When you hear the name Paris Hilton, a number of things probably come to mind.  “That’s hot!”  Little dogs.  Nicole Ritchie.  The “One Night In Paris” sex tape.  Britney Spears acting like a whore with an 15 extra lbs.  Brian Urlacher.  Paris Latsis.  The Simple Life.  Nicky Hilton.  You see where I’m going with this?

Paris Hilton is famous for being famous…and so is everything around her.  This is the kind of mindshare you want your internet projects to generate.  This is how you want to leverage the mindshare and authority of your current projects to spin-offs, future projects, or other assets.

The Paris Hilton Rule, Category-Killin’ site concept is part of what I was trying to get at the other day with the Link Ninjas vs. Link Baiters discussion.  Creating viral content once is great, but tough.  Creating viral content twice is tougher (The Sophomore Slump), but spreads faster once it goes viral.  Create viral content three times and I bet you are starting to generate enough mindshare and brand recognition that subsequent viral campaigns are met with very little resistance.  You are creating your own Paris Hilton.  That’s really hard to do sniping at links like a year 2003 SEO All Star.

Let’s fast forward six months.  Your site…let’s call it the Paris Hilton of Mortgages…has eleventy billion links, reputation is fully vested, and you are on your way to authority status.  What’s your next move?  No, it’s not to add content for the sake of adding content, redesigning the site, or any other such micromanaging waste of bandwidth.  We are not running a public service. 

If you are Paris Hilton, you launch your next project…like a singing career.  Or you launch your sister’s handbag line.  Or you give your Mom a TV show.  And you probably leak some porn to juice the buzz.  Building an audience for that new project…let’s call it The Paris Hilton Refinancing site…was probably 1000% easier than the first one, right?  It’s the Paris Hilton rule and it’s hot.

The Paris Hilton Rule is so strong that I bet if I told you that Paris Hilton was entering your market tomorrow, you’d have to react to that…no matter what market you are in.  If I told you that Paris had a thousand MBA’s and PhD’s behind her…well, then you’d have a Google.  Or a Microsoft.  Or a G.E.  But that’s the next rule and very few us Competitive Internet Guys want to get off the couch or off the beach and put up that kind of effort. 

Social Media Marketing gives us amazing opportunities to efficiently create mindshare and to leverage that mindshare into quicker adoption rates of subsequent projects.  I know this sounds funny coming from an SEO, but The Paris Hilton Rule…”famous for being famous”…is one more big step to never needing the search engines again.  It’s the ultimate defensibility.

Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe to the RSS Feed and follow me on Twitter!