Monday, July 31, 2006
Successful Myspace Strategies
Using MySpace effectively
Social networking is a phenomenon that seems recent on the internet with sites likie ecademy, linkedin, ryze, openbc, orkut, craigslist, friendster, and of course myspace. But the nature of networking with others has been around for thousands of years as individuals gathered in communities and expanded their base of friends. It's through the technology advancements, though, that worldwide networking with people you choose is being made easier every day.
The website MySpace is a community that has arisen in the last few years as a result of a need in the marketplace for an easy to use, customizable, fluid, multimedia rich, and fun place to hang out. Preteens, teens, and college age students have flocked to MySpace in droves, with the intent of creating a space for themselves on the web, expanding their network for social purposes, and being entertained along the way.
The MySpace platform is now used by tens of thousands of young adults daily, has a high ranking in sites like Alexa, and has retained a very loyalty effect, meaning that users frequently come back to the platform to add to their sites and connect or reconnect with those who also gather there.
One of the most useful features of MySpace is the ability to add in skins and overlays to add flavor to your site. There are many individuals and websites out there that enable easy customization of this online community. Along with visual customization of your site, it's also useful to include audio. This audio can be in the form of a message you leave for visitors or by adding in clips from your favorite music. Another great way to add flavor to your site is through the addition of content that reflects your personality, interests, thoughts, and basic views on the world. And by searching for users with similar interests and developing a connection with them, you can expand your networking.
In order to develop a connection with those you network with, it's best to keep in mind how to add value to the relationship you have with them. In other words, how can you benefit them or their site? Perhaps you know of someone they should meet and you want to make an introuction, or you know of other music similar to what they've posted on their site, or you have a perspective on some content they've included. It's through these sharings that you could not only increase the quantity of networking, but also the quality of networking that you're doing.
The skills in networking that young adults gain by using a site like MySpace are ones that will stay with them their whole life, enabling them eventually to maybe meet a mate, develop a fulfilling career, or establish lifelong friends.
By keeping in mind the principles of customizing content and developing a unique persona, focusing on adding value to relationships established online through speaking to what benefits them, and networking with a long-term view in mind for creating connecxtioins both with those you have a lot in common with and those you may not at first glance, the investment of time and effort you put into MySpace can pay off for the future as well.
Dave Lloyd has created an online guide to MySpace and social networking at www.socialnetworkingsecrets.com
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Making Your MySpace Profile Stand Out From the Crowd
There is little doubt that MySpace has taken the internet world by storm. The ability for members to make friends and displays their interest, hobbies and statistics (age, location etc.) has seen the site soar to one of the most popular websites on the internet.
It is suggested that the total number of MySpace members will soon be approaching 100 million; which is why it can be great fun to customize your own profile page to stand out from the crowd. You may have noticed from browsing friends profiles that many opt to display large images or videos on the page that take an age to load, so this may not be the best route to take to make an attractive looking profile.
I prefer to choose a nice light background with traditional black text, possibly adding a single video to the page. There are certainly some points to remember if you want to make your profile appealing to everyone. Consider that many members may still be using a dial-up internet connection, meaning that any large images or videos may take a long time to load. Also ask the opinion of your friends to gather feedback over what looks good on your profile page and what does not. The color of the background and the color of the text are often badly chosen. Some people find it hard to read white or red text on a black background, whereas some it difficult to read yellow writing on a white background. Choose carefully, as many MySpace users may be put off reading your profile if the page does not display well.
There are some great features that you can add to your page, including cursors, layouts, surveys, games and much more. You can even add music to your page, so that when someone visits your profile the music will play. You can literally spend hour after hour customizing your page!
MySpace is a great place to find friends with the same interests as yours, and you might choose to reflect this in your profile with pictures of your horse for example if you like horse riding or you with your basketball team if that's what you like to do.
The site has also provided great promotion for many users, and has led to relative success for a number of musical artists. This is of course down to the large number of users that can be contacted.
