MySpace – Internet Marketers Delight

If you are into internet marketing, MySpace is an invaluable tool in your SEO arsenal. My space is social community platform which has exploded in the last few years as a favorite hangout for members from around the world.

There are millions of members and every day tens of thousands are still joining the MySpace bandwagon to network and socialize on the virtual world. You can also find old friends whom you may have lost contact with.

Just like google which became a household name with a generic word “google it” MySpace is well on its way to become a brand synonymous with online communities. Though there are many online communities such as ‘Orkut’ or ‘facebook’ MySpace has caught the imagination of online world and becoming the most dominant one. For the Internet Marketing community, MySpace offers a huge resource base in terms of a global audience and is the best place to network and build your business in the social community.

So who are the people on MySpace?

The answer to this question is just about everyone. An answer of everyone to this question is also fitting because individuals from different cultures around the world and different age groups are all using MySpace.

Unlike online message boards and discussion forums where members are usually somewhat similar and share a particular interest, there are members who are vastly different in the MySpace community. MySpace members represent just about all nationalities, sexual orientations, financial levels, occupations, political beliefs, religions and other variables. While it is true that members who are vastly different may not be interacting to a tremendous extent on MySpace there is certainly representation from all walks of life on MySpace.

It is important to note that members’ websites are viewable to the public unless they are specifically designated as private websites. This means many members’ websites can be viewed by those who do not join MySpace. These individuals are known as lurkers and they effectively increase the size of the community by an immeasurable number.

Lurkers may be completely harmless individuals who are just looking to read about others they can be predators. The latter is more serious because these lurkers can use the information they find on MySpace to stalk or otherwise harass members of their own community. Many members of MySpace include both pictures and their hometown on their MySpace profile. This information can be used, by unscrupulous predators, to gather more information about the individual. Many web frauds originate from social media sites and for this reason adequate care should be taken when posting information on MySpace.

With all this going for MySpace a word of warning is appropriate. There are guidelines regarding the types of materials which can be posted on MySpace but there is always the potential for questionable materials to escape the attention of the MySpace administrators. There is a very distinct possibility that members will be offended by content that is permissible. Parents should keep a watch on young and impressionable children on the communities they use on MySpace.

Like all social media MySpace can sometimes become addictive with members spending increasing amounts of time updating their website or searching for new friends in the community. Spend your time wisely and MySpace could be the perfect place to do business online as well as socialize on the internet.

Internet Marketing Through the Social Media

Social Media has become very important in an internet marketers promotional arsenal. Simply described the social media is a platform where people gather and form communities to discuss and share information. The platform - a website which provides technology for integration of the written word, audio and video – can be used by members to post their information in any form. The internet marketer could use these communities to place subtle messages or provide links during his own conversations in a unobtrusive and natural manner.

One of the greatest distinctions between an industrial or company website and the social media sites is that the content originates from users and not the promoters of specific business.

Internet marketers could effectively use this to contribute his own content to interested communities and create huge traffic to his own web sites.

The social media could be in different forms offering different applications to its communities.

Some of the major such social media applications are:

Blogs such as blogger.com and wordpress.com. You can create your own web pages once you set up your account and post content regularly.

Micro blogs. The most famous is Twitter.com. Twitter allowes send and receive one sentence communications of 140 characters. Once you sign up you can chose to receive messages from people who share similar interest. The messages can also be received through SMS and RSS.

Then there are the social networking sites such as facebook.com, linked in.com, orkut.com or my space.com being the most popular ones. The networking sites offer many interesting applications for users to share content and create huge common interest communities. The networking in these sites has become so popular and widespread that some of the organizations have banned them from being used by their staff to increase productivity.

Then there are the book marking sites such as delicious.com and stumbleupon.com. These sites allow the user to find pages and store them online. The users can also post comments and rate different websites, pages or videos. These can then be accessed by interested peer user communities based on the recommendations.

Internet marketing community can use news sharing sites such as dig.com or reddit.com. In these news mediums you can share any web pages you found interesting on the internet with your own comments and voting on them. Based on the voting they will be ranked up or down on the site.
Then there are the photo sharing and vdeo sharing. We all know flickr and youtube.com.

Now there are tons of other such social media sites for the internet marketer to make use of and profit from quick traffic through these sources. However a word of caution. Don’t use these sites blatantly for posting buy messages or self promotion as the people using these communities have come together for sharing interest and fun and blatant commercial exploitation could have you banned quickly.

The best way to use these communities to market is to blend in with the community and let your products be discovered naturally by the users. Once you learn the art of marketing to these communities effectively, you could be generating a huge and profitable internet traffic and income.