Myspace Secrets

Myspace, a type of social network is extremely hot right now. It gets millions of visitors to its site each day (maybe that's why it's always loading so slowly?) and it is one of the most visited websites in the world (number one most visited website in the United States). When I first joined myspace I was really surprised to see how many people were marketing their services on there. It ranged from:

Singers
Actors
Models
Small business owners
Comedians
Filmmakers

The main theme about myspace is to add friends and that is displayed in your profile. The reason why marketers want friends is so that they will have a range of people that they can market to; it is sort of like an email list in a sense.

Myspace was originally built for the younger audience but you can see that it's obviously changing very quickly because a lot of the older audiences roam around there. The concept with the "friends" theme is very similar to high-school so you have to step outside your normal business frame of mind and work on fitting in.

Ask yourself what do they want? It's quite simple; all they want is to feel accepted and to have friends. They are not on there to market their products; they just want to accumulate as many friends as possible and to feel good about themselves. Why do you think people post pictures and ask for comments? They want to feel good about themselves; it makes them feel more confident and happy which people would gladly pay lots of money for but you will be giving it to them for free. Why do you think Americans spend millions of dollars each year on cosmetic surgery? Do they really need it? Of course not, but they want the attention of their peers and surroundings. So, make sure to leave comments for your friends. Be a super cool, but a super helpful friend. You shouldn't go on myspace for the sole purpose of making money, put some thought into it first. Myspace is a business in itself, and you should spend some time to build this effectively, nothing a software program can do by itself, it needs the human touch.

Myspace is a great place to learn about the "sociological" aspects of human beings. I learn a new thing every-time I go there. I like to use myspace to gather feedback and understand humans better because they are in a different state of mind on there. It is like my own scientific laboratory in a sense.

You have to play by their rules to make a sale, and it's usually harder to sale on myspace because people are just not in the buying mode but I will reveal some solid marketing techniques later. Myspace is a powerful network and it is hard for someone to compete with it because of the large amount of users.

You can add more features to a social network and try to make it better them myspace but I doubt that you will overcome myspace, the same can be said about the other powerful social networks such as eBay. You can try to make something better by adding more features and reducing the price but being the first is something that people will always remember.

So, if you can't beat something what is your next route? You join them, so this is what we are about to do and this is exactly what a lot of other social networks have done and they used myspace as a fuel to drive on. An example of a social network that used myspace to fuel their burning growth is youtube http://www.youtube.com/. In matter of fact, the growth of youtube was so rampant that it actually threaten myspace own video resources and they wanted to disable myspace users from using the network on myspace, but the users loved youtube so much so youtube has became an exponentially growing phenomenal since. So, the next question is how can you become the next youtube and use myspace to fuel your next product launch? Well, there are some ways that you can go about doing this and I will get to them later.

Just by integrating your business around myspace you can:

Build a rapport with prospective customers
Generate more traffic to your website
Build up your newsletter
Network with people that have similar goals with you
Use it as another free source for advertising

It is a good idea to make a myspace profile for your business or organization in order to add another degree of personalization to your company. If you have a list of subscribers you can tell them to go check out your myspace website and add you as a friend. I have seen countless of movies know adding myspace profiles about the actors in the movies in order to help generate awareness about the movie and you can do the same. Your myspace profile can be like a fan site for you and your company. Once you set up your myspace profile which was explained earlier (not a hard process) you can edit the look and feel of your myspace profile by using html or CSS. A lot of the profiles look dull and are not enticing. You can hire a graphic designer to take care of the myspace layout for you if you're not good at graphics like me. There are some sources you can go to get free templates for your myspace website, check this out:

http://myspacesupport.com/

Having a unique myspace website and adding interesting and useful content will stand you apart from the millions of users. Make sure to sprinkle your niche keywords throughout your myspace profile to help increase your search engine ranking both in the major search engines such as Google and in the myspace search engines. Make friends or potential joint venture partners?

You can also use myspace to size up the competition and see what other people in your niche are doing, and this can be accomplished by using the myspace search engine. Make sure to click myspace because it is originally defaulted to search the web.

Now go to Google and type in:
site:profile.myspace.com fishermen

You'll see how many people are fishermen on myspace, seems like their are only 6,030 indexed profiles into Google about fishermen so lets go to tinker with the keywords a little. Try to use the keyword "fishing" and hopefully you will get more profiles that have the keyword "fishing" listed as a hobby or interest so you can start adding some friends.

Okay if you changed the keyword "fisherman" into "fishing" You now find 1,310,000 profiles indexed into Google which is a whole-lot-better. However, be careful because all of these profiles do not necessary have anything to do with this particular keyword. I have clicked on some profiles and have found that some of them could just be stage names of bands or such so make sure to check and read their profile to discover their interests and hobbies before adding them as a friend. If they have interests in your particular niche then send out an invitation as a friend. Sometimes they will accept you sometimes they won't so don't take it personally if they don't. After your friend accepts you just don't not talk to them ever again, send an email and introduce yourself and what you're about.

A lot of times people will just add friends and abuse the bulletin system and that is about it, I will cover the bulletin system later. Talk to them and make some "real" friends, if you have to pick up the book "how to win friends and influence people" this is a very appropriate network to apply these techniques in, it's a social network. People are more likely to purchase from you if they now you so try and build up some rapport on this network. Tell them who you are and what your goals are and how they can help. Believe it or not, people are generally good by nature and if you try telling them where you need help they will most likely try to help you out. It could be as simple as adding your banner to their myspace profile, but the main thing marketers forget is to build friendship that is what this network is about, not marketing. Of course if you have a myspace profile of one million friends then this will be very hard to accomplish so you can take one of two routes:

One, you can try to maintain a small but royal network of friends.
Two, you can get a large network of friends but it will most likely be a network of people that you don't know and also untargeted.

Each one has its pros and cons so it's truly up to you. As again, from my personal experience having a lot of friends is not really that great for myspace because the conversion ratio will be really low, or less they are targeted but there again, myspace browsers are not really huge spenders so if you're selling something make sure that it is something your niche can afford.

Until Next Time,,
A.J.