Branding Tiered 1 link building

Hi BHW,

Quick question:

I want to know from people who have experience doing tier-link building.

Do you guys advise using the same brand name for your money site as your web 2.0 sites?

For example: If my money site is www.BASKETBALLVIDEOS.com

Should I make Web 2.0 links like: basketballvideos.wordpress.com & basketballvideos.tumblr.com?

Or should I do something like topnbaplayers.wordpress.com & lebronjamesdunks.tumblr.com and then link to money site?

I use the brand name as the sub domain.

For me, if my money site is a brand, then I'll have various social accounts and stuff that use that same brand name, because they are meant to be legitimate extensions of the same brand. But if I'm doing anything for pure linkbuilding purposes, then I'm trying to make it look like the site has nothing to do with me and they just happened to think I'm awesome and wanted to link to me. So in that case, those Tier 1's would not carry my brand name at all. Hope that makes sense.

I'm assuming OP read this by Gotch (scroll to the branded link building section)

http://www.gotchseo.com/does-google-trust-your-website/

You can see a few examples that he made for this tutorial linking to his website like these:

http://gotchseo.wordpress.com
http://gotchseo.tumblr.com
http://gotchseo.weebly.com

Some of these are considered social media websites. Personally I don't go crazy with it. I make about 10 of these on the social web 2's where i can scrape relevant blogs and comment on them to send traffic to my web2 blog on the same platform. I also add at least 3 pages of interesting content to drive traffic to my website from these. Tumblr is great for this.

I don't think there is a fixed rule. Mixing it up would be better in my opinion.