MySpace Marketing Secrets
4.1 Benefits of Making Money on MySpace
There are a number of important benefits to making money on MySpace. The most important is that the market is extremely easy to tap. Al you have to do to find prospects is to begin searching for people who have interests related to your given product or service. You can then add these people to your friends list.
This is a significant advantage over other methods of finding prospects, as it al ows you to do so completely free of charge. Furthermore, MySpace has built-in mechanisms that help you to contact these prospects and to warm them up for sel ing.
One of these mechanisms is a “bul etin.” A bul etin is a message that you send out to al of the friends on your friends list at the same exact time. Regardless of whether you have 10 friends or 40,000 a bul etin wil reach them al in a matter of minutes. Next time they open up their profiles, they wil al have that bul etin you sent.
How can you use this in your favor? You can send out a bulletin about something related to your business; and then use that to lure them into reading your MySpace.
For instance, you could stage a giveaway event – and then mention that in your bul etin.
This wil be especial y effective if your friends list is composed of people who you selected based on their interests.
You can also send out private messages to individual users. This is a good method to use in conjunction with a database. If you are taking the time to invite people individual y, also take the time to add them to a database, along with some notes about them. If you think they might want something particularly, you could always send them a private message to let them know you are a sel er. You can then offer them a discount if they are interested.
There are a number of different benefits of using MySpace to make money. I have listed only a few of the things above.
4.2 Risks of Making Money on MySpace
MySpace is an excel ent tool to use for sel ing virtual y anything on the Internet; however, it is important to take into consideration that certain uses of it could put your MySpace Marketing Secrets
business in jeopardy. For this reason, you should exercise caution when creating and using a MySpace account.
The biggest risk of using MySpace to make money is basing your entire business model on a MySpace profile. This is a big risk because MySpace technical y owns your profile and can do with it what they wish. If you send out bul etins to your friends and one of them takes issue, your account could be flagged and banned. This means that al of your source of new customers would grind to a halt in an instant.
Another significant risk of using MySpace to make money is that MySpace's terms of service are somewhat unclear about business use; however, the general y accepted understanding of the ToS is that you cannot use MySpace for most commercial uses, including sending out bul etins that include links or putting up links on your profile.
Additional y, business profiles are almost certainly not included as a valid use of MySpace.
Additional y, in different sections of the ToS, there is some indication that MySpace reserves the right to sue anyone for commercial use of bulletins.
If, for instance, you send out a bul etin to 40,000 friends, they could fine you a certain amount for each of those individual friends. In most cases, this isn't something that happens, but it is a possibility if you abuse MySpace for commercial purposes.
Another risk of making money with MySpace is that many segments of MySpace users simply do not convert well. They are teenagers, who do not buy things with credit cards online. If you spend al of your time building up a MySpace account to promote your business, you may end up wasting a considerable amount of time and energy, but without many rewards to show for it.
For al of these reasons, you wil want to be cautious about the way in which you use MySpace and the amount of effort you put into it.
4.3 What to Sell on MySpace
If you already have a product or service that you want to sel , this is not a question for you. You wil probably setup a website, create a profile, add friends, and then use that profile to direct friends to your website, where they can purchase your product or service.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
If you have no product or service ready, that is an entirely different story. If this is the case, I suggest sel ing private label electronic products in specific niches. For instance, you could purchase a bunch of private label content E-Books about do-it-yourself home repairs – and then you could target that specific crowd with your products.
I personal y suggest that you begin by looking for a target niche on MySpace. For instance, determine whether or not there are a significant amount of people who are interested in carpentry or soccer. Then determine whether or not there are places where they usual y congregate to discuss these topics. If this is the case, then you have a market at your fingertips.
Once you have your market determined, then begin looking for private label products, including software, E-Books, and reports. Begin compiling a stock of these materials and then figure out how you wil sel them to your customers. For instance, do you want to create a membership site? Or would you rather sel each component by itself?
The last step is to find some way in which you can market these products to your target audience. For instance, should you simply mention to your friends that you are having a sale at your site – and give some sort of a discount to everyone on your list? This is definitely one option.
Another option is to specifical y find people who might be interested over forums and groups and send them private messages with the information. Ideal y, however, you wil want to restrict al marketing efforts to your friends list, as your chances of being flagged wil be much smal er.
4.4 Selling Advertising On Your Account
When most people talk about making money on MySpace, they're usual y either talking about striking it rich by getting noticed by someone in a position of power; or they're talking about sel ing some product or service and reaching a massive audience.
Interestingly enough, there's an entirely different way to use MySpace to make money.
Rather than trying to sel your own product, you can simply concentrate on creating profiles and stocking them with friends who fall into a particular demographic.
Perhaps you have decided to seek out al people who are interested in aviation or in bowling. Create a specific profile for that demographic and then seek out everyone who is interested in that activity.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
Once you have done this, your next step wil be to find advertisers who you can match up to your specific niche profiles. For instance, if you have created a niche profile for outdoor sports, you can then look for companies who sel mountain bikes or tents or campers. You can then contact them to let them know the amount of “warm prospects”
you have access to, as wel as some rate for advertising to them.
