If you promote your business through a website, the chances are that your content is quite commercial. Yes, you may have some reference articles on there, but these will always have the stigma (for want of a better word) that there is a commercial enterprise right behind it.

This takes away some of the value of your good content, in terms of potential incoming links from external sources.

A way to add a layer of separation to this process is by creating an independent, non-sales oriented website, full of quality, non-biased content that has a chance of growing credibility.

If you add in some discreet, non-biased links to your commercial website, you can also benefit from the link “juice”, ie. the fact that a respectable, linked-to website, is linking to your website. eg. Jessica Nails for TS Beauty (arguably a weak website but does get regular traffic that pushes through).

There are other ways of creating the same sort of effect, without the need for a complete website, namely websites such as Squidoo (Jessica Nails) and Hub Pages (Building better web pages).

Effectively the aim is to attract credibility. It is extra work that will probably not lead to a direct kick-back, but these tactics, if applied regularly, will benefit a medium to long term online marketing strategy.