Here is something I came up with a few months back when talking to a friend I later posted about it at digitalpoint and recieved a lot of feedback. I like to call it the coke theory…. that is how I explain it to people anyway. Basically coke can make cherry coke, new coke, diet lime coke or whatever they want and it costs them next to nothing to do it.
If you wanted to maye a pop could you? No cause it would cost you ASSLOADS for the staff/manufacturing/processing.
So basically if you have a website that works just recreate it with a small degree of seperation. You have seen many sites do this already. Slashdot/freshmeat/themes.org ect all use the same framework. Why cant you?
Ok lets use the Mobile phone vector for a example. Lets say you have a website for tmobile wallpapers (you know the background on your phone) and it takes off. People come and download thousands of wallpapers for there phones through your website.
Some people look at this and settle. I look at it as a opportunity. Yes, you have made a successful website and people are coming. Now you have 2 choices. You can either sit back and soak up from affiliate websites or take the bull by the horns and make your own.
For instance someone comes to you and says “hey sell me advertising space so I can sell my tmobile data cables on your website”. Now you can take 10% or a monthly fee to sell this guys data cables OR you can start your own site and sell data cables for these phones. You already know that people HAVE to have data cables in order to load the wallpapers for phones so why not profit from that also.
OK so now you have 2 sites that are pulling in traffic. AND 2 NEW AREAS TO MARKET. Now make a site for Mobile ring tones. why? well you already have 1) people who are savoy enough to put there own content on there phones (wallpapers)
and 2) people who have the required data cable to load the ring tones on to there phone (or you can sell them one!)
boom now you have 3 sites and your empire is growing
Now sell phone accessories!
Now duplicate it for Verizon, Nextel, Cingular, Us Cellular and the other 39 cell phone providers world wide (believe me I know how many there are =).
OK so now you have 80 or so websites and have the cellphone media market covered…. Hopefully you have planted seeds with other vectors and now your ready to start doing it for cards, or portable games or WHATEVER
Small degrees of separation =) Thats what has been good to me.
February 3, 2006 at 6:42 am
Shoe, Why not use directories or subdomains on the same domain instead of the investment in so many different sites?
January 4, 2006 at 10:44 am
Good post and I agree. I am doing something similar in the SEO niche with 5 different sites offering different things, promoting each other and it works well.
December 5, 2005 at 11:37 am
I guess then it’s a good idea to make your sites narrow enough to be about one manufacturers products, rather than a catch all for (in this case) mobile phones. Then you can spread across the different manufacturers.
December 5, 2005 at 8:54 am
If I can inject some marketing theory into this (I only know this stuff because my wife’s a university marketing instructor…), what you’re talking about here are the concepts of line extension and brand extension. The Coke example you give is a line extension, where Coke introduces new variants of the same product category. A line extension is very closely related to the original product. A brand extension is using the brand to launch a product in a different category.
Of course, what you’re talking about isn’t really about pushing a “brand” per se, but rather creating different sites to expand from one area out into related areas. Many of the concepts and techniques that marketers used to extend their brands are very similar, though, and may prove useful to someone wanting to expand their online empire into other areas.