Marketing With Myspace?

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For those who may not have heard of it, http://MySpace.com is an enormous "social networking" website that has taken the internet by storm. As of early 2007, it was estimated that nearly half of the American populace over the age of 14 had at least one account at MySpace, with the result of account numbers approaching 150 million as of this writing. Every day thousands of new accounts are created at MySpace, many of these for marketing purposes. But is it a good idea to use this vast resource for marketing and attempts at making money online?

The story goes that MySpace was originally designed with musicians and artists in mind, even thought its founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe were clearly tried-and-true businessmen themselves whose previous businesses included selling email addresses to marketers, resulting in numerous complaints about spamming. The long and tumultuous history of MySpace ended up with young Tom and Chris making a fortune when MySpace was bought by megamedia maven Rupert Murdoch for hundreds of millions of dollars. Murdoch promptly aimed to turn MySpace into another of his corpulent cash cows.

With such a background, it would seem that MySpace would be a rich mine for marketing and marketers, and many people believe that it is. In fact, many marketers have made thousands - some, rumor has it, even millions - of dollars on MySpace, and an entire industry of MySpace marketing techniques and products has cropped up, including ebooks, video courses and software. Some of these methods and products are legit, in the sense that they play by the MySpace rules, but a number of them violate MySpace's rigid "anti-marketing" terms of service. This fact has not stopped either unwary or unscrupulous individuals from using these services to create a massive amount of accounts with automated software that includes the ability to add thousands of friends per day, for example, essentially developing a huge "mailing list" to send messages and bulletins to. MySpace's non-marketing population, however, becomes peeved with the endless solicitations to download ringtones and engage in other marketing ploys. With enough complaints from the MySpace community, these accounts are quickly deleted, without notice. With such a large number of accountholders, however, not a few innocent individuals have gotten caught in this trap as well and had their accounts summarily removed. The question remains then, can the MySpace community bring fruits to its laborers? Technically, yes, because MySpace's purported purpose is to showcase talent and creativity, such that musicians and artists, for example, are actually encouraged to market or "show themselves off."

All of the marketing prohibition appears odd in consideration of the fact that MySpace itself appears to have been devised with the desire of targeting the youthful demographic of 18-35, with its large amount of disposable income. MySpace itself uses the personal information provided by users to sell to them, but its TOS are evidence that it is jealously guarding its market. Nevertheless, even while adhering strictly to MySpace's terms of service there are certainly "kosher" ways to make money on this megasite, and many will continue to do so. With an enormous online presence that has eclipsed even Google, it seems that MySpace and its bevy of hungry artists and marketers are here to stay.

By: Jamie Clarkson -

Jamie Clarkson has been making money online since 1997. For more information about Internet Marketing, you can go to supermarketingaffiliates.com.

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SAN ANTONIO - For Scott Winters, a master inventor, distinguished engineer and director of development at IBM in Austin, inspiration can come from anywhere.

"Wherever I go now I constantly see things that I can do better or different, whether it's going to the supermarket or a football game or driving the car and coming to work," said Winters, 51.

He was sitting in the food court at an Austin mall while his family shopped when he came up with a new system for a cell phone network that he later patented. Winters modeled a directory of cellular services on the way kiosk vendors display their merchandise.
That kind of innovative thinking makes Winters one of the top patent producers at IBM. He received 25 patents last year; during his 18 years with the company, his total is 65 patents and another 40 pending.

For the 14th consecutive year, IBM topped the list of patent recipients, according to IFI Claims Patent Services, which compiles its annual report from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data.

"Electronic technology is a hot area these days and will continue to be," said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Claims, based in Wilmington, Del.

Some electronic patents have a short lifespan, so companies are continually filing new ones on the latest innovations, she said.

IBM this week announced that it received a record 3,621 patents in 2006. The Austin campus received 640, up from 550 a year earlier. Fifty were related to Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console, on which IBM worked with Sony and Toshiba.

At IBM, patents are rarely issued to a single person; usually three or four people share in the development of one, said Winters, who develops mentoring groups with people at different stages of their careers.

The patents awarded to Winters last year focus primarily on cell phone software. This year's submissions to the patent office, he said, all will be based on social networking.
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Guerrilla Marketing for Your Retail Business

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Guerrilla marketing has been in the news lately. Perhaps you've heard about Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotion that drew out bomb squads in Boston and made front-page news across the country. Some say the attempt went awry; some say any press is good press. Whatever the case, it was guerrilla marketing.

Just to refresh your memory, guerrilla marketing is about gaining the maximum exposure for a company, event, product, service or person with the minimum amount of cash. Instead of a big budget, marketers rely on time, energy, information and knowledge to draw a crowd. Does low- or no-cost sound like a welcome relief to your budget? Let’s review some easy-to-implement guerrilla marketing tactics for your retail business.

