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Making money on MySpace isn't as easy as it once was. It used to be incredibly easy to make money on the site. A marketer could create a fake profile, add thousands of friends using an automated program, and then simply send bulletins out to all of those thousands of people.
Then people started complaining about the ridiculous amount of spam messages they were getting from marketers. Some people would receive dozens of daily spam offerings for everything from Viagra to ringtones to payday loans, and everything in between.
Those people started to complain to MySpace, so to salvage their reputation, they got a lot stricter about enforcing their rules. One of the first things they did was put a limit on the number of friends you could add daily. This seriously hampered a lot of people, who were used to adding hundreds or even thousands of people per day to their spam lists using those automated programs.
Then they started cracking down on bulletin spam, banning some users who abused the privilege. Users would find themselves banned within hours of sending out their first bulletin, which cause many marketers to simply give up trying to make money on MySpace.
But smart marketers found out you could still use MySpace to make a great deal of money if you used it properly. Gone were the days of sending out bulletin spam, spamming affiliate links on guestbooks, and spamming the MySpace forums. But you could still promote your offerings tactfully on MySpace.
You should offer MySpace users real value in return for being your friend. If they're just on your list for marketing purposes, make sure you provide them with plenty of free incentives to get them to stay.
Once you've made friends with people, you can direct them to your own websites outside of MySpace. You could ask them to join your forum, sign up to your newsletter, or visit your blog. Once you get your friends to start networking with you outside MySpace, you're free to market to them however you choose.
MySpace won't interfere with your marketing efforts off their site, even if someone reports you for trying to sell them something after they joined your email list from your own private website. Just keep in mind that there's always a chance you could be banned from MySpace for using any kind of marketing there.
Although you can greatly minimize your chances, due to their terms of service that prohibit blatant marketing, there's still that small risk that you should keep in mind. The financial rewards generally makes it worth the risk.
Filed under Social Marketing by 
Web 2.0 is a term that's often misused. Some people use the term to refer to a particular style of graphics design, but that's not what web 2.0 is really about. Web 2.0 is all about user-generated content.
This means the visitors to your site generate the majority of the content on the site, as opposed to the site owner or writers creating the content. A perfect example of web 2.0 is Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network, which is a type of web 2.0 site.
Although the site does post some of its own content, such as the lensmaster tip blog, the vast majority of the site was built by individuals creating their own pages within the site. When a user signs up to the site, they're allowed to position themselves as experts on anything from A-Z (they even have a separate section for R and X rated pages that are kept from the general G-rated public).
They create a unique page on the Squidoo domain, with all sorts of information about their niche topic. They can create or join groups and post in the SquidU forum to communicate with others in the community.
One of the oldest types of web 2.0 sites is the forum. Forums are almost as old as the Internet itself, and they were one of the first types of web 2.0 concepts. Other very old web 2.0 predecessors were guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and classified ad sites.
These days, web 2.0 sites are more complex. Rather than simply posting messages on a forum, users can typically generate their own profiles, create their own custom pages, and have more involvement in creating the site and its content.
There are many different types of web 2.0 sites. MySpace and Facebook are two well-known social networking sites. Blogger is a very popular blog platform, which allows people to develop a type of online diary or journal.
Twitter is somewhat like a blog, only users post very small snippets of content in each post. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to post their favorite links, and allow other people to vote on those links.
Squidoo and HubPages are two sites that let people create pages of information about specific subjects, a bit like a one-page website about a particular topic, similar to Wikipedia. The basic function of web 2.0 sites is to allow users to post their own content to the site.
Web 2.0 sites can be leveraged for marketing purposes if used correctly. The key is to immerse yourself in the community and become known as a real person rather than a nameless marketer hoping to cash in on their pooled traffic generation.
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Social bookmarking is the latest revolution to hit the internet marketing scene and if used correctly can dramatically increase your websites traffic. What makes social bookmarking such a great means of traffic generation is that getting your sites bookmarked doesn't really cost a thing.
Unfortunately, because social bookmarking is freely available to just about anyone, it has become widely abused. Many social bookmarking sites are spammed by internet marketers looking to generate some quick traffic. Spamming the social bookmarking sites can easily result in the loss of your reputation and credibility.
Each submission you make to the social bookmarking sites needs to be carefully reviewed beforehand. Submitting articles laden with keywords is a common form of social bookmarking spam. Articles that are very dense with keywords have a tendency to not make sense. The articles and web pages you submit need to have real value to those who will end up reading them. It's next to impossible for keyword dense content to be of much value to anyone other than the person who submitted it.
The keyword density of your content submissions should ideally be between 6%-8%. If you constantly submit high quality and informative content you will eventually receive a substantial flow of traffic. To make matters worse, Yahoo and Google hate spam and are taking great pains to eliminate junk content before it can be widely distributed.
Creating and mass submitting junk content may seem like a great way to get free traffic but in reality you are just wasting your time. The extra time spent on creating meaningful and user friendly content is well worth the investment of time.
Purchasing private label rights content is a great way for webmasters to leverage their time and outsource their content creation. The trouble is that private label rights content has a way of being viewed as duplicate content. Using duplicate content can get you into trouble with the search engines and can even lead to the impression that you are a spammer.
If you purchase content that is available for other webmasters to use, it is absolutely imperative that you rewrite the content somewhat before you use it as web content. If you are pressed for time then consider hiring an article rewriter who will usually rewrite content at the cost of about $2 an article.
If you have desperately been seeking a means of increasing your web presence but lack the funds necessary for professional SEO, then social bookmarking may be just what you are looking for. But because social bookmarking is freely available to anyone it is very easy to abuse. If you are going to use social bookmarking as part of your overall marketing strategy then you need to take the time to create quality content. After all, the last thing you want is to become seen as a spammer.
More on Marketing Power of Social Bookmarking Without Spamming
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