Ahhh! So There's A Name For It: Katamari Philosophy

I've always believed in this tactic but never knew the name for it. My view has always been that as an affiliate blogger that you should focus on a small niche such as "trainers for one-legged pygmies" (no offence to people with one leg or pygmies of course!) and then you should gradually roll out of that niche as you gain a level respect and coverage of that is sufficient to sustain it.

So reading Matt Cutt's presentation: “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” from WordCamp San Francisco and in particular slide 33 and then searching on it I found Andrew's description of the Katamari Philosophy:



I know that I missed this presentation, but I can't be aware of EVERY piece of SEO dialogue :-(.

Other things that Matt said was that you shouldn't obssess about links and page range. And I completely agree with that. If I'm in a niche that I'm totally confident about then I spend about 0.5% on overtly thinking of links, 95% thinking of content and 4.5% thinking of (and implementing) the on page SEO.

There's many affiliate blogs that have worked well at gaining a reputation that in term generate inbound links and it doesn't take me how to do it, every second tweet seems to be about it these days, but just try and be original and don't fall in to the trap of having a formulaic approach to building reputation by thinking that if a post has A,B and C that it will DEFINITELY work.

I'm currently implementing the Katamari Philosophy on the small niche (relatively) that I bang on about into a less small niche and its a fascinating process. What's more interesting and satisfying is when you work in only slightly related niches and as you imply the Katamari Philosophy they're consumed by the new site:



An example of this would be my Easter Eggs site linking towards my generic chocolate site - relevant and fair to link.

But then you can also use other, generally non-related sites but which has a slightly related post to help gain support (links and traffic) to both your other niches and the Katamari site. This may be a post about a chocolate football on my old Euro 2008 site linking to both the chocolate site for that product or the Easter eggs site via a link to a general post about football Easter eggs.

Again, as you dominate the micro-niches and then the larger niche then you can use those to spawn new micro-niches and start the process again.

Am I the only one that finds affiliate site evolution interesting? :-(