Many retail entrepreneurs are in a great position to use holidays for promoting their businesses. Every month has a holiday except August. And if you don't find one that fits, make one up: National Haircut Day, Treat-a-Dog Day or Buy Roses for No Reason Day, for instance. These types of themed days can even get you extra media coverage, so be sure to let the media know about your made-up holiday and promotion.

Another way to get press is writing special-interest articles on relevant topics, such as "The History of Valentine's Day" or "How the Poinsettia Became So Popular." Feeding the news community with this information positions your business not only as a resource for information related to holidays, but also as the place to shop for holiday-related gifts.

Other guerrilla ideas for retailers are events or contests. The event could be an open house, or a meet the expert, meet the mayor or meet the press. Contests can be simple, such as guessing the number of roses in a car for a florist or predicting the day a certain milestone will be reached--the thousandth guest or millionth sale, for instance. These suggestions may sound corny, but hopefully they'll get your creativity going.

The most powerful guerrilla suggestion for retailers is to keep track of your customers and prospects. Prospects have already expressed interest in you, so marketing to them should produce sales. Use a guest book in your business or hold a drawing and collect names and contact information from the entries. This pool of prospects will prove more valuable than any mass advertising. And remember, when you get contact information, put it in a database and be sure to get permission from your prospects before e-mailing them.

Guerrilla marketing can--and often will--push boundaries. It’s OK to be on the edge, to test extremes, to get attention and to take calculated risks. Sending seasonal greeting cards falls into this calculated risk category. Imagine getting a greeting card from your favorite retailer wishing you a happy July 17. No special day, really, just an arbitrary greeting--maybe including a promotional offer. People love getting greetings at unexpected times, and you'll get attention for your gesture.

Another easy way to get noticed is putting candy in with each item you sell, which will also help you gain attention and stand out from others. Brainstorm marketing ideas with co-workers and suppliers. Try a few. Repeat what works. Fix what doesn’t. You may surprise yourself with how well your marketing takes off with your budget still intact.

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Al Lautenslager is the "Guerrilla Marketing" coach at Entrepreneur.com and is an award-winning marketing and PR consultant and direct-mail promotion specialist. He's also the principle of Market For Profits, a Chicago-based marketing consulting firm. His two latest books,Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days and The Ultimate Guide to Direct Marketing are available at www.entrepreneurpress.com.

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Generate Ad Revenue With Your Website

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If you have a website that provides free information or a free service, you may be sitting on a potential goldmine. It is possible to generate ad revenue with any website, even if it is just a blog or a message board. For our purposes here, we will review each of the different income streams available to you as a webmaster so that you can formulate a plan to turn your free service into a money making business.

The simplest way to get some ads running on your website is by displaying banners or text links for affiliate programs, strategically placed on your webpage where people will see the advertisements and subsequently click on them.

An affiliate program is a program whereby you, the affiliate, display a banner or text link advertising the products or services of another business. If someone clicks on that ad and then purchases something from that other company, you will be paid a commission on that sale.

There are thousands of affiliate programs available to you. Major corporations such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble have affiliate opportunities, as do smaller online businesses such as insurance quoting websites and internet dating services.

I recommend that you perform a search on Google for affiliate programs and sign up for those that either somehow relate to the topics being discussed on your website or are enticing enough that people will click on the banner ad. You should rotate different banners on to your website each day of the week, and then stick with those that work best. Try several different affiliate programs and see what works.

Another way you can make money with your site is by displaying pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on your webpage. You need to sign up with companies that deliver PPC ads. Nextag has a pay-per-click program, as do several ad delivery services such as Adrevolver. Google Adsense is probably the most popular pay-per-click advertisement delivery service on the internet, and you should sign up with them as well.

It is also possible to make some significant ad revenue from your site by actually charging companies a fee to advertise on your website. This is easier said than done; your website has to establish itself as receiving a lot of high quality traffic.

If you have a website that gets thousands of hits per day, you need to have statistics that prove it so that you can justify someone paying a fee to advertise on your website. The more popular your site is, the more you can charge. Only if your website receives a ton of traffic will you be able to charge other websites a fee to display their banner on your site.

The best way to make money online is with a dealer program, which is a little different from an affiliate program. With a dealer program, you actually add a webpage to your own site that is tailored to fit the look and feel of your own website, rather than simply displaying an affiliate banner.

With a dealer program, the products or services of the other company are actually sold directly through your own website, so that you are in total control of the sale. Meanwhile, the parent company does all the order processing and shipping, etc. You can just sit back and collect your money.

I hope this information has been helpful. Sometimes, it is easier to make money with a website that provides nothing but free information than it is with an actual business. However, you will need to run ads for products or services that somehow relate to the subject matter of your site.

If your site provides information about obtaining a mortgage, then your site should have affiliate banners or links to mortgage quoting services. There needs to be a relationship between between what kind of information your site provides and what you are advertising. Doing this will enable you to turn your free website into a real business.

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About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.

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