If you want to make money online, creating and marketing with minisites is perhaps the fastest and cheapest way to achieve your goals.
Firstly, a “mini site” serves a very tight niche market, and delivers very specific content, usually in the form of a membership. Unlike content sites, minisites sell access to information within. A mini-site can have at bare minimum two pages; the sales page and the download page. Even larger sites rarely have more than 10 “member” pages.
Although mini sites do benefit from search engine traffic, it is not the most important factor. Since your content is mostly in PDF / audio / video format, Google will never find it gve it proper ranking. Therefore if you want to market mini sites, you need affiliates – and LOTS of them. Knowledge in PPC or Pay Per Click marketing helps as well, especially when your site is new and you don’t already own a list you can market to.
The most important part of any mini sites, besides the content, is the sales page. You need to understand how to write basic sales copy that sells, and also arm yourself with a lot of sales copy elements and other images you can use to make your copy look appealing. Creating a pure-text sales copy is a big mistake, but most people still do it.
The overall design and appearance of your mini-sites also matters. You can either hire someone to create your design or you can buy instant minisite templates and easily put together a stunning site yourself.
Of course you will end up learning a lot about web design in the long run. Although Photoshop is the best option if you can afford it, you can also use GIMP as an alternative.
With accurate GIMP videos you can get all the skills you need as far as creating minisites is concerned, but you probably can’t make use of cool stuff like Photoshop e-cover scripts and templates.