October 31st, 2006
MySpace is a community with about 130,000,000 members. It is hard to say how many accounts are genuine and active and how many are bogus and inactive, but the web site lures thousands of Internet marketers hungry for traffic and affiliate sales. It is not a secret that it is hard to rank high in Google and people consider MySpace as a nice alternative to drive visitors to their offers and websites.
But reality is that it looks like MySpace as a marketing channel becomes less and less attractive:
Getting too many friends fast? Get banned
Using mass messengers? Get banned
Any member reports you as a spammer? Get banned
Yes, you an start new accounts, but this is not the way to spend you time.
The most valuable asset of this social website – friends – you need as many friends as possible to convert a tiny portion of them into your website visitors or your affiliate offer customers. You can buy MySpace accounts (at the moment the market price is about $4.00 for an account with 1000 friends). But these friends are 99% auto generated with some trains or received via BadderAdder program or similar. Such accounts are of low marketing value.
And it is obvious that it is numbers game - you need thousands and thousands of ‘friends’ to achieve a decent result. MySpace members are reluctant to react to all those spam offers and deals they get.
The other side of the story are offers that webmasters try to promote using MySpace traffic.
CPA affiliate networks are against this sort of marketing (that is associated in their minds with spam). Sample: Maxbounty takes a Stance on Myspace Promotion
CPC networks share this point and if you abuse their TOS with sending too many clicks from MySpace traffic – you will get banned. Yahoo! Publisher Network statred to close accounts driving MySpace traffic months ago, Google AdSense was less strict, but now catches up.
What’s left? CPM? Need toooo many views to earn a considerable amount. Adult programs? Not allowed with MySpace (as well as other regulated industries offers). Some indie programs? Probably, this one still works.
There are other ways to make money with MySpace - but their days are numbered as MySpace owners do not want their project turned into some kind of linkdump or spam website.
Many webmasters complain that MySpace marketing is not so easy and profitable as it used to be back in 2004. I really admire those early adopters who discovered this marketing treasure room back in 2004.
I do not think that MySpace is useless for website owners now. It is simply not so easy. It takes time to add targeted friends, to build your profile and relations. It is likely to be a lasting source of traffic to your own web sites, but it will take much harder work that it used to be.
Summary: The question is if there is any ‘legitimate’ way to use MySpace as a marketing channel?
Yes, but it takes time and hard effort like building and promoting good quality websites. Target the demographics that fit nicely your web site topic. Add your friends gradually, join a group or start your own, build a brandable profile.
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It is a popular topic of forum discussions. One place is a particularly good source of information on this topic: