MyAds

Small business owners, by their very nature, are enterprising people. It's a good thing too because, as we're quickly finding out, it sometimes takes a bit of ingenuity to keep the doors open when the economy is not-so-great.

Unfortunately when tightening the budget belt, marketing is often one of the first things to get scaled back. Maybe it's the marketing education in me coming out, but I'd like to say that just because the marketing budget isn't what is used to be doesn't mean you have to cut back on your efforts.

Almost as if to prove my point, I came across this article on BusinessWeek.com that talks about MySpace's new advertising initiative, MyAds. While the "proven-ness" of advertising on social networks is debatable, MyAds does pose and interesting opportunity for enterprising business owners -especially those with small ad budgets.

First, MyAds takes out the creative department and presents a do-it-yourself platform where users can create their own banner ads, set their own pricing, and select their target from MySpace's highly-segment-able database.

MySpace officially unveiled MyAds today and the newness might deter some business owners, but at least some of the companies that test-drove the program during its beta phase saw a "50% to 300%" jump in people clicking on their ads.

Granted MyAds won't work for every business, but if social networking is supposed to continue its dominance on the web, it might not be a bad thing to look into.