As Myspace has grown to be a 800 pound internet gorilla the web business world has been trying to figure out why it’s successful and perhaps more importantly how to take advantage of it and market to it’s user gigantic user base. I’ve seen many people talk about using Myspace to market their business, but I’ve seen very few examples of it being done successfully besides the music industry.

I was made aware of RollerWarehouse and the success they’ve had by creating a news ticker of their rollerskating-focused blog posts for people to put on their Myspace profile pages. Here’s an example profile with it going, and here’s the ticker in action:





Roller Warehouse: Aggressive Rollerblade Skates

The kicker is that by running this on your Myspace page (or any other web page for that matter), you can get 5% off any order you place with RollerWarehouse. So, if you’re into rollerskating, you can put news on your Myspace page to make it cooler, and you can get 5% off your orders. Not bad.

So how has this worked out for RollerWarehouse?

In it’s first two weeks of action RollerWarehouse.com went from a Google Pagerank of 0 to a 6, sales for March were up about 10% over 2005’s sales which was their first increase in 4 years. The program has a viral effect as other Myspacers see it on pages and add it to their’s, so the link benefit is just growing, as well as the number of customers taking advantage of the 5% off. They currently estimate that 50-75 new news tickers are being placed today for a total somewhere between 750-1000 total tickers running on people’s pages.

Why is that Google Pagerank important? Well, now everytime they highlight a product on their blog, they get great natural search results in Google for that search term. For example, they went from nowhere to being ranked #1 in Google results for “aggressive skates”, and are currently sitting at #2. That is one of the top search terms for their industry.

How much work was this for RollerWarehouse? Not much, simply creating the news ticker and getting it adopted by the first few users.

What a simple and great way to market their ecommerce business and blog.