Increasing Return Visits To Your MySpace Page

With attention spans dwindling, it is becoming a progressively more difficult task to keep fans interested in your daily development as an artist. Being able to attract return visitors to your MySpace page increases the value of your blog as a communication tool, your player as a listening tool, and your schedule as a promotional tool. The reality of the situation, however, is that a certain amount of sensationalism is required to generate site traffic. Add-ons are simple and effective devices for doing so, and several have become very popular features amongst users.

As the rampant success of MySpace’s comments section indicates, allowing users to contribute to the page’s actual makeup is a goldmine for encouraging repeat visits. Playing off of this trend is QuickKwiz 1.0 (www.kwiz.biz), one of the social networking site’s most frequently added features. From the QuickKwiz website, artists can write their own basic polls and quizzes, which are then transferred into HTML code that can be copied and pasted into MySpace. Not only are these quizzes enjoyable add-ons that can be changed frequently, but they also offer artists a chance to promote themselves. For instance, posting a question about the next album’s release date increases fan awareness. Other sites within this same vein are www.mywebgoodies.com, which, in addition to polls and quizzes, lets users create Madlibs and insert arcade games into their pages, and www.adpoll.com, which offers more choices per poll compared to QuickKwiz.

Also of intrigue to MySpace frequenters are widgets, embeddable, interactive icons that can arouse any number of senses on nearly every topic imaginable. An up-and-coming widget marketplace launched in September 2006, Widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com) caters to both developers and end users. With its Widget Syndication Platform, developers can turn any web application into a widget (or blidget, as the site refers to them) with no coding necessary. Artists can use this program to their advantage by turning blogs external to MySpace into widgets. When placed on social networking pages, the widget will update automatically to reflect the changes made in the blog, thereby attracting visitors to MySpace, as well as directing them to other resources for supporting their favorite artists. Of course, artists can also simply grab the site’s existing widgets from its gallery, which include countdown timers, fun facts, and more, to spice up their MySpace pages and allow more fan interactivity.

Lastly, a site not to be ignored for its cross-network compatibility, Photobucket (www.photobucket.com) prides itself on its linking abilities. An artist’s photos, videos, and images can all be uploaded to the site, remixed and put into slideshows, and dropped into MySpace. It allows users to give their MySpace pages a greater sense of identity, and given the ease with which content can be linked to MySpace, updates are effortless. Keep fans returning with new collages from tours, video remixes using your own music, and promotional icons.