Marketing to the Masses: MySpace

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

It has been a little over a year now since Rupert Murdoch bought the popular site, MySpace.com for $580 million dollars. (July, 2005) Unless you are living under a rock, you have heard about this popular site. The site has received some negative publicity because of the younger demographic and predators that have been attracted by those children. Television personalities, such as Jay Leno and David Letterman have made jokes about the promiscuity of MySpace members. (“There’s a new web site aimed at people with social diseases. New? It’s called MySpace!” – J. Leno)

With all of this negative publicity, is there a silver lining in this cloud for your small business? Of course there is! MySpace has a great potential for you as a business owner. Blogging, in general, is a great way to reach your customers, but MySpace offers added opportunities for business potential.

The demographics of MySpace are impressive. It is a social networking phenomenon that has over 100 million users worldwide. In October, 2005, it is reported that MySpace had 12 BILLION unique page views – double of Google for that same month. Its’ primary demographic is teenagers and young adults (16-35), which make up about 87% of the MySpace network. The remaining 13% (13 million people) are over 35. I happen to be in this minority.

So how can you market to MySpace users? What do you have to say to over 87 million young adults? Will they even care? – This may not be your demographic. Never fear! Build a MySpace page anyway. It is easy to do and you won’t be sorry. It can just be a simple, basic page but the potential for you to gather customers or contacts is amazing.

Make sure when you are building your MySpace page that you include the right keywords. Keywords are defined as: “A word used by search engines in its search to locate relevant web pages.” Your MySpace page is a mini-web page made just for you. Let us say you have a small business that caters to your community. You would want to have the name of your community on your MySpace page, because if someone is searching for pages in your community, they are going to find your name. MySpace turns just about everything you put down into a keyword.

It is better to be specific if you are creating your keywords. For example: if your business is selling SHOES and put this in your MySpace page, then you are going to be lost in the millions of pages that have SHOES in their web site. However, if you type in RUNNING SHOES, you have created a keyword that will focus on that style of shoe. Be specific and be found.

You can also add links to your MySpace page. This takes a minimal knowledge of HTML, but it isn’t too difficult. You can link your own web page into your MySpace page. What makes this nice is that MySpace is a high ranked web site in which you are back-linking to your site. (See other blog entries by me on this topic.) This means that your web site has a better chance of being closer to the top on the search engines. We all know that the higher your ranking the better the chance for customers to find you.

So you are saying, “I have a small business that just caters to my community. What would I do with MySpace?” You probably don’t know that MySpace offers a wonderful Search Tool that can focus onto your community and seek out people for you to market and inform. You can type in to find people who live anywhere 5-100 miles from your location. These are people who can become potential customers for you.

All right, you’ve decided to take MyAdvice and signed up for MySpace. You have added your web site, you have placed the essential keywords that apply to your business, service, etc… Now you are ready to get people to your site. You will notice, just by signing up, you already have a “Friend”. This is Tom. He started the company. Tom really isn’t your friend. He is just a place-saver and wants you to feel more welcome to the community. However, Tom is iconic in the fact that you want to add MANY more people to that list. You can do this by browsing or searching for people in your area. Type in your zip code and see how many people are in your MySpace area. I live in a small town of 18,000 people. Within 20 miles of me, there are 3000+ people who have a MySpace page. Each of these could be a potential customer to you. What you do is go to THEIR MySpace page and add them to your friend’s list. They will either Approve or Disapprove you. The more friendly your message, the more likely you will be able to add them to your list. As your list grows, you will have more people to reach. You can reach them by sending them a Bulletin or Message. This could include a coupon or something of interest at your business. It could be a press release of something new in your business. Like all mail, not everyone will read this, but it is a way for you to get your name out to the masses.

MySpace is also the perfect place for Viral Marketing. What is viral marketing? It sounds pretty scary, doesn’t it? It has everything to do with people taking something from your MySpace site (or any site) and passing it on to their friends. Remember your demographic. You can create some interesting viral marketing pieces that will get passed on from one MySpace member to the next. The whole site is dedicated to community. “Sneeze” your viral piece out to the masses and see how far it spreads. This could be a small video of something funny, a free MP3 song, an audio file, or anything. Just attach your web site to it, and if it is cool, you may find millions people come to your web site.

One of my clients, www.sexywithin.com , started out by using MySpace to get the name of their online magazine started. They post reminders to their MySpace community and let them know when a new addition has come out. They have members from all over the world and now notify over 690 members each and every month. Their membership is growing at an alarming rate and should reach out to over 1000 people by the end of next month. This is all advertising done for FREE. Think of the cost savings that they are achieving by just sending out a memo once a month. You can –and should – be doing this for your business.

