The MySpace generation brought some changes to the marketing scene – while conventional marketing and link exchange solutions are never going to fade out, new opportunities arise when millions of people gather in one place. That's the case of MySpace. Here are some facts:



MySpace has a Google PageRank of 8 (many user pages also have PR themselves)

According to Alexa (), MySpace is the 6th most popular site on the entire web. In June 2006, MySpace had 75 million users, 15 million daily unique logins, was growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and was generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that's 10,593 page views per second)

In September 2006 MySpace had more than 100 million users

Now, with so much traffic and so many people, it's clear that this can be an opportunity. To obvious thing to do: create an account, build a targeted friends network, communicate with them and promote your products or services. Well, let's refine this idea a little: building such a list by hand is impractical because of time consideration. And you probably (I'd say hopefully) have better things to do.

As a side note, there are various so called 'whore trains'- services that promise they will bring friends to your account. My advice: don't use them! They only bring you friends that signed up for the same service and those persons are more than certain just looking to gather a large amount of people to send messages to – you want real people as your friends.

You actually have more than one option: you can buy an already made account (the downside is that you don't have an accurate control over the friends added) for which the price depends on how many friends it has - the usual price is $10/1000 friends. Or you can hire someone to build an account from scratch based on your needs (e.g. you only want friends from with ages between 20 and 30 years from the US) – here the price is around $15/1000 friends. Or finally, you can just use a message sending service: persons who own MySpace accounts send bulletins (bulletins are just messages that are sent to all your friends with a single click) to all their friends on behalf of you – the price is somewhere around $0.5/1000 friends.

The key to success is to carefully choose the text of your message and more important, the title text because everyone sees first the title and only if they click it they can look at the entire message. So you'll need a hook there – my advice is to just make it look natural. You have to be sneaky in a way: if it looks like advertising your friends will just feel cheated and ignore the message.

What can you write in the bulletin body? Almost anything: you can use full HTML and CSS which means links, images and pretty much anything that can appear on a web page (no javascript, iframes or other mechanisms that may allow javascript injection for obvious security reasons).

From my experience, the click-through rate for these kinds of messages is around 1-2%. That means, for example, that if you submit the bulletin to 10.000 people (at a regular cost of $5 if you choose to use someone else's account) you can expect to receive 100 - 200 visits to your site (I presume anyone who promotes something will have a link to the site in the message). This brings you to a cost of 2.5 - 5 cents/visit. That's not bad at all! Now, traffic is something, but targeted traffic is the king – so if you get good friends you have no excuse of not recovering your investment.

Besides traffic you can also get PR from MySpace – remember I said some user pages have PR. Now consider the fact that you can post HTML comments on those pages. I'll be back with another article with updates for you.