MySpace. You've surely heard of it. Most of you probably have an account that you use to keep in contact with friends. Others may only know of it as "that place the predators hang-out", but if that's all you know about MySpace you're realy missing the BIG picture. MySpace is the largest online social networking portal on the internet with 61+ milion registered users and over 50 milion unique visitors per month, and the site is STILL growing. MySpace is curently the second largest destination, by page views, on the entire internet.The MySpace visitor demographics are nearly an equal split between men and women and the primary age of the site visitor is between 16 and 34. There are 1.4 milion registered bands on MySpace and the site reaches more men than ESPN.com. All that, and you stil won't have to talk to more than 5 people to find someone who says "I hate MySpace". That's fine. Let them dismiss it, while you and I take advantage of one of the largest opportunities in internet marketing you may ever to come across.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It is important for you to understand that it is against the MySpace "Terms of Service" to do any marketing on their site with the intention of profiting, but that does not mean you may not market "something". Look on almost any profile and you wil find people promoting something. They're promoting themselves, their bands, and some blatantly selling items on their profiles, some with afiliate links and some more discreetly. Everyone is essentialy marketing something. Your interpretations of these rules will be your guide to what is "black hat", "white hat" or that gray area in between. So let's get started already! Let's look at the squeaky side of MySpace marketing. if there ever was one.

Get started Now!

There are milions and milions of registered users on Myspace. Everyone has a profile. So make yourself one (or a new one). And since you're wearing your "white hat" you can do your best to tell everyone who you are while not telling everyone anything personal. You are never going to put your real name, number address, etc. on Myspace. Don't even use a real email address. It's not required to register or varify and account. If you feel you must, create free email account with yahoo, google, or msn to use with MySpace - again using no real personal information.

If you've been poking around Myspace you're probably wondering why everyone's profile looks cool and unique and yours looks so blah! Well trick it out! You can go to any one of the thousands of sites that give away free codes, graphics and stuf for your profile page. Search Google for Myspace Layout and you'l see what I mean. Go ahead and make your profile "yours". This is what social networks are - a chance to tell the world who you are and what you're about in a one page profile. Add music, images, videos, voice recordings, text, blogs, just about anything you can imagine. If you do happen to go on to become a full fledged marketer, there are many more tools, resorces and such below.

By now you're probably geting impatient and wondering how the heck you make money doing this. Relax, we're geting there. Ok, so you've got a profile and let's make up a topic for the sake of our example. Let's say you're totaly into Xbox 360 and playing games. You wouldn't be alone right? In fact if you go to Google and search for the term "Myspace Xbox" you'l get over 3.5 milion results. Now what? Well you can start visiting the profiles one at a time, and you can click the "Add Friend" buton on each one. It sends a request to the user to add you as a friend. If they accept, you become "friends". Then you do it another few thousand times and you've got a list of friends interested in the same thing as you. you can call this a "niche." It works well, but it takes time. We'll come back to this in a minute, but let me tel you about a few things to save you a ton of time.

Friend "bots" or "adderbots" as they're known are robot programs or "bots" that wil go out and send these friend requests for you, hundreds at a time. There are many out there and they all have their up's and down's. I use two different programs: You can find and grab a copies by visiting my website. Several complete videos demonstrating in detail how to use some of the advanced features of thes programs are included in the member's areas.

Another quick way to get friends for free is to visit and join a "train". This is a place where you join up to let others know you're trying get a lot of friends in a hurry, and you know they want the same thing. Now this type of friend adding is completely untargeted, but you can build a friends list of thousands in a week this way. A few good train locations are listed on my website.

Ok, back to your niche. So you add a few thousand (or more) friends that are into Xbox 360. One of the keys is to remember, this is a "social" network. So socialize! Comment on your new found friends sites, visit their websites, read their Blogs, join their groups. Across the top of every MySpace page is the top navigation bar. On that bar you'll see "Groups". Click on it, and then search Xbox. Guess how many "groups" there are on MySpace for Xbox? 3100! The largest Xbox related group has over 31,000 members, second largest nearly 20,000, then 16k, 11k, 10k..you get the idea. Literaly hundreds of thousands of users that have joined a group devoted to Xbox. Some are general "Gamers" some are "Xbox Live" junkies. but all are into your niche. Join some groups. This is another great way to find friends interested in your niche.

Now if you just start "spamming the PS3 out of everyone" in your group, you're going to get banned and likely deleted from MySpace in a hury. And there are a few ways to deal with that. Depending on which hat you've decided to wear.remember the "black hat". well you can have 50 profiles, all Xbox related and just continue to market and get deleted, market and get deleted, all the while making money. Or you can be more subtle about it and stay more within the rules al while wearing a prety clean and atractive white hat :o).

