I've seen quite a few posts about myspace being used as a marketing tool. Now I quite like the sound of this (I can just make it, get a few mates to add it and leave it alone to work its magic). How does it work? Do you make the page about you then just stick links to your site on or do you make the page about your website? Paste information added to your website into new blogs on it then redirect people to your site from the blogs? I think this would be pretty useful for me to start getting traffic to my website (currently on about 30-40 uniques a day, but its only been 2months and I've done no marketing really so I'm happy). Dan
As far as I can see, it's just like other blogs: use their comment feature to stick your website into very popular pages, thus raising your PR.
Why wouldn't it? The Myspace front page has a PR of 8, but when it finally trickles down to the user pages, it's generally much less. I'll have to check real quick. Edit: The user pages have a PR of 7. I'd say it's a great marketing tool.
Just be careful what you do. I've seen a recent rash of myspace accounts being deleted for marketing practices.
User pages aren't all a PR 7 first of all (one of mine's a 3, and the other's a 0). Second of all, no, you can't just set it up and sit back ... unless you're using bots to do everything which is complete and utter nonsense, because it's not marketing at all. You can't reach targeted prospects who actually care about what you're saying that way. I don't have a huge friends list on my webzine's profile page, but I market effectively to that highly targeted group who specifically ask to hear what I have to say, and I pull in a lot of clients that way. You'll make more money offering something useful to people who actually want it than to simply try to push a site on myspace for random links. Jenn
Yep - Jenn's got the right idea. Going "mass market" is pointless, as far as I'm concerned. Go after a niche that's crazy about their hobby or whatever and build a friends list that way. It makes way more sense. -Chris
Chis and Jenn are right. The marketing trend these days is to capture the right audience and that depends upon the demographic of your targetted visitors. You can't sell teen stuff to adults, it just dont work. If you got the niche, even a smaller number of people can outnumber the sales made by a big pond. - Jerome
So I have another thread on Sitepoint about this - using MySpace and the advice I got was to create a profile then search for groups related to my site information. I have done that. Then its says add the group members as friends - but how the heck do you do that!? One by one?! Then what!? Post bulletins to my profile that goes to those on my friend list? Or post in the group forums or bulletins in the groups? All of the above? This doesn't seem much different than signature linking in forum posting. Maybe I am missing something but what is so powerful about MySpace besides sheer audience size? The audience at Google is huge, too....
Try it out, asking these questions will only have people throwing their untested theories at you. From my own experience I will say that you need to be offering something that really helps the users -- they should be adding you to their friends, not the other way around. On the other hand some people do large-scale bulk spamming for cams and adult dating. Does that work? No idea.
I dont think any ways work very effective anymore. SInce the big media push most profiles are private or add only real friends. I do have bots now to search for keywords so that should help target the product being promoted.
MySpace is so jammed with users just for the sake of users now...I haven't found it to be a great marketing tool, although it does have it's merits.