Do You Have An Anchor Site?
We’ve all heard the stories about creating blog networks and auto-posting content on either your own group of sites or with services like Posterous that will put your content on several sites at once. Some of these work well but most are just a pain in the ass and will only last a few months at best until the service decides it doesn’t want that traffic a la Posterous. But can you do site linking on a much more targeted yet smaller scale and still see benefits.
I believe you can and I just proved it to myself.
Two Quality And Related Sites
I want to start by saying this is not some bullshit method of trying to bolster a low quality site with a high quality one. This is about linking your related sites together into a merger of sorts and having them both benefit from it.
I had two sites in a related niche. I’ll use the example here of a writing blog and a guest posting blog. The guest posting blog had quality content and was easy to read and find useful information in. It only suffered from lack of promotion and it was a new site. After months and months of not finding time to promote it, I decided to announce on my writing blog that it was expanding and did a release about the new partner site. I talkied about how it would help the writers following the big blog by giving them another piece of the puzzle and made sure to link directly to the site.
BTW, Google loves links from related sites, don’t they? LOL!
What Happened?
What came next surpassed my expecatations. The newer blog’s readership is now on par to more than double it’s last month’s traffic. How do you like them apples?
So, see. Everything that can help your blogs succeed does not have to be massive to work. If you’ve got two or more related quality sites. Tie them together with an announcement in the big blog. You can even use the merger angle because it lends creedence to your successful business empire model.
Caveat
Let me give three warnings. First of all, the sites MUST be quality sites or you could hurt your popular blog by association. This is not some lame sleight of hand trick to get people to read a crappy blog. Sometimes, one of your sites just needs readers to prosper and a popular site can help with that.
Secondly, just linking them is not enough. Build on that success by publishing more on the smaller site to help increase the affect of the linking. Don’t think you can just link them and never worry about it again.
Finally, if linking doesn’t help the struggling site maybe you should consider selling it off or proposing a linking with another site in your niche. You may be able to find plenty of writing blogs that would welcome a ready made, QUALITY guest posting blog. Especially if all they had to do was either buy it from you or pay you to maintain it.
Let me know your thoughts or if you’ve done this successfully by leaving me a comment below.
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