The New MySpace :: How to Become a "Top Fan"

Become a Top Fan in Five Minutes or Less

I never used the "Old" MySpace, so I can't really compare, but I think the New MySpace is pretty cool. I have always been a music fan and I like the look and feel of it - and I am definitely into social media, so the ability to connect with people that like the same music as me is fun.

In a nutshell, people that are connected to you can see what artists, albums, photos, songs, etc. that you are connected to and can then connect as well. The New MySpace also has a "Top Fans" feature. Still in Beta, Top Fans are "people who have interacted the most with an artist and their content."

Being a "Top Fan" will eventually (supposedly) give you access to exclusive content from the artist (tickets? autographs?)... so imagine my excitement when I realized I was one of the Top 10 fans for Metallica - possibly my all time favorite band! I bet I started listening to their songs twice as much - and then I was #2.

As silly as it may seem for a 44 year old, I was very excited and proud of my "accomplishment"... 

Become a Top Fan of Your Favorite Artist (or any artist) on the New MySpace... in 3 steps and in less than 5 minutes

I checked my rank on some of my other favorites... and discovered that I was in the top of quite a few. I do tend to be a little OCD and listen to the same bands a lot, so I guess that isn't TOO surprising... but it did make me curious about just how easy it might be to become a top fan of other artists. To get to the point, I figured out (I believe I am the first, or at least the first to write about it) that actually playing or listening to the music has very little or nothing to do with how a "Top Fan" is calculated on the New MySpace.

I am writing this in order to tell others how they can get to the top of the Top Fans list for their favorite artist in the hopes that once the "secret" is out, it will get corrected so we can truly see an artists' Top Fans, rather than who is good at the social media game. Think about it - as soon as there are rewards involved, it will just become another social media numbers game of who can connect the fastest.

The 3 Keys of Online Marketing :: Acquisition

Acquisition, Conversion, Retention

In my previous post in this series "The 3 Keys of Online Marketing," I talked about the importance of correcting any conversion problems you might be having before wasting time trying to acquire new or more traffic. Assuming you have done so and are ready to continue, let's talk about "acquisition."

Acquisition: Driving or acquiring traffic to your website.

Traffic to your website is basically going to come from 3 major sources:

Search—Google, Bing, Yahoo, MSN and others provide an excellent source of traffic for many websites. This type of traffic will be either be free ("Organic") or paid ("PPC"). Getting highly ranked in the organic search engine results pages ("SERP") depends upon whether or not your "score well" in the search engines' algorithms, which attempt to determine whether or not your content is relevant to the user's search query.

Referring Sites—When someone visits your site by clicking a link or banner ad from another site or by clicking a link in an email*, this is known as a "referring site." Building links from quality referring sites can also improve SERP as many search engines use this as one of the ways to measure the importance of your site ("PageRank").

*Direct—These are the visitors who are demonstrating brand awareness by typing your website address into their browser... but direct traffic can also be any traffic that is not recognized as coming from search or from a referring site.

The 3 Keys of Online Marketing :: Conversion

Acquisition, Conversion, Retention

This post is the first in my series "The 3 Keys of Online Marketing" and will begin by covering the topic "conversion"—getting your visitors to take a desired action. 

I have found that many businesses tend to focus first on getting traffic to their website only to later discover that they have problems with conversion. In my opinion, there is no point in discussing ways to acquire more traffic to your web, blog or social media sites until you have corrected your conversion problems and optimized the conversion process.