Can MySpace Work With Affiliate Marketing?
If you haven’t listened to the latest AffiliateThing by Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille, you need to download that now and give a quick listen. There’s some interesting stuff on there for your listening pleasure.
One of the things they hit on are our ongoing posts about affiliate marketing and web2.0 platforms such as Twitter and YouTube.
So, let’s do the obvious and tackle MySpace.
I’m sure you are all familiar with the platform. How does/can affiliate marketing work with MySpace for you? I’d argue that it can’t. I think most affiliate marketers use too much of a “push” mentality to work with MySpace. Have any marketers successfully used MySpace (beyond the site placements) to effectively drive traffic to their site/program?
(BTW, Shawn evidently owns affiliatewidget.com… contribute to costperlove.com to help me buy it from him!)
Hey Sam,
There’s ample opportunities for affiliates to integrate Myspace in to their marketing mix – but the question becomes how far can an affiliate go? Brian Littleton pointed out several months ago that within the Myspace TOS, affiliate links are strictly forbidden. However, that doesn’t mean that savvy marketers can’t use bulletins, blog posts, comments, and profiles to promote their website. Furthermore, since Google indexes some outbound myspace links – it’s possible to get the linking value as well.
Obviously one of the biggest problems facing myspace right now is the threat of phishing scams. Phishers are, unfortunately, taking over myspace accounts, posting false bulletins, and inserting their affiliate links in to those bulletins (which, supposedly are generated by people’s “friends”). We’ll see what actions myspace takes in 2007 to curb the problem.
MySpace’s TOS says that no commercial ventures (unapproved by NewsCorp/MySpace of course) may be used.
http://www.costpernews.com/2006/11/20/cpa-network-offers-on-myspace-persist/
There’s an interesting line in there about affiliate links as well.
The question is, when will they drop the hammer and start doing something about it? Or can they do to the way links can be redirected, etc.
I’d argue that if you are smart enough with your program, you can market on places such as MySpace without links (since you know… “links are dead”) and have even better results.
> Furthermore, since Google indexes some outbound myspace links – it’s possible to get the linking value as well.
Agreed. Google and Technorati snap up my blog posts from MySpace.
Also, just as affiliates can leverage the videos on YouTube with affiliate links, they can do the same with MySpace videos.
I blogged about this today: http://www.affiliatetip.com/blog/archives/affiliate_popup_video.html
One thing to think about, and I think third parties like BubblePLY are a perfect example – the potential monetization of MySpace by affiliates doesn’t have to happen on MySpace.
I’m still not able to pull up the BubblePly site at all, Shawn. I’m getting some sort of a runtime error.
The service limits you to placing those links on just your videos, right?
I’ve seen some less than scrupulous and soon to be (if not already) illegal devices where you can put links on top of any video. Not cool.
Are you able to see their “About Us” video at http://www.bubbleply.com/player.aspx?pid=b5489a6d-c161-4bb4-bf3b-b1b4d0dd8abe ?
I am running IE 7 on XP Pro and have no problems with viewing videos on their site or the one hosted on my blog.
> The service limits you to placing those links on just your videos, right?
Hey Sam –
The service enables you to place layers on any videos at YouTube, Google Video, etc.
But the original videos are not changed in any way. The videos with the BubblePLY layers are running through BubblePLY.com.
The ket to MySpace is not to direct market anything.
You can give stuff away like mad.
With listbuilding techniques you can then follow up in e-mail.
Now if you are trying to resell mortgages then you are out of luck.
If you have a hip information product and you can turn it into a affiliate product you can monetize any social network.
I am going to expand on this to members of my affiliate network…the best way to find us is to click the Autopilot Traffic Machine article at the link in my name.
Hi Sam, as the CTO of Plymedia I would like to better understand your problem with using BubblePLY. Please send me your OS and browser settings to gal@plymedia.com and I’ll get back to ASAP. Thanks.
Gal-
I’ve sent over an email with a screenshot of the error I was getting.
I was using the gnome based Epiphany browser on the Linux distro Ubuntu. I’ve since switched back over to Firefox and (no surprise) the site works great on FF on Ubuntu. So, there’s another notch in Asa’s belt!
I’m probably the only person in online marketing that uses Ubuntu, but I’m slowly trying to gain disciples to spread the good word. Even security MVP Wayne Porter mentioned it in a recent post on ReveNews.
Thanks so much for the comment and question. Really shows the kind of user building you guys are doing to ask about problems on a Saturday night! Good stuff!
Sam
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of course myspace can work… you just have to be a little sneaky!
Yes it can but bot as good as facebook can offer
Yes it can but bot as good as facebook can offer