Sugarrae - Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to me on Twitter, which is updated on a more frequent - and more meaningless - basis.

We all know it isn’t a good idea to have a “network” of sites connected. Typically though, by a network, you tend to think of a group of sites targeting the same topic or a group of sites interlinking to one another in an attempt to boost the placings in the serps. But what happens when you have a legitimate grouping of sites, that aren’t targeting the same niche topic areas (and if they are, they’re doing so with very specific segmenting, branding and reasonings) but are all owned by the same parent “website publishing company”?

I’m from the old school days of affiliate marketing and as a result, some might call me a bit paranoid. ;-) I also own a website publishing company that has built of an impressive grouping of Internet properties that are thoroughly legitimate websites (my “new breed” which has been in motion for quite some time now). And all of the above companies have chosen to be transparent with their publishing empire.

By legitimate, I mean that we do our best to make them excel in their categories by producing killer content and filling voids left open by other sites in the industry and market the hell out of them via every legitimate means of developing traffic that we can think of and execute.

As an example, one site has been featured by major sites in its industry, is an author of a column for a top offline industry publication and is definitely the best site on the topic to exist at the moment. And we expand and improve on it every day via dedicated staff assigned to it. It is the epitomy of the types of sites I have said before are needed to survive the affiliate evolution.

As the company makes the move from utilizing a heavy portion of remote employees to “in house operations” and having an actual office as its homebase, the question arises as to how transparent we want this company to be. Advertisers want to know a bit more about the parent company as deals get bigger and employees also want some inkling of the company they are applying for.

Publishers like Ziff Davis, McGraw-Hill and Weblogs, Inc. are probably some of the bigger names in “website publishing companies”, though Weblogs, Inc. is the only one with solely online properties. But, you get where I’m going here. And all of the above have chosen to be transparent with their publishing empire.

As a paranoid affiliate, my immediate trained reaction is to build out the company site, sans the names of the sites we actually publish. But, the logical part of me knows that we’re building a great set of websites that have no reason to “hide”.

But another aspect to look at when deciding transparency is my “higher profile” within the industry. Having my name attached to the company makes it easier to score lucrative affiliate deals before we even begin to build a website. Having my name attached to the company makes it easier to reach out to connections built over the years when we have a big launch or marketing push. As you can tell, we’ve decided to be public about my relationship to the company, if for no other reason than that we have little choice since I’m running it. ;-)

But, my “higher profile” could also serve to be a liability if we are transparent about the sites we own due to people hitting our sites with competitive intelligence, scrutiny from search engine representatives due to my “competitive past” or people trolling to identify niches that we may possibly enjoy little competition within. Of course, we could always choose to display a few “flagship” sites to avoid having all of our sites “exposed”.

The issue of transparency is a tough one for us. I’m interested to hear thoughts on the topic.