One final bit of advice I would like to add about MySpace. It is primarily a blog site. It is “pinged” each and every time that you post a blog. This means that as people are going to the site looking for new information, they have a chance of coming by your writing and signing up for your blog or becoming one of your friends in the community. Keep writing and you will find more people on your site. Some of the best sites I have found on MySpace are through the “new blog” section. So blog on and gather clients and customers.

See you on MySpace!

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James Fowler is the proprietor of www.mywebsource1.com – a web marketing and design firm aimed at helping small business succeed on the internet. For more information about MySpace or any other online business concerns, please contact him at mywebsource1@gmail.com

Marketing 101 (part four) When Will My Web Site Be Complete?

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

Previous Posts:
Marketing 101 (part one)
Marketing 101 (part two)
Marketing 101 (part three)


“When Will My Web Site Be Done?”


This is probably the most common question I hear from my clients. They want to know when their web site is going to be completed and the money is going to start rolling in. If this is how you are looking at your web site, you are going to be sorely disappointed by the answer. The answer is a simple one. “Your web site is never finished.”

All right. Perhaps that answer is a little too simple. What I should have said was, “If you want your web site to be successful, then your web site is never finished.” A web site is not a brochure that you hand to someone. It is a living, breathing advertising tool that you have to work at – on a weekly, if not daily basis.

But what is there to do? You have paid the designer to build your web site. You have had the text of your site optimized to be search engine friendly. The web site is customized to the needs of your clients. What else can you do? Below is a short list of answers to keep people coming to your web site and have the search engines continue to find your site.

Search Engine Submission: How often do you submit your web site to search engines and directories? You should be within the first two pages of a search engine to have successful results. This is not easily done, but can be achieved with due diligence. When you first start out this process will take 6-8 weeks for the web sites to place you. You can have this time reduced if you pay to do so. For example, Yahoo! will look at your web site within 7 business days for the price of $299.00. I am not suggesting that you do this, but it is an option. I suggest submitting your web site every 4-6 weeks to at least 30 new search engines. There are literally thousands of search engines out there, and you should submit to as many of these as possible. Each search engine has different criteria for indexing to their sites. This is offered as a paid service through my company or you can do this yourself. It takes about 3-4 hours to do initially and if you document everything in your personal files correctly, this time can be reduced with subsequent submissions.

Build a Link Strategy: A very effective method of getting people to your web site is to have a link strategy. This will help bring your web site higher up in search engine pages. Building link strategies is easy to do, as well, but time consuming. Ideally, the links should be incoming to your web site and they should have a relationship with the topic of your site. Be warned that there are FFA (free for all) sites out there that send your link and email out to thousands of web sites. This is basically spamming and will do nothing to help your web site. Some search engines, such as Google, are rumored to actually penalize you for joining these sort of link sites. I would advise against using a FFA site to build your link strategy. Also, do not sign up for too many links at one time. The major search engines also view this as spamming and will penalize your site. I would advise against more than ten links a day.

Create a “What’s New?” page: This is something that you can add to your site to keep people coming back. This is especially helpful if your site is particularly static because it states basic information or is a manufacturing site. There are many items you can place in the What’s New section. These could be a calendar of upcoming trade shows or events, press releases, special offers, or promotions. It could include an educational program that you are offering. The most important aspect of this is that it changes on a regular basis. From this, you can have an email alert to your customers that informs them when something is added to this section. This will help bring people back to your site and also give you permission to email them on a regular basis. It is a proven fact that the more permission you have with your customers, the more they will buy from you. I will speak about permission marketing in a later blog.

Offer Something Free: People love free stuff. They tell their friends about it and this brings more people to your site. A free offer doesn’t have to cost you anything. It can be a coupon or a screen saver. You can find free screen savers on the internet that will allow you to customize them. With these, you can put your web site name and logo to remind your customers of who you are. You can offer free online post cards. This is especially effective if your target audience is children or people with a special interest. You could have online post cards of pets, cars, or landscapes. You just have to find a niche with your customers. Other free items that can be offered are samples of your product. When you introduce something new or are featuring an item, this is the ideal time to offer a free sample. Finally, you could offer an informational piece for free on your products or services. People like to read about information from experts in the field they are interested in. Create an eBook and offer it for free. You will find that the informed customer is the return customer.

These are only a few examples of how your web site should be ever-changing. A fluid web site is a visited web site. If your web site stays static, what need is there for your customers to return to your site other than find your phone number or address? Give them a reason to return and they will. Additionally, the search engines also need to have a reason to come back to your site. If you change your site, they will come back and build the online relationship that you have formed with them.

I hope you find this information useful and will continue to have online success.