How’s this for a great viral marketing host — a social network that gets almost three times the daily traffic as Google, has 66 million registered users and is growing at a rate of 2000 - 10000 per hour.

What if I said promotion in this social network is free?

Do I have your attention? You’re not the only one — MySpace got the attention of Rupert Murdoch, who paid slightly shy of 30 times earnings or $558 million for the site.

To quote our friend Mook-Jon, one of the giants of the Internet Marketing business, Myspace is an untapped resource of over 57 Million users for teen (12-17) and young adult (18-34) demographics. Best of all, all you really need is a profile and some friends to start advertising on it for free. Some people think it’s just a fad, but if Newscorp was willing to shell out over $500M for a site that was only making $20M annually and was only 2 years old at the time, you damn well know that this is the start of something major. I predict that it will only continue to grow, and that it will become more corporate.

If your target is young adults in either category (12 -17 or 18-34) and you’re not using MySpace you’re leaving opportunity on the table.

There seems to be a lot of opportunity. Forbes ran a story on April 10 called The MySpace Economy, where they quoted Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, who says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images. MySpace doesn’t build many customization options into users’ profiles.

Ramos makes money with AdSense and popups on his site.

Selling stuff that helps people spiff up their MySpace site is one thing, but how do you use the Viral Marketing power of MySpace to sell your stuff?

I’ve been IM-ing people all night tonight, and here’s what I’ve come up with. MySpace revolves around your Friends List, which is a list of the other MySpace people with whom you exchange information.

First you need to put together a MySpace page that appeals to your audience and sells your product or service (most likely as a Presell page with a good offer that links to your website). Then you need to find some traffic. I’ve been told that the offer is key. Someone was giving away free music related tchochkes and found themselves with a few thousand extra visitors as a result. Remember the age group and their interests when you’re coming up with the offer. If you’re selling portfolio management services you might want to click on the link to the next article above.

Anyway, MySpace users can join interest groups. There are thousands of them on MySpace. They look suspiciously like forums…you post something, someone else answers, and the conversation continues.

You need to build your Friends List by going through these forums, grabbing the names of people who look like good prospects, and sending them a request to be added to your Friends List. This functions as a type of opt-in mailing list of sorts.

Once you have a good sized list together, you use Bulletins (the MySpace version of email) to send them information about you, your company, your website and your offer. As long as they are on your Friends List they are fair game for your offer, but you still can’t spam them.

Rinse and repeat until you have some good traffic. It’s not easy, but it can pay off. And it can get quite viral – if you give MySpace users something to display on their pages and they like it, you have an instant button link and the virus starts to spread.

Like anything else, there are people out there selling shortcuts.

Some are offering to send bulletins out to thousands of people, which MySpace considers spam in most cases, and others operate so-called whore trains where you can sign up hundreds or thousands of people as friends with a few clicks. I have been told that whore trains produce lousy friends and lousy leads, but I have also seen others reporting successes.

Still others operate services that build your friends list (sort of a manual whore train). Some seem legitimate, some do not. If you feel like it, try one. They are hanging out at most of the webmaster forums like SitePoint and DNForum.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that MySpace is a fad. I think that grossly underestimates its power. I think there’s something here for businesses that can leverage the demographic and have products and services that will appeal to it.

Conclusions? It’s cheap and easy to put a test together. Try it.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 3:42 am.
Filed under Viral Marketing, Internet Marketing.
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