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How many websites do you need to effectively market your business? It depends what type of business you have, but in many cases – the answer is two or more. I currently have 13 business sites. Please realize I’m talking about marketing and promoting – not just having a bunch of sites for bragging rights.
I was recently traveling through Florida and was amazed by how many towns had at least one McDonalds and Wal-Mart located within them.
Both companies do business in every major town and city in North America (not to mention the incredible number of locations they have throughout the rest of the world).
The multiple town and city concept/strategy also exists on online. Although the Internet is one, enormous location, search engines have actually divided and subdivided it into many “locations” or “towns” thanks to the way they index keywords and phrases. Today, if you want to have a presence in multiple “towns,” you’ll often need multiple websites to do so. Think of a key word or key phrase as a town or city that exists in a virtual online world. Type in a word or phrase and your screen will immediately be filled with “houses” located in that area.
If you want to be found in multiple towns or locations, the way to do so is through multiple sites.
Does that make sense? Let me use my own business as an example.
I started Gulf Coast Internet Publishing back in 1998. Under a single roof we offered multiple services including –
- Website Building
- eMail Marketing
- Florida Publicity Services
- National Publicity Services and –
- eBook Publishing
Getting listed highly in Google (or any other search engine) for multiple services under a single roof is impossible. This leaves you with two options.
- Market a “frontend” product or service that brings people “to the table.” Then, once you convert them into customers/clients, you can market additional products or services to them.
- Have a main website and then create multiple websites that specialize in promoting individual products and services. These sites specialize in a particular keyword or phrase that matches your product or service.
Does that make sense?
Number two is the only method that works consistently across the board when it comes to “getting found” on Google. Look at keywords and key phrases in the online world the way you’d look at towns and cities in the offline world.
Some people don’t know the name of your business… so guess what? They won’t type it into the box when doing a search. Instead, they’ll type a product or service. If they type one that you’re not easily found under, someone else will get their business.
This brings up the issue of strategy. Like any other type of campaign, it’s not the tools you’re using as much as it is the strategy behind their use.
THE SOLUTION
Use multiple domains to promote different aspects of your products and services. Originally, I marketed everything from GCPublishing.com. From there, I broke down each of my services and spread them out over the following domains –
- Website Building – mainstreetwebhosting.com
- eMail Marketing – worldresponders.com
- Florida Publicity Services – MyFloridaPublicity.com
- National Publicity Services – MyNationalPublicity.com
- eBook Publishing – OnlineMentorMagazine.com
Using this method changed everything. Currently, several of my sites rank on the first page of Google with up to 90-million competing sites for my keywords. I’ve been using this method successfully for almost 15-years.
THE CONS OF THIS METHOD
Like any other method, there are pros and cons to marketing with multiple websites. The pros we’ve already covered. What about the cons? The cons are –
You have to market multiple sites. That means buying ads, promoting multiple sites, getting all of your domain names into print, etc.
The days of – “If you build it, they will come,” are long gone in the online world. Thousands of your competitors are positioning for the same piece of the market you are.
Fortunately, not many of them are aware of how effective the multiple website strategy can be for many niches, if done correctly.
