Today I created a MySpace profile for tshirtreviewblog.com. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of traffic to be had with MySpace. Plenty of bands don’t even have actual websites anymore, relying solely on the incestual sort of traffic you find on MySpace.

I’ve had a personal profile forever since that’s where all my friends are, but I’ve long avoided doing something like this to drive traffic to a site.  I don’t have the mad skills to hack up a decent-enough page. I simply lack the CSS knowledge to bob and weave my way through the convoluted ass-backwards web of code that is MySpace. Thankfully, Mike Davidson (founder of Newsvine) has the skills that I lack. He shared them on his blog quite a while back, but I hadn’t looked until recently.

Why you want to use MySpace to drive traffic to your site

• Brand Awareness
  I see plenty of companies, especially those in youth-centric niches that have a website, but just maintain a MySpace (should I really capitalize it? I feel ridiculous. It’s myspace from now on.) profile just to keep their name out there. The pages are rarely updated, but there’s a steady flow of visitors there. Politicians do this too. Why else would they be on myspace? Seriously.
   
• Targeted Traffic
  Everyone that attempts to friend you (that isn’t a spammer) is already interested in what you’ve got to say (or they hope you’re interested in what they have to say). Think of them like an RSS subscriber. You can choose who you want to send a friend request to, of course. I started with people that were friends already with a number of tshirt companies. That showed they were already interested in the niche and they were looking for exactly what I serve up.
   
  Be careful having bands as friends. They will post “check out our new songs/album” every time they record something. They will want to post info on their next gig, even if they’re in Australia and you’re in Ireland. They’ll often use a large gaudy graphic too that will pollute your page and generally make you look like an idiot for adding them in the first place. That’s a perfect example of someone not targetting their traffic actually. An Australian band should only be inviting locals to a gig, but I digress.
   
• Bulletins and Status Changes
  Now you’ll understand why I drew a comparison between RSS subscribers and myspace friends. With a bulletin you can instantly put your message right in front of every one of your friends. Be careful not to abuse this (or do it too often) or you’ll come off as spammy and get yourself ignored and deleted. You can also change your status or mood anytime. That will put your short status message, your name and avatar at the top of your friends’ screens when they sign in. This is excellent for keeping yourself fresh in everyone’s mind.
   
• Blog Crossposting
  There’s an awesome little plugin out there that will automatically post a bulletin notifying all your myspace friends of new blog posts. Since the key is to get them off your myspace profile and onto your site, be sure to only post the notification to myspace and not the post itself. Keeping the juicy content off of myspace can help to serve as a catalyst for the user to visit your site.
   
• For Some People, MySpace IS the Internet
  If your target demographic consists primarily from teens and early 20-somethings, myspace is the place to be. Though I sometimes find it hard to fathom, I do have (real life) friends that think Google is just for doing research for papers and reports. They check their mail, they IM, they myspace. If you can do them a service, you really can get them to your site though.

I’m of course speaking in theory, I haven’t had this profile long enough to sucessfully prove myself that these items can be accomplished with a myspace profile. They are, however, the reasons I am doing this. I’ve also based these in things I’ve seen other profiles do. If you have a site or blog in a niche that might benefit from the myspace demographic, I encourage you to consider creating a myspace page to let some of that traffic filter through to your site or blog.

Check out part 2 of the experiment here.