One very important note to make is for young users to use caution when posting personal information and for parents to realize this. It's an unfortunate reality that some people use such sites to stalk young users, so caution must be made to stop this immediately if it appears. This is not meant to be scaremongering, but instead to highlight the fact that it can be great to talk to friends and share your interests, but be cautious when sharing personal information with members you do not know.
Nevertheless, as highlighted earlier, your MySpace profile can be fun to customize and there are many ways that this can be done.
Why not customize your profile? Check out the links to the right of this Blog. They are great ways to make your profile page stand out from the crowd!
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Myspace Promotion
Making a myspace profile for your band, company or organization will gain you useful and effective free advertisement. The aim is to build up direct contact with your target group. A community where your fans or costumers will hang out, ask you questions, talk to you and be easy to reach.
To start off, you need to create a profile on myspace. Make sure that you register with the display name of your authority and leave the First Name and Last Name fields alone. Registering with an email that you don't own will save your email accounts from a lot of irritating emails that myspace sends out every hour each day.
When you have registered, it's time to chose an url address for your account. The url will be www.myspace.com/(your url name). If your url is already taken by somebody else, you can contact that person by going to his account add him/her as a friend and then email him about an account exchange. Tell the person that you need the account more than him/her and alternatively suggest that you can exchange it for some money. If you don't succeed with the contact, you can register the authority name plus one, two or three extra chars such as kentucky_, kentucky2 or kentucky_68. Make sure that the keyword stays in the name, because it's good for SEO.
After making the url name, you may pimp up your profile. Start with getting a good layout that you can use for backgrounds. You also need to add a description that should at least cover one page. Add images, music, glitter, videos to it, so it gets interesting to read. Since it's on myspace, you should better write simple, so the average myspace user can understand. Write about what the organisation do, links to cool stuff and such. When you are happy with it, it's time to move to the next step.
Add friends and lots of them, but concentrate on your target group. If the profile is for promoting a clothes design company, you can make a query to google like this: site:profile.myspace.com design clothes pattern
Make sure you don't add too much friends per day or your account will be banned. The limit of today is currently 500 friends a day but it may as well change in the future. So be on your watch.
Adding friends is great, now you will slowly get a reachable community. From it, you can promote your organisation/band or company buy sending out bulletins. Just make sure you don't send too much, because then you will get a bad reputation. One bulletin each day is enough for most of us. Make every bulletin unique and as interesting as possible.
Other then sending out bulletins, you can also respond to your visitors comments, sending out happy birthday comments and starting myspace groups.
The possibilities are endless.
Brett Hull is an myspace advertising expert.
MySpace as a Marketing Tool
Automatic or Manual
There are many programs which can be used to gather “friends”, and build up your contact list, so you have a wider audience to advertise too, this is a 100% automatic method of gaining friends – apart from maintaining your profile that is.
Many people find the “personal approach” works better however - this works very well for niche sites or businesses. This basically means browsing through MySpace, and individually Friend Requesting those who seem to fit your target audience. It may take a lot longer, but for certain niche’s it has worked out very well for some people.
MySpace Trains
A MySpace Train is a script that allows users to post their profile on a page, for other users to add them. After the train is full, it is reset for a new Round and you can join again. It may sound fair basic, and a waste of time, but joining trains is probably the best way to get friends on MySpace. Why? There is a limit to how many friend requests you can send, but with trains you are getting requested, and there is no limit on that.
This method is not recommended for those looking to advertise a Niche, as the friends are completely untargeted.
To collect friends effectively with trains you will need to use a program to automatically do it for you. There are many programs like this and they are outlined at the bottom of this article – they will allow you to be the first on many of the most popular MySpace trains, and maximize your friend requests. You can receive 500+ friend requests a day if you leave it running 24 hours a day.
Real or Fake?
There is no law against making a fake MySpace account to gain extra friends (some find a Bikini-clad female to receive more attention, than a 45 year old business man), in fact no one will ever know – it is more of a moral, or even business plan issue.
