I used Myspace advertising with much success. With over 200 million registered users there are plenty of potential visitors/sales to reach. With built in mass emailing, bulletins and comments – it was an extremely effective way to get the word out about your website or product. Once I saw a guy offering to send out 3 bulletins per day on his account which contained approximately 100,000 friends.
The total cost for these 3 bulletins was $10. I figured it couldn’t hurt! I had a new tattoo website which contained a ton of pictures and information about tattoos. I was shocked to see in my statistics the next morning that this $10 investment brought me a little over 20,000 unique visitors the day before. Then I checked my Adsense statistics and was thrilled to see that I made $125 on my investment.
All good things come to an end though. First off, even though this was very effective for me, I was still a bit nervous about it as it had too much of a “spam” feeling for me, so I really didn’t purchase too much advertising this way, but I did try it a few more times with success. Secondly, Myspace has been working hard to clean up these mass bulletins as it became a security problem.
Hackers started targeting accounts with the most friends so that they could send out their own bulletins, either for their own uses or for selling bulletins. Myspace has also since converted their linking methods and it’s no longer an effective way of getting backlinks.
Many people also utilized the service for advertising instead of displaying their own profiles. They would setup a false account with a beautiful girl in their profile and try to trick as many people as possible into adding them as a friend. They would then add links in their profile to websites or utilize their friends list to send out mass emails or bulletins. But Myspace added a “spam” button and now you can report spam accounts and they get deleted rather quickly.
So if it sounds to good to be true, it likely is. Tricking people and using mass methods to send out advertising to people who didn’t ask for said advertising will always lead to penalties or complaints and will eventually disappear. The best thing you can do is concentrate your efforts on tried and true methods of advertising, and the visitors won’t be just a small surge that goes away but turn into long lasting, and return visitors.