Are you one of the millions of Myspace users? Myspace has grown into the largest and most successful social networking site on the Internet to date and following these simple tips will ensure your success on Myspace. Whether you are a starving artist, a hopeful musician, a talented photographer, a wannabe model or a professional business individual looking for a job, Myspace can work in your advantage.

No Overload
There are several sites that offer several fancy-smancy additions for your Myspace page but it is in your best interest (and helps everyone viewing your page) if you don’t overload your page with celebrity look-alikes and glittery messages. Invest in yourself by learning some basic HTML and design your page without the help of a generic profile editor. These profile sites often embed their logos, links and personal props in your page, making your page “TheirSpace”. This is a helpful YouTube video on editing your Myspace profile on your own.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQtFj1jA188[/youtube]

Remember the Web is World Wide
Often, in the news, you’ve heard similar stories about teachers loosing their credentials or beauty queens loosing their crowns due to unacceptable pictures of themselves being blasted across the Internet. You must always remember that if your goal is to taken seriously and to have a successful Myspace site – do not post pictures of yourself that are remotely questionable. On second thought, don’t even allow remotely questionable photos to be taken of you.

Keep it Updated
In order to make your page interesting, you must update your site with new pictures, new layouts and new biographical information as much as you can. An interesting site is only interesting the first time you see it, maybe a second time, but no one will continue to view your page if it always stays the same.

Talk, Don’t Stalk
Since there are millions of users, you are almost guaranteed to know another user. It is an absolute NO-NO to continually go to their page and see what’s happening in their life. If you know a fellow Myspace user, talk to them! Send a simple message, “Hey, I see we are both Myspace users! Good to see you’re doing well. Take care.” Stalking users’ wastes time, makes you un-cool and takes the focus off of your Myspace goal of being successful.

Utilize Bulletins
Myspace bulletins are excellent and bringing people back to your site. Make sure you post useful and interesting bulletins, possibly pointing out that you have updated your site or for the music sites, you can post upcoming concert dates to facilitate a sold-out show. I would suggest not posting several bulletins containing a 100 question survey that you’ve filled out or a chain mail type of time waster.

Network
Take advantage of Myspace’s networking tools by looking up everyone that was in your high school and college graduating class, your previous and current businesses and become part of the thousands of groups of people that share similar interests as you. The more friends that you meet, accept and keep engaged with will ensure your Myspace page goals are met.

Bring Them Back
The most important tip on making it big with Myspace is to give your viewers several reasons to keep coming back to your page. You can run contests, write an interesting blog and express yourself truthfully and excitingly. Advertisers will want to be visible on your site if your page views are consistently high which will bring your great exposure and extra dough. In conclusion, there are several ways to reach your goals with Myspace. Follow these simple rules and good luck.

You may find these useful, as well.

MySpace For Dummies

Hacking MySpace: Mods and Customizations to make MySpace Your Space (ExtremeTech)

Many people may not be aware of this, but blogs such as this one and many others rely on numerous ways of spreading word of their existence. One of the most widely used tools to expand a blogs reader base is something known as digging. Digging is where a reader clicks or navigates in someway to the digg site and submits the story. You may even notice up on the right hand corner of this very post a little number with digg it! underneath. What this little number represents is how many people have submitted the story to the digg site, and the more people who have submitted it generally can give you an idea of how popular an article is. This is an important barometer of how popular a particular blog or subject might be, and it also spreads the word of a particular blog or articles existence.

So now that you know what Digg is, I am going to take you through a step by step course on how to use digg. For those of you who already use digg, you may find this part some what redundant, however for those of you who have not used digg it is my genuine hope that you will begin to do so.

The first thing you will need to do is register. So please open up a new window in your web browser and type in www.digg.com. Once you get there you will see this:

Now simply click on the Join Digg and follow the instructions. Once you have finished your registration, come back to this post.

Now Find the picture up in the right hand that looks like this:

Now that you have found it, be prepared to be directed away from this page and remember to come back! Now click it (go ahead it won’t hurt you or your computer I promise).

Back? Good, now if you were the first person to digg this post then you were probably asked to provide a brief description and give it a category, then at the end you were asked to prove you were human and more than likely after that you had to be told the story was similar to another one. I hoped you went ahead and submitted it. For those of you who were not the first to click on the digg it symbol you now know what it is like to be the first!

