I don’t know if the term was used before in this context, chances are that it already was, and I only imagine that I just coined it yesterday. If so, apologies to the savviest blogger here. If not, well, here’s my 2 cents about what “blending branding” advertising in the blogosphere should be. Or, to be more precise, what already is.

“Blending branding” advertising is basically promoting your image using another, friendly, brand that you use. You make a banner in which you say: “I just love this guy! His blog, his work”. And you sign yourself on that banner: “This is me at http://www.mysite.com”. And then you make your banner public on the site that you just appreciated. Of course, the link will go to your site. Simple, isn’t it?

So simple that we may start to ask what are the advantages here.

1. You melt (blend) your name into the other’s name. And if the other name is (usually) far more popular than you are, that’s huge. Let’s say you constantly read a site of a well-known blogger and all of a sudden you start noticing a little box saying: “I love this guy, and his work. And this is me, at http://www.mysite.com”. Your first reaction is to consider those two guys friends, or at least from the same league. And you do that not by thinking, it’s just acting by reflex, you just unconsciously made an association. Good, very good.

2. You expose a positive message. “I like it, I love it, It’s awesome, Keep up the good work!” – all are very positive messages. And a positive message is far more likely to remain on a reader’s brain than a negative, compulsive message. Even if they won’t click on the banner, they will remember you as a nice guy. Again, this is awesome!

3. As a reader, you don’t even consider this advertising. You just think it’s a shoutbox on the website and people are just expressing their simpathy for the author. Having a shoutbox in your website is pretty common and it’s very likely to be like this. Unless there is an explicit text that says “advertising”, you won’t even consider it like this in the first place. It’s so blending that it becomes the branding.

4. You will selectively place yourself in the league of your choice. By selecting a number of websites that you consider appropriate for your promotions – even if you don’t like them – you become part of that league. You chose what parts of the other’s websites branding you want to blend into yours, and the rest will be done just by exposing the banner. Keep saying good stuff about the others and it will come back to you somehow. In this case, by plain and nice traffic.

Of course there are costs. The normal costs for exposure, and the time costs for research and banner creation. But the advantages are far more bigger than the normal advertising strategies. Or, at least, I think they are .

And now the credits for the “blending branding” technique goes to John Chow, who used that for the first time – consistently and constantly – and made me think at all of these. I saw his banners on Steve Pavlina site, and on the Problogger site. It might be also on Steve Olson, but, if it isn’t, I think I just imagined I saw them there too. Which is just another, well hidden, advantage of this technique, isn’t it?

[tags]success, blogging, advertising, branding[/tags]