In this scenario you'd be wearing the "gray hat" which is somewhere in between "white hat" (methods that don't realy break the rules) and "black hat" (methods that outwardly violate rules, terms, or conditions for the sold purpose of individual gain). So you have al these friends. you're chating with them, slowly gaining credibility, knowledge, and maybe posting in your blogs, you send a message to your buddies saying "hey, I found this great cheat code site - check it out!"

Go to Google and do a search for "Xbox Afiliate" and you'll get the idea. There are hundreds of Xbox related afiliate programs. Cheat codes, hardware, software, accessories.everything. All you do is sign up as an afiliate and send you MySpace friends interested in Xbox some afiliate links to products they might enjoy. Anytime one of them makes a purchase you get an afiliate commission. money in the bank. You're still in that "gray area" here because you're marketing for profit and remember it's against the Myspace TOS, but let's be creative. Let's make a small site.related to Xbox. Maybe an Xbox blog of your own or an Xbox game review site.

You invite your buddies day after day to your site, and on your site you can market whatever you want. There's not realy much objection to mentioning your own website to your friends if you do it tastefuly and aren't over-aggressive because after al, your website could be your hobby or interest, and hobbies and interests are things that are perfect to talk about on your MySpace profile. You can have Google Adsense advertisements on your website, afiliate links, build a mailing list. and you're driving free targeted trafic there using Myspace!

Ok, let's take a step back and review what we've gone over real quick.

Make a profile or make a bunch of profiles. Be specific and target a niche, or be general and add tons of untargeted friends. Use a bot to speed up the process. Pick which ?hat' to wear and get started. Use profile searches, groups and advanced search techniques to target your desired friends. Decide how aggressively or passively to market. Use afiliate programs to generate revenue. Drive trafic out of Myspace to your site. Use Adsense, afiliate marketing, pay per lead ads, & more to generate revenue.

All that and we're just geting started! We've realy only discussed one niche I picked out of the air - Xbox.

Most people think that Myspace is a huge untargeted market, but that's just because they don't know how to use the tools available to narow it down and find targeted leads. How about one of the most popular tactics, marketing on Myspace for a local band. MySpace is widely known for its wide assortment of bands that use it to promote their craft. This is an opportunity for you - even if you're not in a band! How? Let's go back to the Myspace toolbar at the top of the page. Back to Browse. Now look at the botom of the top section of the Basic tab. See the postal code section and the miles of box? Put in your zip code and 50 miles in the miles of box. Up above in the between ages box, select 21 as the young and 50 as the old. Also select Both under "Browse For:" and then click update.

This wil return all the men and women that are over 21 that are within 50 miles of your zip code. Get to work on building your friends list. Let's pretend you market yourself to bands in your area as a promoter. For the price of $100 you'l build them a list of people on MySpace within 50 miles of their hometown (or wherever their gig is). Then for a recuring fee you'l send out comments, messages, buletins and event invites to "their list" at a given schedule for "x" amount of time before an event. Poof you're a promoter. With some training, you would have no problem whatsoever promoting bands on Myspace.

Speaking of making more money from Myspace, but not "on" Myspace, here is another tactic you can make a profile, add friends using a bot and whoretrains. Get to say 10,000 friends (in a few weeks) and sell that account on eBay for $100 or more. Make 100 accounts with 1000 friends and sell them for $10 each. are you geting the idea yet? Making Myspace accounts and adding friends is a cinch once you've got the knowledge.

Perhaps your specialty is graphic or web design? You can ofer your services customizing other people's profiles on Myspace for a smal fee. Even if graphics & web design is not your specialty after learing how to do it, you'll be able to make the coolest Myspace profiles for your clients quickly, easily, thoroughly, & eficiently. Turn yourself into a Myspace money making machine!

These are just a few of the many ways you can monetize your MySpace eforts. I'm going to bulet-point a few more without going into detail about them. But the point is, there is such a tremendous opportunity here.

I can't teach you everything you need to know in this brief about Myspace marketing, but hopefuly I've peaked your curiosity and got your creative juices flowing. If you visit the sites I have provided, and use the tools and resorces you can find tons of step by step training videos, profile editing tools, and a very active members only forum where every single tactic we've discussed (and about 40 more) are outlined, detailed, demonstrated and discussed.

The Myspace marketing platform is changing daily so don't wait! Get in on it now!

Check out my website for more info.

About the Author

My name is Jason Stilwell. I started MoneyInCollege.com with the sole purpose of showing students worldwide simple, fun and effective ways of making extra money in college and to connect you with others who share in this interest. <P align=left>-Jason Stilwell MoneyInCollege.com