To make this even more effective, you wil want to consider finding advertisers who are wil ing to create a contest. This wil al ow you to blatantly advertise for the company, but without giving overt overtones about your intent. In fact, you may even want to create one large, general MySpace account for announcing contests.
Regardless of the way in which you decide to do this, you wil want to remember to segment your prospects into different groups according to profiles. You wil also want to make sure that you are able to find warm prospects for a given topic. Last, you wil want to make sure you match up the right advertisers to those lists.
4.5 Tricks for Making Money on MySpace
There are a several important tricks to making money on MySpace. In this section, I wil go over some of these tricks – and how you can best use them to your advantage.
The first trick to making money on MySpace involves leveraging all power available to grow your friends list by adding “interested prospects” (friends). You can do this by contacting people who have massive friends lists and offering to pay them to send out a bul etin. You should do this in conjunction with some contest you are having on either your MySpace profile or on your website.
Simply have the account owner announce that you have started a contest – and that al people who fit a certain profile (i.e. swimmers, footbal fans, etc.) should enter. This wil al ow you to build a list of prospects, rather than people who simply join your friends list unwittingly or because you have invited them.
Now that you have this list of prospects, you wil want to begin making your pitch to them by baiting them with contests and money – and then slowly revealing your product or service to them in an attempt to gain long term customers.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
Now, another trick you can use for making money on MySpace involves creating some contest around adding friends to your profile. For instance, you could offer to do something interesting and videotape it if you get a certain amount of friends (100,000, for instance) or you could offer to give away $500 to the person who gets the most friends to join your MySpace.
Regardless of what you do, it is important to find ways in which you can leverage any power that you do have to get people to join your friends list at an increasingly faster rate. Additional y, if you are able to find warm prospects, rather than random people, that as an additional bonus.
4.6 Making Money on MySpace without
Creating an Account
Making money on MySpace without an account is perhaps the best way in which you can make money through MySpace. Not only does it remove the risk that other methods require (i.e. putting your account at risk, risking a lawsuit, etc.), but it also requires a considerably smal er amount of work.
In order to make money on MySpace without an account, al you have to do is find people on MySpace who can make money for you. This is especial y inexpensive if these people do not know that making money with their accounts is a possibility; however, on the other hand, it wil be a lot easier to find the right people and convince them to do this if they already do it on a regular basis.
So how do you go about doing this – making the connections and then setting up the ads?
You can start by finding people who are outright sel ing MySpace bul etins or private messages. Before you ask them to send out a bul etin for you, you wil want to join their list as a friend and monitor them for a minimum of a week. See whether or not they send out bul etins every day. If they do, chances are that few people are reading them.
Once you have tested the person sel ing bul etins, you wil then want to check out their offer and compare it with others. How many friends do they have and how much are they charging? Is their list composed of any specific segment of the population? Are they sending out bul etins or private messages? These are al important things to keep in mind when considering price.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
You wil then want to test out various bul etin sel ers with various friends list sizes.
Determine which one has the best response; and then stick with that one as much as possible.
Additional y, remember that you are attempting to sel to the same crowd, so you wil want to take a different approach each time. Use contests, giveaways, and events that attract customers for purposes other than buying. This wil ultimately yield more sales.
4.7 Advertising on MySpace
In addition to setting up a MySpace profile and advertising your business through a network of friends, you may also want to consider advertising directly through MySpace.
MySpace al ows you to do this in a number of different ways.
One way in which you can advertise on MySpace is through “video ads.” These flash videos are placed in various spots throughout MySpace. These can either be in the form of a video screen or a banner, which pops out into a movie with a viewer hovers his or her mouse over the banner.
These are the most expensive of al forms of advertising MySpace sel s; however, they are also reputed to have the highest click through rates, too. Depending on the price you want to pay, you can select the places in which these videos play and the amount of views you receive.
If you're looking to pay less for advertising, you may want to purchase something cheaper, such as a regular banner ad, a text ad, or an image ad. Al of these are relatively inexpensive; however, MySpace may require you to purchase a high volume of impressions, as most of their advertisers have budgets wel in excess of $5,000.
This advertising certainly isn't free, but it may be more effective in the short run, as it wil al ow you to immediately drive visitors to your profile or to your website without spending the time to build up a massive friends list, to join groups and forums, and to post semi-regular bul etins, reminding people to check out your profile.
Another major advantage to advertising directly through MySpace is that they wil segment the demographics for you. For instance, if you just want to advertise to people who are in bands, they wil set your ads up in the optimal place to reach that demographic.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
With that being said, if you are serious about advertising on MySpace, you may want to send them an email to inquire about their rates and positioning. They wil send you a media kit to help you determine what is best for your business.
MySpace Marketing Secrets
MySpace Marketing Secrets