Cogent Insights Marketing Consulting

Stephan Spencer (one time scientist, now marketing guru) is writing a series of articles about marketing on MySpace, and his latest post makes some interesting points, which I’d like to expand on.

Spencer interviews Michael Bolding at Pugster, online retailer of charms and jewelry. The business has a MySpace profile, which it is using to help generate traffic and sales. Bolding provided some advice on how to use MySpace as a marketing vehicle. His key points were:

I was interviewed yesterday by Dearl Miller of Trafficology.com about marketing on MySpace. While I was preparing for the interview I tried to distill the key issues for someone trying promote themselves (as a musician or artist) or a product or service using MySpace.

Here are the three principles I came up with:

Do you ever start loosing your enthusiasm for your blog? Read this story “Blogging for dollars” from Business 2.0 to keep up your enthusiasm.

By the way, Business 2.0 is the only newstand magazine that go out of my way to buy (and it’s quite expensive out here in Australia). There’s always something interesting in each issue, and if you’re looking for business opportunities, online  or not, you’ll always see something ot get the creative juices going.

It’s well-researched, and well-written, and if you’re interested in the blogosphere and new media, it should be on your reading list.

You’re about to start a new blog (or you want to expand an existing blog), and you come across blogging networks such as b5media or On Topic Media (Orble). How these networks seem to work is you sacrifice a percentage of ad revenue in exchange for being part of the blogging network. Depending on the model adopted by the blogging network, you may or may not own the blog, and you may or may not receive some kind of subsidy to help establish your blog.

So what competitive advantage do you gain by joining a blogging network?