If you don’t have a MySpace presence, you are losing money!
You are about to discover 10 specific ways to promote your business and build targeted prospect lists
or interested, qualified prospects!

“But isn’t MySpace just a site for kids?”

While MySpace is a favorite of every high school kid in America, that myth is costing you sales everyday. Go to the browse option at the top of the MySpace site, type in your zip code, then type in an older age range, such as 35-55.
It’s an eye opener! You will find most of those kids on MySpace have turned their parents on to MySpace as well. But that is just the tip of the iceberg…read on!

MySpace is one of the most powerful networking tools…
IF you understand how to utilize it properly.

There are not too many places you can go to reach geo-targeted, age-targeted, gender-targeted, product-targeted customers….FOR FREE!

But... Besides being a potential treasure trove of contacts, it is a very fickle and private community with many, many voices vying for attention. It takes a carefully structured plan and creative approach to use MySpace to it’s fullest potential.

I am going to teach you how to get started in MySpace, how to set up your profile to get maximum exposure, how to get “friends” to your page, and then show you 10 ways to use MySpace to drive traffic to your website and sell more of your product or service.

Getting Started on MySpace

Starting your MySpace profile is free and simple. Go to www.myspace.com and sign up. You can be up and running in a matter of minutes. During the sign up process, MySpace will give you an opportunity to create a unique URL for your MySpace page. This is your first chance to personalize your site and help others find your profile.

Subtlety is the name of the marketing game with MySpace!

A couple of weeks ago, I started a MySpace presence to help market an online dating company.

Instead of posting my logo and telling people about the company, I created an online persona to interact with the MySpace community in a way that would both softly attract attention to the business and at the same time not come across as an advertisement.

There are hundreds of sites on the Internet devoted to helping you customize your profile. You can google “myspace profiles” and within minutes turn your page into a vibrant and fun site. This is commonly known in the MySpace community as “pimping” your page and is essential to attracting attention and fitting in.

One site I found helpful is www.mygen.co.uk/. They have lots of MySpace profiles available, just highlight the HTML and paste it in the “about me” section of your MySpace profile.

Too many sites choose profiles that are busy and difficult to read or navigate. You want your profile to be clean, easy to load, easy to read, and easy to negotiate. If not, people will click off your profile quickly.

Before sending visitors to your new profile, spend the time to set it up in a way that people will want to stay on your page. Just putting up a link to your website and telling them about your product will not get the attention you want.

Start perusing the community, looking at others sites and you will see what I mean. If you want to stand out in the crowd, you have to give the community a reason to peruse your page.

Let’s revisit the dating page I set up on MySpace…

The profile is full of interesting headlines, content, pictures, links and interactive games. All these things are relevant to the topic and in one way or another help sell the service I’m promoting.

So, before we start attracting visitors, let’s “pimp” your page, so when the traffic arrives, they do what you want them to do… stay and buy!

First, let’s add a photo to your profile. Not using a photo here tells the community you don’t have much to offer. You can use your own photo, an attractive woman, a photo of your car, your product, etc.

Use something enticing that catches the eye and is visually relevant or interesting. When browsing profiles, this is the first thing people see and may dictate whether or not they check out your profile.

MySpace will host your photos free by uploading them when you set up your profile. You can also add more photos to your site by using a free hosting service, such as imageshack.us to host your images.

Next, you want to write some copy about who you are and what you do. This is your chance to introduce yourself and tell people about your benefits and company. Avoid sounding like a sales letter, subtlety is the name of the game. MySpace has it’s own search engine, so take the time to add lots of text and keywords relevant to your product or service.

Now that we have some content, let’s add a link to your website. A great place to do that is under the “General” heading box. Don’t worry about the heading box titles, like Heroes and Television. It is generally acceptable to place whatever content you want in these areas.

My suggestion here would be to place a headline or logo with a link to your website, then give a brief explanation of your company with an invitation to check it out. Don’t worry about getting too involved here, as I will go more into detail about adding links later in this article.

With the basic layout of your page setup, let’s add some toys!

A great site for widgets (graphics, Flash, etc.) is TagWorld, which has some great visual stimulators for your MySpace profile. Best of all, they are free.

This will add an element of interaction on your page and make it more interesting to users. My suggestion would be to periodically change the widgets on your page, as users will get bored with the same content over time. Give them a reason to keep coming back!

Another great tool for building and keeping traffic is videos! MySpace has a place for you to display videos, or you can simply paste them into your profile. A great place for funny videos is videovat.com or you can create your own.

Music is very popular on MySpace and you will find lots of profiles have the users’ favorite tunes blaring at you the moment you click on their profile. I would suggest leaving the music player for the kids.

If users don’t like your music, you give them a reason to leave your page. You can list your favorite bands under the “Music” section on your profile, giving users more insight into your personality and tastes if you like. Remember, this is a socializing site, so don’t neglect to tell the world about yourself.

I found a fun way to monetize your page, add widgets and tell the world about your musical tastes. Go to favoritethingz.com and you can add a widget that will list your favorite bands and make you an affiliate if someone clicks the artist and buys their materials.

You can also add stuff other than music. It makes for eye candy on your page and can add to your monetization. Now your MySpace profile is officially, what the kids call, “pimped”.

Now that you have a “pimped out” MySpace
page, how do you start marketing?