Moral Issue? Some people simply disagree with being untruthful, and having a fake profile will not be acceptable, for the profile creator, or it’s viewers. Even if you have no problem with it, if one of your “friends” finds out, you can say goodbye to your marketing days.
Business Plan Issue? Basically, this means that you may or may not need a real or fake account. You simply have to decide what will work better for you and your company. If you are advertising a Golf company for example, having a surf chick in your profile is neither convincing, or useful.
Maintaining your Profile
You can’t just fill out some basic details, and leave your profile sitting there while friend collecting – people will see something is not right (and not appreciate it). You do not need to do much to maintain your profile, and these few steps can help:
Update your blog at least once every 3 days.
Fill out as much of your profile as you can before you start friend requesting.
Change your Profiles design to give it a more personal feel – many free templates are available around the internet that are perfectly fine.
Include photos of yourself, or at least have a few pictures in your gallery.
Comment on your friends profiles occasionally, so they know you are still there.
Reply to as many messages as possible.
Maintaining your Profile – Automatically?
If you use automatic methods to gain large lists of friends you will probably not have the time or patience to comment on all their pages, or respond to their messages.
Firstly, attempt to at least comment on a few profiles yourself, to show that you care (or are at least trying to care). There are no automatic ways to respond to messages, randomly click about 20 messages a day, and give a simple response – this just makes sure that they won’t remove you off their friends list.
The good thing is, there are many auto-commenting programs, which can’t be tracked by MySpace. In your comment just say something like “Hey, how you doin? Just thought I’d say Hi!”, this will lead the friend to come back to your profile at least once, and you in turn will get more exposure.
The Beauty of Bulletins
Bulletins are similar to forum posts, but you cannot reply, and they can only be seen by the people on your friends list – they are great marketing tools if you have a highly target list of friends.
People frown upon you if you spam advertising bulletins, so try to do them as little as possible – we recommend no more than 1 each week. You can use HTML, CSS, Flash, and Graphics in your bulletins, so try to make them stand out.
Mass Messaging
Recommend usage? This works better for those with a niche market – you won’t have to send out as many messages, and the messages will be more relevant to your friends.
Using an automatic messaging program, write a personal yet informative message, with a link to your site at the bottom of it. Not only should the user find it useful, they may appreciate it enough to tell their friends about it, and so the chain of viral marketing begins.
Warning! Sending mass messages is known as spam, and as stated in the MySpace Terms of Service you will be charged $50 per message if caught spamming – I haven’t heard of anyone being caught, but this is just a warning.
David Turnbull is a long-time blogger & online writer. He owns multiple sites such as Drawing Tips,Wii Gamin', and his blog: Turnbull's Blog. www.turnbullsblog.com
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Social Network Marketing
MySpace is the current king of social networks, as it is literally a social-space network with 2.5 times more daily users than Google (psst, this is a huge untapped market). The domain dates back to 1999 where it was originally an online hard-drive of sorts. The current rendition took hold in 2003 making MySpace barely three years old. The main demographic is made up of teens to 20-somethings. The music industry is currently using MySpace as a marketing tool, not the labels themselves, but the bands. For example, Pearl Jam is announcing their upcoming release for May with sample songs and concert date announcements. One of their sample songs from their upcoming albums is one of the most played songs across the entire MySpace network. Independent film makers have also taken notice. In February 2006, amateur filmmaker David Lehre released a short film called MySpace: The Movie. This short film has quickly become a hit, registering over six million views following its release.
Benefiting from MySpace traffic is pretty straight forward. You will want to create a user profile and post links to your company or websites such as blogs, feeds, etc. Profile note, you can post html code in any field regarding your profile. Next, create your social pipeline of users and keep the demographic inline with any product or link you wish to shamelessly promote in the future. You don’t want to get spammy here either. The downside would be getting your user profile terminated from MySpace or members posting negative comments within your profile. Again, tread lightly by thinking neutral and keep the benefit of the community in mind.
The opportunity costs associated with community based SEM are very high. However, tagging in particular may be time prohibitive for most organizations as it requires a lot of trial and error. Tagging can seem like a waste of time as most tagging submissions will be removed by community members who find your submission “spammy”. Time spent on tagging isn’t a problem for most sole proprietors, but can be costly to your employer who is left with little equitable return to show for your time spent.
