One of the assumptions people make when they hear I run six businesses under Linkedd LLC is that cross-promotion must be some kind of built-in growth hack — surely customers of one business naturally flow into the others, right? I wish. The honest reality is that cross-promotion between your own businesses compounds slowly, unevenly, and mostly not at all through the obvious moves people assume work. Here's what I've actually found, based on what I've actually seen rather than intuition.
The honest reality: it compounds slowly, not instantly
When I started my second business, I genuinely expected some meaningful chunk of my first business's audience to show up for the second one just because I mentioned it. It didn't happen, not in any measurable way. A handful of people, sure — the most engaged fraction of an audience, single digits as a percentage. Not the flood I'd pictured. That was a useful, if humbling, early lesson: owning multiple businesses does not automatically mean you own a shared audience across them. You own separate audiences that happen to have one overlapping point of trust — you, the person — and that overlap is much thinner than it feels like it should be.
Where cross-promotion does compound is over a much longer timescale, and through a different mechanism than direct promotion. It's not "business A pushes traffic to business B this week." It's "over years, a slice of people who follow what I do generally become aware I run several things, and some fraction of them eventually check out more than one, on their own timeline, not because I pushed them to." That's real, but it's slow, and it's nothing like the instant lift people imagine.
What actually works, even a little
A few specific things have produced real, if modest, results:
- Shared story and behind-the-scenes content. Content about the fact that I run six businesses solo — the operational reality of it, the mistakes, the systems — genuinely interests people beyond the audience of any single business. This blog is a direct example: someone reading about how I run multiple businesses is a different, and often more relevant, audience than someone who's only ever interacted with one specific product. The "running six businesses" story itself is a legitimate cross-promotion asset, separate from any individual business's marketing.
- Mentioning other businesses naturally, when it's actually relevant. If I'm answering a question and a different business I run genuinely fits the context, mentioning it in passing does something. Force-fitting a mention where it doesn't belong does the opposite — it reads as an ad and costs you credibility in the business you were actually talking about, for a mention that wasn't going to convert anyway.
- Being upfront that these are all "mine," rather than hiding it. Some founders keep their different ventures separate and unbranded from each other, presumably to avoid diluting focus. I've found the opposite works better for me at this point: being open about running all six under one roof, with this site as the hub, gives people who like how I operate a natural path to discover the others if they're curious — without me having to actively push anything.
Notice what these have in common: none of them are "advertise business B to business A's customers." They're all indirect — building trust in the operator, not the specific product, and letting curiosity do the work on its own schedule.
What doesn't work: assuming shared interest exists
The single biggest mistake I made early on was assuming that because someone trusted one of my businesses, they'd automatically be interested in a different one, even when the two had nothing to do with each other. A customer buying a specific product doesn't inherit interest in an unrelated service just because the same person built both. Trust in me as an operator doesn't automatically transfer to interest in a completely different problem I'm solving somewhere else — and treating it as if it does just annoys people who came for one specific thing and now feel like they're being upsold into something irrelevant.
I've also found that audiences overlap much less than you'd think, even between businesses that feel adjacent to me because I run them both. The person interested in one of my products and the person interested in an entirely different one are, more often than not, genuinely different people with different needs, who happen to share exactly one thing in common: they've both heard of Linkedd LLC. That's a thin thread to try to build meaningful cross-promotion on, and treating it as thicker than it is wastes effort that could go toward growing each business on its own merits.
Realistic expectations if you're hoping this is a shortcut
If you're running or considering running multiple businesses and hoping cross-promotion between them will be a real growth lever, I want to set expectations honestly: it's not a shortcut, and treating it as one will disappoint you. Each business still needs to earn its own growth mostly on its own merits — its own marketing, its own product quality, its own customer trust built from scratch. Cross-promotion between your own businesses is, at best, a small multiplier on top of that — not a replacement for it, and definitely not a way to skip the hard work of growing each one individually.
What it is genuinely useful for is the slow-compounding brand effect: being known as someone who reliably builds and runs good things, which over a long enough timeline does make each new thing you launch start from slightly less than zero. That's worth something. It's just not the instant flywheel people picture when they imagine "six businesses under one roof."
If you want the fuller operational picture of how these six businesses actually relate to each other day to day, the guide gets into more of that, and I post ongoing updates on what's actually working and what isn't at the membership. You can see all six businesses for yourself at Linkedd LLC.
Frequently asked questions
Does cross-promoting between your own businesses actually work?
It's a small multiplier at best, not a growth shortcut. What works is indirect trust-building — content about the operator, not direct 'buy my other product' pitches — because that builds curiosity on its own schedule rather than forcing an upsell.
What's the biggest mistake when cross-promoting between your own businesses?
Assuming trust in one business automatically transfers to interest in a completely unrelated one. A customer who trusts business A doesn't inherit interest in business B just because the same person built both — audiences overlap far less than founders expect.
What's the realistic benefit of running multiple businesses under one brand?
A slow-compounding brand effect — being known as someone who reliably builds and runs good things, which over a long timeline gives each new business a slightly better starting point. It's not an instant flywheel; each business still has to earn its own growth mostly on its own merits.