Paris Hilton - Celeb 2.0 What She Can Teach You About Marketing
I have to start this post by saying that I am not a Paris Hilton fan. I actually think she epitomizes how vacuous celebrity can be, but that is another topic for another blog.
What Paris Hilton has shown is that it is possible to build a very successful brand and make a lot of money without any content or talent; think of it as Celeb 2.0.
How Did Paris Get Her Big Break?
She used a common technique, she created a controversy when copies of her own user generated sex video hot the Internet. This is quite a lot to suggest that this was not the work of some evil ex-boyfriend, but rather a carefully orchestrated plan. Either way, a controversy was created and Paris and her publicist built upon it to create the brand.
A similar technique (without the sex tape aspect) has been employed by many successful blogs today, with quite a few now at the top of their respective niche.
Content
The Paris brand is similar in many ways to several of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies. If you look at the top Web 2.0 sites you will see that the success and popularity of many of them is built upon the content created by others; think Digg.com, Myspace.com, etc. Paris herself has tried her hand at other things, pop career, movie career, etc. without any of them taking off. Sure she has the Simple Life, but that came afterwards, the brand was already built by that stage.
Attention
In the blogosphere, if you don’t have attention, your chances of garnering significant traffic and higher returns for ad revenue is greatly reduced. The clever thing about the Paris brand is that it does not restrict itself to facts to garner attention. A lot of the Paris myth is fabricated, but it creates attention. Paris built her entire brand around creating attention.
Now attention by itself it of little value unless you do something with it.
Affiliate Marketing
So what exactly does Paris do and what does it mean for you as a blogger? What Paris does very well and what she is paid massive amounts of money for is exactly what many of the most successful bloggers do. She heavily promotes products. Think of the Web’s top earning bloggers and affiliate marketers and you will see that they do the same. They use their attention and talk about others. Just like Paris, the good ones do this without people even realising it.
So airhead or not, her ability to build a brand and market herself, thus creating attention and a revenue stream is quite exceptional and something that is worth taking note of.
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[…] I have to say, I totally agree with both Carlo and Dean on this post. While quality content is important, without marketing and presence, you will struggle to succeed. If you really want to see an example of how effective marketing is, see my post on Paris Hilton and what she can teach you about marketing. […]