I once again hesitate to mention a big-name PPC Engine because this is supposed to be a free resource report. However I’ll make an exception because I think you’ll want
to pay the $5 they need for you to open up a new account with when I spill the beans on AdCenter…
First of all, MSN launched AdCenter in 2006 and they’ve still got a long way to go in order to catch up with AdWords… Or even Yahoo’s Search Marketing program. MSN’s per-click prices are pretty low right now because of this, and it’s common to get #1 or #2 for a keyword at or under $0.30 per click.
Even in a tough IM2IM niche like ‘Home Business,’ I’m still able to pull a few daily visitors with just the minimum bid of 10 cents. Of course that price may change at any time.
Secondly, and even more temptingly, (is that a word? It did not set my spell checker off – oh well...) AdCenter has had coupons out since the beginning, and these coupons have been getting BIGGER in size! They have recently been handing out $200 coupons to new sign-ups which would be a shame for you to miss out on.
I went so far as to attempt to secure some for everyone here, but they just won’t hand out very many at a time. The next best thing I can do is tell you how to find your own: Just Google “MSN AdCenter Coupons” and you’ll be sure to find plenty of leads! (Hint: the $50 & $100 ones are all likely to be used up… Search for the bigger ones!)
Marketing on the web’s #1 Social networking site is a lot like how you remember High School; the rules are different, it’s all about competing in a Popularity contest!
In fact, you may notice that it seems the majority of MySpace members are pretty young… So why does everyone obsess about using MySpace to market with these days? Simply because they’ve already got the traffic there.
MySpace.com is at this moment the world’s 6th most popular website according to Alexa.com. YouTube.com and it had been closely competing for the #5 spot for half a year until Microsoft’s ‘Live’ search got between them. (YouTube, which I review later in this eBook, is even better for marketing purposes than MySpace.) Still, getting a website all about you on the #6 website worldwide is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up.
Getting your own profile there is free, you can make it link to any off-site (no illegal) websites that you’d like, and of course your profile page should include some type of non-spammy-sounding content on your niche subject matter that other people may want to link to.
Since it’s easy to linkswap (they call it ‘inviting friends’) with other MySpace members, a full link campaign inside MySpace takes only minutes instead of months. Of course not everyone there will accept the invitation.
You can search for link swap opportunities by simply popping your niche keywords into a MySpace search box and you’ll get all the matching member pages as results.
From there it’s just about having a nice page yourself that they’ll want to swap links with (accepting the invitation) and if you get enough MySpace ‘friends,’ your MySpace page can have a really impressive stream of traffic… Which of course you’ll want to have linked to your own primary website.
Although you won’t get any traffic worth mentioning if you don’t make a nice page and invite every friend in your niche there, one nice thing about it is that many MySpace members surf member pages randomly, so you’re almost sure to get a visit or two daily, even with a blank page.
It won’t be very targeted, however, so don’t count on it to bring you much reward. Also, since it’s so much of a popularity contest, it can be difficult to convince individual members into accepting your invitation.
Your best bet: Use a Popularity submission tool like Friend Laser. It’s not free, but it can drastically improve your page views because it seeks out just the ‘profitable’ friends to submit add friend requests to… That way you don’t build a list of thousands of friends there just to find that none of them have ever been back to MySpace since the day they signed up. It also make sure you’re only submitting comments on pages that have a lot of views, which is the hardest thing about MySpace marketing.
Unfortunately there is no free way to do that part, so the best you can do without any cash on MySpace is just to manually make sure that you submit to only people who appear active, on topic, and have lots & lots of friends.