Have you ever completely fucked your sleep schedule by staying up later and later until you’re going to sleep at 1 in the afternoon and waking up at 8:30 pm? I’m there right now and feel like a vampire. On to today’s question . . .

Cristoph Asks:

I really want to know how best to leverage your existing sites to promote new ones.

I have a large number of sites, some in the same niche that i’d really like to leverage to promote my new sites.

How best to do this?
I would interlink but dont fancy losing all the sites if something happened

I’m in the same boat. I may be leaving money on the table, but I do very little cross promotion between site that are not in similar niches (among higher traffic, money sites). If I want to interlink within particular niche I generally ask myself:

“Would it make sense for a non-purchased link to be here?”

One of the main benefits for having more than one site in the same niche is for protection against a huge search engine traffic penalty. Assuming the rest of your footprint is spotless (and most people’s are not!) there really shouldn’t be a problem. But links are easy to build – So is the risk worth the reward?

One example of aggressive cross promotional linking can be found if you look on the bottom of bloglines.com, you’ll see they have this link trading scheme on the bottom of their pages with their partners:

Partner Sites: NASCAR | Match | Citysearch | Dictionary | MerchantCircle | ServiceMagic | Pronto | Gifts | Shoes | Expedia | Hotels | Hotwire

It’s the old school footer links. They do work. For those partners, they don’t need to care because of the brands. Those sites are going to show up in the search engines no matter what they do. For the rest of us, we’re probably better off finding other ways to cross promote. And there, everything is on a case by case basis.

There are plenty of other types of cross promotions that focusing on “non-Link Juice” benefits (mostly it’s exposure or customer acquisition). If cross-sale or cross promotion made sense from financial prospective without the link juice, then go for it. Don’t shy away from an upsell or cross promotions because of the Google Boogie Man.

On the other hand, you may have noticed that although seoblackhat has a lot of trust in Google, I never use it to link to any of my other projects. This is, of course, a somewhat extreme example, but a similar principle applies. If it’s just for links and rankings, why not just buy or trade for them off network?

Do you better Idea on how best to Leverage existing networks for new sites? If so, please share them in the comments.