current agency website.

I had received some advice early on that when I decided on a direction that I should just create a custom landing page on my current website.  It already has a domain history and some authority built up, and it’s already there.  However, I decided against it for two reasons.

1. 100% Focused on the Niche

I personally like the idea of having a whole site that is 100% geared toward the niche.  When I send a wedding professional to this website, all they see is information crafted just for them, without any of our past work mixed in.

I think this is going to make us look so focused and specialized, which I think has a lot of value.

2. Risk Aversion

What I definitely didn’t want to do was take over my current agency site with my specialized service information and confuse clients.

I want to leave the 11Web website as a generalist agency for now, so we continue to receive the general leads I’m used to while I work to get more work in our specialty.

This plan feels less risky to me, to have a separate site I can simply take down if this doesn’t work out, with my main website unchanged.

Next Steps

I’ll continue to build this site out.  There is a lot of helpful content I’d like to add, and I have a strategy in mind for how I’ll drive traffic to the new content.

But, for now, I have something simple up to get me started and share with referral sources to get the ball rolling.