Free Website Marketing Advice from Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.

As many of you know, MySpace is gaining in popularity with businesses but it is still dominated by teenagers and college students who use it primarily for chatting, sharing pictures, etc. However, MySpace can provide a tremendous amount of direct website traffic for companies selling products or services commonly used by the general public.

A recent book I read, “Plug Your Business“, gives some excellent examples of people using MySpace to market their business but one stands out the most. The general scenario is that of a young man who was writing a novel and wanted to sell his manuscript but couldn’t get a single publisher to read it. So, after two years of writing query letters, he decided to self-publish and promote his novel.

In order to do this, he leveraged his ‘circle of friends’ on MySpace which consisted of other authors and fans of fantasy novels. His first step was to give away a few of his short stories to peak the interest of his friends and within just a few weeks, he was able to attract hundreds of readers and generate a lot of comments.

His next step was to self-publish his book and set up an account with Amazon where he could sell without the need to setup an expensive merchant account, build a website, etc. He then asked the friends he made on MySpace to go to Amazon and purchase a copy of his book. Within a short time, his book was pushed to No. 25 on the fantasy bestseller list and not long after that, he started getting calls from book clubs wanting to do call-in interviews. After that came calls from trade magazines wanting to do stories on him. Near instant success!

While most of you are not authors trying to promote literary material, you do have products or services that can benefit from the power of MySpace in a similar fashion. All it takes is a little of your time to develop out a MySpace profile and spend some time in groups creating a solid list of friends.

Everyone from authors to companies offering technical business consulting can find others looking for help. Don’t assume that because your industry is very “corporate” in feel, you can’t have success with MySpace. My projection is that MySpace will eventually create a clone of itself that’s dedicated to business rather than just chatting and sharing pics. If this happens, you will for sure want to be listed before the change over - taking a little time now will save you months of time in the future.

A quick tid-bit about MySpace - just two years after they launched, MySpace became the most popular US based website gaining more visitors than any other site in 2006.

How Do I Set up A MySpace Account?

MySpace is probably one of the easiest programs to set up an account with and create a profile that will let others know your abilities while lending credibility to your company. Below are the basic steps - if you need further help, let me know and I will gladly help.

• Step 1: navigate to http://www.myspace.com and click on the “Sign Up” tab found in the upper right hand corner.
• Step 2: fill out the information form that appears after clicking on “Sign Up”.
  • the password section on the sign up form will require that you use letters and numbers in your chosen password.
  • *note - if you don’t want to use your primary email address, you can sign up with Gmail for a free email address.
• Step 3: after clicking the submit button, the next page will ask you to enter a series of letters or numbers to verify that you are a real person and not server generated spam. Fill it out and click “Continue to My Account”.
• Step 4: upload a photo - this is an optional step that you can skip if you want but eventually you will want to include a photo of yourself or your company logo for use on your profile.
• Step 5: invite your friends to MySpace - skip this step for now.
• Step 6: you should have gotten an email from MySpace - in there is a link that lets you confirm your email - be sure and do this.
• Step 7: in the upper left corner of your profile page, there is a link that say, “Pick your MySpace URL”. Click on this and set up a permanent URL - it should be your name or company name and will look like: www.myspace.com/yourname
• Step 8: now that the hard part is done, you will need to set up your profile. On the left side of the page is a section titled, “Control Panel” - this is where you can edit your profile, upload photos, video, manage a blog, etc. You will want to go through each section and make sure that you fill it out as much as possible.

Some important things to remember are that you should only list information that you want people to see. Posting embarrassing or inappropriate comments or pictures is sure to limit your ability to network with other people. For more information on this, read “Social Media - Recipe For Disaster?”

If you have any questions or comments on setting up and using a MySpace account, please let me know.

When you get registered, give me a shout on MySpace - http://www.myspace.com/semarketing

Yahoo! just announced today that they have encountered some financial troubles during the last part of 2007 and as a result, they will be laying off 1,000 employees.

So, what does this mean for you as a business owner utilizing Yahoo’s pay per click advertising program?  Probably nothing right now but it does show that Yahoo’s hold in the search engine market is continuing to decline.

As a Yahoo! advertiser, you should be concerned with this and continual monitoring of this downward spiral is warranted.  If the growth rate does not swing up over the coming months, I would not suggest increasing the amount of monthly spending you do with Yahoo!

For the full store on the Yahoo! Lay Offs, follow the link below.

http://www.umbrellanews.com/story/read/D8UFR6K00 

Trevor Walter : Freelance Marketing Group, Inc. 

Everybody knows that email marketing can put valuable information about your company, products or services in front of potential customers but it can also lead to wasted money when your emails get caught in spam filters.

So, is there still value in email marketing? Absolutely! The key to creating a successful email marketing campaign is to target your existing customers, assuming you have any. Buying email lists can be useful but sending targeted newsletters about new products or services to your existing customers is a great way to gain repeat business. If people were willing to purchase from you once, they will do it again.

The biggest advantage to email newsletters is that your existing customers have probably had emails from you in the past and that means that your email address is most likely not blocked by spam filters, junk email filters, etc. Take advantage of this, put together an email that is enticing, informative and has a call to action (request for quote, call us for best price, etc.).

Don’t let your customers become a customer of your competitor. A little communication with them once or twice a month will go a long ways to keeping them long term.

Trevor Walter - Freelance Marketing Group, Inc.