Emer­gency Cash Tip #14: Use My­space Fo­rums to Sell Products

So­cial me­dia has proven to be one of the best venues for mar­ket­ing prod­ucts in a hurry.

In­ter­net mar­keters have held con­tests to see how much they can make in one day, one week, or one month by cre­at­ing a new prod­uct and sell­ing it through a so­cial mar­ket­ing medium.

When it comes to this type of project, there are two things to ask yourself:

1. What type of prod­uct should you sell?
2. What medium should you sell it in?

In this ar­ti­cle , I will cover how to sell on My­space fo­rums. In the next ar­ti­cle, we’ll con­sider Twit­ter.

Let’s start with the types of prod­ucts you might want to sell on Myspace.

What Prod­uct to Sell

You might im­me­di­ately as­sume that you should sell one of your flag­ship prod­ucts, but in fact, so­cial me­dia sites are not al­ways the best place to do this. For this rea­son, you will want to an­swer this ques­tion by do­ing mar­ket re­search, rather than sim­ply pick­ing a prod­uct and run­ning with it.

One way you can ap­proach this is to be­gin brows­ing through a va­ri­ety of My­space mem­ber fo­rums. Do this for var­i­ous cat­e­gories; and make an at­tempt to gauge how large the fo­rum fol­low­ing is. Are there hun­dreds of peo­ple who post reg­u­larly? Thou­sands? What is it that they’re talk­ing about; and what in­for­ma­tion could they pos­si­bly need to help them in their endeavors?

Once you find a group that strikes you, be­gin read­ing up on their topic of choice; and then par­tic­i­pate in the fo­rum dis­cus­sions. Try to make friends and be help­ful. This will ben­e­fit you in the long run, since they are un­likely to re­spond well to you if they per­ceive you as a green-eyed in­fil­tra­tor whose only in­ter­est is in sell­ing them stuff.’

Af­ter you have a feel for the fo­rum and the topic, com­mis­sion a writer through a site like Elance to cre­ate a pow­er­ful, but brief, “how to” man­ual on some spe­cific facet of their topic. For in­stance, you might fol­low a jew­elry group; and de­cide to cre­ate a guide on how to pur­chase high qual­ity beads on­line at a steep discount.

What­ever you do, make sure that this topic is some­thing you hear about on the fo­rum fre­quently. Your goal should be to pro­vide a prod­uct that solves a prob­lem that seems to be com­mon among fo­rum members.

Once you have this guide in hand, cre­ate a mini-site with a short copy salespage; and a Pay­Pal check­out but­ton, so that you can re­ceive pay­ment im­me­di­ately. On the saleslet­ter, high­light the fol­low­ing ben­e­fits of your guide:

• Ex­plain how it will tan­gi­bly im­prove the lives of your tar­get de­mo­graphic group (i.e. af­ter you read my guide, you will be able to do task x twice as fast) in general.
• High­light the spe­cific ben­e­fits of cer­tain chap­ters (i.e. chap­ter 8 alone will save you $100 per month).

Also, con­sider sell­ing your guide for a very, very low price. Your goal here should be to make the de­ci­sion to pur­chase a no-brainer. At least ini­tially, you shouldn’t blud­geon your new cus­tomers with high-end prod­ucts. In­tro­duce them to your work with some­thing that costs around $3-7. If you do a good job with every­thing else, you could eas­ily make around $500 in a mat­ter of days.

The fi­nal step is mar­ket your prod­uct by cre­at­ing a sig­na­ture that ref­er­ences it. Be­yond that, all you can do is post fre­quently; and hope that peo­ple see it and buy.