There are 10 ways to get the word out and market your products and service for free on MySpace. They are as follows:

1. Friends
2. Groups
3. Blogs
4. Forums
5. Bulletins
6. Classifieds
7. Links in your profile
8. Ads in your pictures
9. Ads in your videos
10. Audio files on your page

1. Adding Friends to your MySpace profile is the
single most important way to get the word out!

There is no greater advertising medium than having a friend tell a friend about your product. MySpace offers you an opportunity to have lots and lots of “friends” telling their friends about you.

“Friends” on MySpace are simply fellow users who are there to network just like you and have accepted you into their network. Some are there for business, some to meet members of the opposite sex, and some to stay in touch with friends and family.

MySpace makes it very simple to find friends and add them to your network, effectively building a huge network of targeted prospects! You simply view someone’s profile and click a button on their profile that says, “Add to friends.”

This action sends a request to the user notifying them you would like to be in their friends network. They then have the option of adding you or not. So by adding friends you begin to build a list a generate unique page views, for free.

“How do I add lots of friends?”

That is goal of every marketer! MySpace’s popularity has spawned an entire software industry devoted to the quest for friends. You can search for friends and add them manually, everyday, or you can purchase a “friend-bot” program.

These programs do all the work for you. What is important to know, however, is that MySpace is aware of these programs and not particularly fond of them. You will need to limit the number of friends you add per day. Currently, you want to request no more than 250 friends per day. Just set the Friend-bot to stay within those minimums.

Of all the “Friend-bots” on the market, we personally recommend FriendTools. It was the easiest and most cost effective of all the friend-bots we tried, and using it did not get my profile flagged, which I cannot say for some of the other friend-bots I tried.

Just set the FriendTools to the keywords and activities want, press start, and go to bed. You will be generating friends, posting comments, sending emails, automatically while you sleep!

In just a matter of weeks, with the help of FriendTools, I was able to add hundreds of other users to my friends list who were all members of romance and dating groups. With thousands of groups on MySpace, you can find users who would be interested in your product or service. Once you add friends to your profile, you can begin to market yourself.

2. Using Groups To Network And Attract
Highly Targeted Traffic and Buyers!

With all of MySpace's groups, forums, and other community-building tools, it is simple to target and reach niche users. For example, say your company makes a unique motorcycle part.

A search for "motorcycles" in MySpace's groups results with 78 pages of groups with some interest in bikes, with names such as "Motorcycle Savvy and “All Motorcycles" to name a few.

Most of these groups have hundreds of members apiece who participate in the group forums and bulletins - if you manage to hit some of these forums with a subtle plug for your product, you will be appealing to highly-specific, highly-targeted traffic that is more likely to buy your motorcycle parts.

You can also search for your targeted demographic in MySpace groups, be they teens, males, females, sports enthusiasts, etc...

You are used to paying more for targeted traffic and the reasons are obvious: people interested in your benefits are more likely to buy your product.

MySpace offers you a chance to reach potential customers who have conveniently segregated themselves into interest groups, giving you the opportunity to market yourself to people who are specifically interested in what you are selling.

“But I don’t see a group that is relevant to what I am offering.”

With the diversity of MySpace, there is almost always a group out there that has revevant members. However, the beauty of MySpace is that this is a community, and it is run by the community, which is you!

If you don’t see a group, start a group! This gives you one more opportunity to get out and spread the word! Aren’t we always looking for reasons to ask people to view our website?
Inviting random users to check out your new group guarantees that a large number of users will view your profile to check out your group. This is just one more way to attract attention to yourself in an acceptable way.

3. Utilize The Benefits Of Blogging In The MySpace Community!

There is enough written about blogging to fill, well, a blog! Blogging is all the rage and I don’t think I could teach you anything new about the how to blog and why you should blog.

However, don’t discount the power of blogging on MySpace! More content on your page of course will increase your profile searchability on Google and on MySpace, and more importantly, you can rant and rave about your product and how great it is all you want!

Remember, this is a social site, and people like to read about their “friends” opinions. Write interesting things. Post articles you find on the net that are pertinent. Post customer testimonials. Post advertising videos.

Your blog has it’s own separate unique URL that can be found on the front page of your profile. I use this address to post bulletins to my friends, inviting them to click the link and read my latest blog. You will find if your blog is interesting, friends will subscribe to it, giving you a captive audience.

Unlike services like Xanga and Blogger that let you monetize your blog with services like Google’s AdSense, MySpace does not allow JavaScript, so you cannot place Google ads on your MySpace blog.

You can however add links and invite readers to check out your website or visit another monetized blog. Click back over to the MySpace Date Doctor and notice that I added a button to my Blogger page and invite people to check it out.

Unlike spam, inviting other users to check out your blog, your band, or your group, is not construed spam. I encourage you to find something to write about at least weekly and take advantage of the opportunity to attract attention from the MySpace Community!

4. Attract Traffic By Participating In Forums!

Before MySpace, there was the chat room. Click on the Forum button on the header and you will find tens of thousands of conversations about everything under the sun.

Like groups, you’ll want to find threads of conversations and topics of relevance and put in your two cents. Here is another chance to find pools of users interested in what you have to sell. And then use your Friend-Bot to add their friends too.

When you post in forums, it places your comments for all to see, along with your picture and link to your profile! Yet another chance to market yourself.