Now that you have done that, comes perhaps the hardest and most difficult step in digging. Relaxing and going on to the next post. Thank you for taking the time to not only read this post, but to digg it as well. Believe it or not, we all really do appreciate it when someone takes the time to digg us, it lets us know that someone cared enough to share the story with other people.

A little while back, I took some time to give you a review of the recently released public beta of Flock. One thing I noticed about Flock 1.0 as well as previous versions was that they are packed with features. Whether you don’t know about them, or you just don’t know how to use them, I am going to take some more time to tell you how you can make the most out of Flock’s best features.

Flock is a great browser. What I once blew off as a joke browser is now my primary. I remember playing around with Flock around the time they released their first version and even then, I thought it was feature packed. My problem was that I did not want to get to know another browser. Call it laziness I guess, but I was just comfortable with FireFox so I quickly removed it not really giving it a chance. I am here to tell you not make the same mistake I did and to take a look at Flock feature number 1:

How to: Set up Accounts

Once installed, Flock will want to make itself your primary browser. I usually hold off on doing that until I get to know the browser a little better so I recommend you holding off on making it the default until you make your decision. The first thing I did was connect it to my social networking account – Facebook. MySpace is another one so to do this; you will have to introduce yourself to the sidebar menu, which is where you will find nine neat icons. You will find links split up into four sections for people, media sharing, blogging, and social bookmarking. Clicking each of the links will take you to the site or service. If you are registered to any, simply type in your login information and Flock will do the rest.

How to: Use The People Button

The most useful feature you’re likely to end up using, and what really makes Flock fun, is the people button. Clicking it will pull up all your personal contacts from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. I have a Facebook account, so I simply typed in my information and all my friends magically appeared with updated information. What is cool is that you can do many of the features you do on the site. For example, if I wanted to message my friend Matt, all I would have to do is click the “Actions” button and “Message” is one of the options.

How to: View Media and Add RSS Feeds

Another cool feature is the media bar at the top. It is a simple toolbar that you can toggle with the photo button that is just to the right of the people button in Flock’s menu controls. The mini-bar shows photo and video thumbnails from any services in which you are connected, and lets you browse entire photo albums without visiting the site. The service connects with streams from Flickr, Photobucket, and Facebook for photos, along with YouTube and AOL’s video service for video clips. If you are visiting a site with a media stream, the little camera button in the address bar will light up. You simply click it and the mini bar magically appears.

Now I was not a big fan of RSS feeds. I simply visited the site to get what I wanted. It wasn’t until recently that I used RSS a little more than I did. Flock makes it very simple and very manageable on a page called “My World.” There are a few ways to add RSS feeds, by either hitting the RSS button while browsing a site and clicking the “subscribe” option on the top of the page, or importing a list of your feeds from another service.

How To: Sharing

If you’re a media creator, like myself, Flock’s got a built-in photo uploader that will take photos from your computer’s hard drive, and post them to Facebook, Flickr, and Piczo. To get started, just hit the up arrow, which you will find on the right side of Flock’s menu controls, and a screen will appear where you can drag and drop your photos. Each service you use has different rules and settings for tags and groupings, so pay attention.

How To: Use Blogging Feature

If you’re a blogger, Flock has a built-in blogging tool. It works with several popular services including WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and Typepad. Here at The Tech Brief, we use Wrodpress, and it works like a charm. You can drag pictures over from the media bar, or your clipboard and pretty much do what you’ll find in any 3^rd party blogging tool. Right clicking a photo, link, or selection of text will bring up the “blog this” option for easy blogging.

To set up your blog for posting, just click on blog icon that’s to the left of the photo uploader icon. Then click on “tools” then “configure blog accounts.” Either pick out a supported service, or choose the “I host my blog” option, followed by the URL and your user login. Pretty simple!

Hot to: Add Extensions

Flock is based on the same underlying code as Firefox, and basic features work the same, so if you’re a Firefox user you’ll feel right at home. I’ve noticed that you are able to use some the same extension that FireFox uses, so that is very nice. Flock also has its own listing of extensions. Flock’s directory of extensions mainly focuses on blogging tools, social networks, and widgets.

The new Flock is an impressive piece of work. I can only imagine the software improving in the future and there is no telling what the future holds for this great browser. Download it. Try it out. Get your feet wet and you will probably stumble into features you will absolutely love, because they are so many more. And it is free, so what are you waiting for?

Flock 1.0 – Features review from doncrowley on Vimeo.