Marketing on MySpace

You've finally logged onto MySpace just to look around or to keep an eye on your kids, you see the kids, the teenage girls, the bands, the politicians and lo and behold you see the real estate agent from down the street, your insurance agent and your house painter! Now, your wondering, "What's going on on MySpace?"

Well, I think it all started with the politicians, they just couldn't resist the opportunity for free advertising and they knew that there were a lot of young college people on MySpace who were old enough to vote. Then I think the parents who were watching over their kids activities started noticing all the major companies who pay for advertising on MySpace and they realized the tremendous marketing potential.

Okay, so now this is getting interesting, but what do you put on your profile? Do you put photos of your family & your dog? Do you blog about your vacation and aunt Linda's gall bladder operation? Do you have to fill in all the categories? Do you have to list all you favorite TV shows? All you really want to do is talk about your business!

Well thankfully, the hackers are way ahead of you. There are, you will find, websites that provide secret HTML & CSS code that will allow you to remove sections of your profile that you do not want to use. One of those websites is: www.freecodesource.com which I find to be very easy to navigate and all their codes actually work. So you could start there and copy and paste the codes that you want to use to make your profile have your own custom layout.

Then you will need to go to your home page and click on "Edit Profile" so that you can start to type in the content of your page. Don't worry you can always change this later, just start filling in the sections that you want to use. After you are done writting the content go up to top of the page on the right hand side and click on "Profile Editor". This will open up the MySpace editor for you so that you can now add a background picture or choose the background color, choose your font style, size and color and determine the look and feel of your new page. If you are not sure what you want to do, then browse around and look at other business profiles to get ideas from other pages. Take notes about what you like and what you do not like so you will have some idea of where to begin.

If you want to add a slide show to your page simply click on the link below one of the slide shows that you've seen on someone's profile and it will take you to a website where you can create your own slide show. The same is true for the voice players that you have seen that start playing when someone views the page. One other feature that you will want to take advantage of is the comment feature. You will want to create a banner ad that you can save in your photos folder and copy and paste into the comment section of your friends pages. This is a little tricky so if you don't know how to do this contact me and I will be happy to show you how or make one for you at a very low cost.

You are now ready to go out there and start making friends! The best way to do this is to go to "Browse" and do a search by zipcode. You can select the geographical area that you want the search to include by selecting the miles away from your zipcode. You can also put in an age range that you want to target in your search. This is a great feature as it allows you to really target your intended market. Now you are ready to start clicking, looking and inviting people to become your friend and add you to their friends list. Be sure to pay attention to the friends that your friends have on their lists as well as many business owners also have other business owners on their friends list.

Now, if all of this sounds a little overwhelming to you right now then you may want to pay someone to set-up your profile for you. What could take you 36 hours to do they might be able to do in half that time. What you want to be focusing on is what you know and what is your strong suit which is the content of your profile page and blogs. If you focus on what you want to say and then let someone else do the technical geeky stuff you will be much happier, and be up and running faster and ready to start reaping the benefits of online network marketing!

~ Debra Miller ~

The Small Business Network of Orlando

http://www.smallbizorlando.com/