Guerilla Brand Marketing Know How Revealed!

Okay, today I will tell you some secrets that will help you brand market your blog.

First, let me tell you about SiteHoppin, it’s a site I custom-coded from scratch (using MediaWiki as base).

When I first started SiteHoppin, it was simply about “hopping” to different websites.

Well as weeks past on, I started adding whole bunch of stuff like widgets, toolbars, king of hops contest, and putting ALL of this on the homepage. (You can check out the old menu and see how confusing the site was.)

Boy was I wrong and that “confused” the hell out of everyone who came to the site for the first time.

Let me show you what I mean:

(Click to enlarge)

You can also check out our page on WikiIndex, which is pretty much carbon-copy of what the site looked like when it first started out.

If you take a quick look, you will notice that there too many words, too many links, and thus “confuse” your visitors.

What I realized over time and reading lots of marketing books is that a website must be simple and force your reader to do one thing and 1 thing ONLY!

The moment you start “adding” too many cool features, is the moment your site will start to become mediocre like everyone else, including Yahoo and MSN. :p

Now, take a look at the new homepage of SiteHoppin:

As you can see, now people can really do only 1 thing, that is to click on “SiteHoppin Widgets” to find out how to get free traffic.

The greatest part about this type of online brand marketing is that you can always “force” your visitors to do anything you want. (Yes, in fact, you want to shove down your visitors throat 1 message you want to get across. That’s fact of psychology and internet marketing, look at Google if you don’t believe me, they “force” everyone to search in a never-ending cycle.)

For example, if I wanted more people to use the SiteHoppin Toolbar, I’d actually change the main heading to, “Download and Install SiteHoppin Toolbar” and replace Toolbar link below it with Widget.

Notice also that I don’t use plural as I want to keep characters to a minimum.

If you are an affiliate expert, you will probably know exactly what I am talking about.

Minimize what people can do on your homepage and they will do what is most obvious to them.

Here’s stats of my CozyURL, a URL shortening site:

As you can see, most of people who are coming through Google are people who search for CozyURL itself.

Now, THAT is brand marketing when you can get people to remember your site and type it on Google to find it.

I intentionally left the site very empty, not even a blog, really really simple so the only thing people will remember is CozyURL and that it’s a URL shortening site. (That’s the real secret that no one talks about or applies to their blog.)

Here’s the quote of the day I made up on the fly:

“Online Brand Marketing is nothing but over-simplifying your website enough so that even a 9 month-old child can use it.”

Btw, this is all going to be included in my new book that I am writing called, “Search”, it should be available at Amazon Barnes & Noble next year if everything goes to the plan.