Utilizing Web2.0 sites such as Wikipedia, del.icio.us and MySpace, will prove effective for your business if done properly. Remember to tread lightly, don’t use “spammy” techniques and stay neutral keeping the benefit of the community at heart in your content development. Doing so will help your business to avoid a negative backlash toward your brand from the community you are developing content for.
Warren Pattison is the Director of Search for Elixir Systems, a full service search engine marketing company specializing in organic search engine optimization services, online public relations management and paid search or PPC management. For more information visit www.elixirsystems.com
Promoting Your Music on Myspace
What types of music will you find on a site like myspace music? You will find everything from Christian to Heavy Metal and all the sounds in between. This is because any artist can upload their songs to the site.
How do you get your music on a site like myspace music? First, you need to sign up for a free membership to myspace.com. It is easy to do and gives you access to a number of features such as blogs and chat rooms. Then, you will also need to register yourself as an artist or a band. When you are on myspace music, you will not be able to upload music unless you are a registered artist. Then, you will get directions on how to upload your song (speeds, format, etc.) so make sure that you have the proper specs on your equipment to do that. You will also be able to create a profile page with pictures and information about your band and upcoming concert dates and releases. You cannot upload any song that you do not own the rights to. This is illegal.
Can you still enjoy these sites if you are not a musician-of course! You can find your favorite new band or artist and where they will be playing on any given day and listen to exclusive new releases and old favorites.
Eriani Doyel writes articles about Music. For more information about MySpace Music, visit fimmusic.com.
Proven Ways to Successfully Promote Your Music on Myspace
In a very short time, Myspace.com has become the hottest music promotional tool available to anyone. Here are the 7 rules of successful myspace music promotion.
1. Get a myspace.com music page.
Getting a myspace.com music page is free so there is no reason not to have one.
2. Make sure your page is user friendly.
There are many would-be music business professionals who have myspace pages take too long to load. If your myspace page loads too slow, you could be losing potential fans. Mega bandwidth graphics and images will prevent your page from loading quickly. Your myspace page should take no longer than 20 – 30 seconds to load.
Many artists on myspace use layouts that emphasize their creativity but are a nightmare to navigate. Refrain from using dancing cursor’s, raining text, and distracting images on your myspace music pages.
Other myspace artists have about me blurbs that go on forever. Keep about me blurbs short (no more than 1000 words), if people want to know more about you, they will ask.
3. Have your music on your myspace page.
Don’t put someone else’s music on your myspace page unless you were involved in the creation of the music. How can you be discovered if your music isn’t on your page?
4. Reach out for friends.
Networking on myspace is one of the most powerful tools you can use to build your fan-base. Take advantage of the opportunity to reach people with like interests. Never ignore or decline a friend request. You never know who can help your career.
5. Treat your friends like friends.
Common courtesy applies on myspace just as in real life. Be willing to thank your friends for adding you as a friend. Respond to friend’s emails (if appropriate). Never post your ad as a comment on someone’s myspace page without acknowledging them. Limit the size of your “ad comments”.
6. Promote yourself in appropriate ways.
Noteworthy career benchmarks, or new music added to your page are good reasons to promote yourself on myspace. List your performance dates on your page and use bulletins to let people know where you are performing. Limit the number of bulletins you post. Posting irrelevant bulletins, or posting bulletins too often, will force your friends to ignore you. Let people know about your myspace.com page. Putting your unique myspace.com address on your website and business cards will make it convenient for you to build your network and fan base faster.
7. Provide ways for people to purchase your music from your myspace page.
If you sell your music anywhere online make sure there is a direct link from your myspace page to the location where people can buy your music. Follow our rules and you will have fun and make many friends on Myspace.
Jerome C. Ford is a 20 year Radio and Records Veteran, Music Marketing expert and Vice President of Succeed In the Music Biz! www.simbiz.info
