Many companies opt for a mini-site to promote a particular service or product within its business niche.  If your business hopes to generate greater value from the small site over the long term, you will need to obtain a high number of external links.  Small sites lack the advantage of very large sites with hundreds of pages providing internal links within the site pointing toward the most important pages.

You should use all available opportunities to obtain high quality external links, including directory listing, hiring a SEO consulting firm and using social media for its viral features.  However, I want to concentrate your attention toward one of the most important of the external link building alternatives, article syndication. 

There are several ways in which article marketing can improve your SEO.  The first is that the links will be found by the search robots on a variety of websites.  Assuming that those websites are located on unique IP addresses, this is very helpful because of the algorithms that the search engines use to determine their results listings.  Next, with content syndication, unlike some other methods of getting external links, you get to decide the exact anchor (linking) text for each link.  Third, article marketing is relatively inexpensive and easy when compared to some of the other ways of obtaining quality links.  The ease of the process can be largely attributed to the introduction of specific software for article marketing.

I am able to be very productive in my article distribution, but only because I maintain memberships in two different article marketing systems.  My approach is to write ten to fiften fresh articles each week.  I spin each of those to obtain hundreds of unique versions for distributions to article directories (in one system) and to individual websites (in the other system).  I use different articles for each system, to further reduce the chances for any content duplication.

One of the sites of which I am a member provides a free article spinner, available to anyone.  You may also register to use an automated submission service that is linked to the spinner.  It sends a unique version of your article to up to hundreds of different article directories.  When you first register to use the always free spinner, you can get a free trial offer to use the distribution part of the software.  There is a membership fee associated with the distribution system after the trial period ends.

The other system to which I have a membership also provides a linked spinning and distribution.  The important difference with this system is that, rather than distributing unique versions of the article to directories, those article are spun and the distributed directly to websites. 

I maintain memberships in both, because both have their distinct advantages.  However, I can belong to both for a monthly fee that is less than I pay for a decent dinner for two in my home town.  Consequently, a combination of the two is what I would recommend for use in the SEO efforts for your mini-sites, with an added benefit of almost immediately increasing traffic.