Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 15, 2007:
Mini Site Marketing Experiment - Update
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
I thought I’d update everyone on the progress of my mini site experiment. You may recall that back on October 4th I launched a mini site called Open Source Help Desk List. It’s a singe page site that lists the primary open source help desk solutions, while also containing a small pitch for HelpSpot. So far I’m happy to report that it seems to be a success. The site has sent hundreds, perhaps thousands of new users to various open source help desk packages. At the same time over the past 3 months the site has generated just under $7,000 in sales for HelpSpot. Not too shabby for a days work. I expect both numbers to increase as more links to the site show up and it’s search engine indexing improves.
I think this could be a new type of collaboration for commercial and open source project to undertake. More exposure for their work while also providing an opportunity to offer commercial alternatives to people who may be interested without building a spam filled, adsense supported page. I’d also note that the feedback I’ve received from several of the open source projects has been universally positive, which I’m very happy about.
Discussion
Wow that is really impressive! Talk about ROI!!!! I think the idea was absolutely brilliant! It helps people make an informed decision and it also keeps you honest with your commercialy available product. Don't be mad if I steal this technique from you in the future 
Created by Alex on 01.15.2007 3:14 pm
No problem, steal away!
The key really is to find the right combination of keywords and need. You need to be targeting keywords that people actually search on. On the other hand if there was already 20 sites with quality listings of open source help desk software this wouldn't have worked.
That's why I haven't built 20 mini sites. I think (not surprisingly) that they'll only work when you are satisfying a market need.
Created by Ian on 01.15.2007 3:20 pm
This also seems like a great way to do some SEO testing to determine what keywords people are banging on. I think this technique would help people looking for software in the world of education as well. I've been following this for a while, Ian. Thanks for the update.
Created by Paul Lawler on 01.15.2007 5:27 pm