Please join us in thanking the esteemed Candy Bilyk for taking the time to write this real-time, real-life series about her experiences on MySpace. This series has been really fun for all of us here to read at MXTabs and at Musicnotes. Hopefully she’ll remember us when she becomes big and famous…

I’ve talked a lot about MySpace in the last month or so, starting with the importance of having a MySpace profile in Part One of The MySpace Diaries. In Part Two, I discussed how to sign up for a MySpace profile and find people that you already know on the site. Part Three covered how to customize your MySpace profile, and Part Four looked at how to find more MySpace connections as well as how to keep those connections informed and meaningful.

But the proof is in the pudding – February is over and it’s time to see how my results have stacked up against my goals.

My goal, simply put, was to acquire 200 friends for each of my MySpace profiles by the end of February. In doing so, I hoped to achieve something more important than numbers – to spread awareness and appreciation of my music. As of February 28th, my classical MySpace profile had 66 friends, while my pop MySpace profile had 37 friends.

My friend counts fell short, but I still found new people who really appreciate my music, reconnected with old friends working in related industries, and landed a couple of opportunities to compose and play music that would have otherwise passed me by. And of course, I’ve appeared as a guest blogger on MXTabs! In numbers I may have failed, but in the results I have achieved far beyond my expectations.

What else have I learned? Don’t be discouraged if the results are slow in coming at first. While 106 of my email contacts were signed up for MySpace, many of them haven’t signed in for months or even years, and others have enabled settings to automatically reject friend requests from Music accounts. Not every friend request I’ve sent to a stranger has been accepted. None of this has stopped me from plugging away and achieving positive results – as with any form of networking, you just need to put in the time and effort. One of my profiles has fewer friends not because of the music, but because I focused on it less.

So if you haven’t started your MySpace yet, what are you waiting for? Get out there and get heard! Need a friend? Feel free to add me and keep in touch: http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterremusique.