How to Use MySpace to Market Affiliate Products

In any kind of sales, whether it's in Cyberspace or in the "Brick and Mortar" world, you must have two things to be successful:

• Something to sell, and
• Someone to sell it to.

MySpace and other social networking sites give the Internet marketer a built-in audience for products and services. Clickbank and other digital product sites give the Internet marketer something to sell. Digital products have the advantage over other products in that there are no shipping charges and hassles. The file- an e-book, or software- is sent to the buyer over the Internet, either by a download link or by email once payment is made.

Step One- If you don't already have a MySpace account, go to http://www.myspace.com and start one. You will not be using this profile in your marketing efforts- this is for you personally, to show you how MySpace works. This is a free service.

Step Two- Go to Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com , and familiarize yourself with the product offerings. There are other sites that offer digital products, but Clickbank is the most popular and the easiest to get started with. Opening an Affiliate account with Clickbank is free- a Publisher account will cost you around $50. You will see that the products are divided into categories.

Think for a minute about the three universal human needs:

• Love
• Money
• Health

Pick out some products that offer solutions to each of these needs, or that fit what we call "niches". Go to the pitch page, and familiarize yourself with three products for each of the three human needs. Pick out one product in particular for each of these three needs that you would buy yourself, and would feel good about promoting.

Once you are familiar with Clickbank, another useful site is Clickbank trends, http://www.cbtrends.com. This gives you a performance report on all Clickbank products, a report on the new products recently released, and many other useful reports. Now, you are ready to get going on your marketing campaign.

Step Three- Sign up for ten free email accounts. Use Yahoo! Mail, hotmail, gmail, etc. You will need a separate email account for each MySpace profile that you create. Think of each profile as an actor or actress.

Step Four- Create profiles for each of these email accounts based on the niche products that you identified on Clickbank. You can find images to use on Google.com, under Google Images. What you are doing is creating ten actors and actresses.

Here are some points to consider when choosing images and profile information for your characters:

• Demographics: Most MySpace users are young adults. Your actors should be under 30 years old, unless you have a product that you plan to market to older people.
• Gender: People have done marketing studies and have found that females are more popular to work with than males. So, most of your profiles should be actresses. I would say to work with seven actresses and three actors.
• Build the profiles to match the Clickbank products. Make a profile of an overweight person looking for something to solve that problem. MySpace allows you to sort for overweight people. Make a profile of a person who is a single parent with money problems. They should have an income of less than $30,000 a year. This is the perfect person who would benefit from products that would allow them to earn money from home or start an online business. You can have a person who is a smoker and who wants to quit smoking and needs an e-book or other digital product to get them started down the smoke-free road. Again- choose products that you feel good about promoting, and build profiles of people (actors/actresses) who have a need for those products.

Step Five- Pimp that profile! If you Google "MySpace Layouts", you will find hundreds of sites offering free MySpace Layouts, glitter graphics, etc. The idea here is to make the profile look like a real person. Find a profile that fits the actor/actress, and pimp it out with a sports layout for an athletic person, a frilly "girlie-girl" look for a feminine actress, etc. Add some more pictures, interests- flesh out the profile to make it look like a real person.

Step Six- Invite friends to your profile. This is where you will need to make a small investment in some software. There are several products on the market that automate the process of inviting friends to your profile, along with other functions such as making comments, etc. Two of these are Badder Adder and Adder Robot. Personally, I like Adder Robot better, even though it is more limited in the number of friend invites allowed each day. Adder Robot is easier to use. MySpace currently limits the number of friend invites permitted each day to 400. Once you hit 50 friends invited during the course of a day, you will start to get boxes that require you to fill in letters and numbers (alphanumeric code), called CAPTCHA boxes, which weeds out non-human users. These friend-adding "bot programs" will figure out how to bypass the CAPTCHA boxes, and them MySpace will advance their technology to get around the bots bypass technology. It's a never-ending duel.

When you do your friend invites, keep the product in mind that the actress/actor is promoting. If you are promoting weight loss e-books, sort for those people who say they have "excess baggage". Sort for smokers to sell the "stop Smoking" software. Sort for those who don't make much money (income under $30,000 a year) and who are "proud parents" and "single" to find the audience most receptive to money-making products, especially "get rich quick" type offerings. Build up your friend base gradually, over a week or two. One of the red flags that MySpace looks for is profiles that get hundreds of friends within a few days. Also, make sure that all of your actors and actresses are added to each other's profiles as friends, setting the stage for a network.

Step Seven- Post to your blogs. Make a starter post such as "Hello, how is everyone! It's great to be on MySpace." Tell a little about your character. The second or third posts should discuss an event in the news, or an event in the "person's" life, such as a new baby, new job, new house, etc. Don't jump in too quickly and try to sell something on the very first post.

After three or four general posts, your character should start talking about the main problem in their life- being overweight, needing to quit smoking, a broken romance (or no romance at all), needing to earn more money. Post bulletins advertising your new blog posts to your friend/audience.

This is where the rest of your cast of actors and actresses come in. At different times of the day, have these other characters post responses to the blog. One or two should post a "Yes, I know what you mean, I have the same problem, too" type response. Then, along comes the actress/actor with the solution to the problem at hand- a great e-book, piece of software, etc. that solved that very same problem for them. "Yes, I was overweight all my life until I discovered a great book called "Fat Loss for Dummies". Take a look at it right HERE. Of course, insert the appropriate html code for your affiliate link for the product and make the word "HERE" a clickable link. Follow up a few days later with more of your acting crew extolling the virtues of the products- "Yes, I went to the site and bought the product and it seems to be working for me". Of course, make your language more specific to the problem and product in question.

Repeat this process with each of your characters and different products. Track the success of each promotion using the tools provided by Clickbank.

Here's to your Online Success!