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All small businesses are aiming for that one-core brand success. If your small business is lucky enough, you've reached your goals, your profitable and the small business brand is running itself.

When your at this point, extending your small brand can make a lot of sense. Their are two methods of extending your small business brand:

1. The first concept is called the branded house. It is efficient and smart if you want to start related small businesses. For example, if you have an on...

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All small businesses are aiming for that one-core brand success. If your small business is lucky enough, you've reached your goals, your profitable and the small business brand is running itself.

When your at this point, extending your small brand can make a lot of sense. Their are two methods of extending your small business brand:

1. The first concept is called the branded house. It is efficient and smart if you want to start related small businesses. For example, if you have an online store for design books. You then start a design portal for freelancers with advertising, geared towards design, some pumping back to your online design store. Both send traffic to each other, both have similar names and design cues that help each brand out.

If your original small business (retailer, website, blog, etc.) has a lot of positive associations, you can create new small businesses quickly (websites, blogs, stores, etc.) that can reinforce and extend the meaning of your original brand — in essence, making your initial small business brand more valuable and more cashflow!

1. Secondly, you could attack it completely differently by building a house of brands. This allows for complete separation between small business brands, but directs the cashflow all to one bank account.

This allows each brand to fight it's own battle with competitors, and protect the rest of your small business brands. However, their is no support amongst brands, you have to individually build, fund, and manage each one separately.

The temptation to grow after one success is natural —companies need more profits, but be prepared to pick one brand portfolio system and stick to it. If your not clear, muddy in your decisions — all your brands will be hurt, bringing down the whole house.

For example, think of Microsoft, some of their decisions are muddied. They create some great corporate, office products, but as soon as their decisions get away from their core positioning statement (efficient business solutions), they start to hurt all their brands (they did a horrible job with Vista, so why should we trust Xbox?)

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