Six Strategies For Success In Second Life Business

Okay, so you’ve taken the time to create a Second Life account and now you’re standing there in your newbie garb, watching the sun move across a summery sky you’d trade your eyeteeth for in winter. Stories of people shaping careers from Second Life are still playing through your mind, but the only encouragement you’re getting from the other noobs on Help Island is that you’re the only one not wearing a box on your head. Yet.

You have no inventory, no networking connections, you don’t know how to make a suit to save your life, and your biggest accomplishment in SL to date is knowing how to use the camera. What do you do? Well…

Getting established on Second Life takes a combination of business, technical and people skills that is more of a balanced three-way split than you may have seen in fields like site-based Internet marketing and bricks-and-mortar businesses. More often than not you will find a technical issue morphing into a personnel/Internet issue or vice versa before your very eyes.

But don’t despair, help is available, from simply pressing the F1 key for SL’s help database, all the way to these six strategies I’ve adopted to promote my own Second Life business.

The best things in life are free.

Second Life is glutted with businesses trying to sell items that few people are willing to purchase without knowledge of the companies’ track records. To establish trust and long-term sales, SL merchants offer quality products… in the form of freebies!

Some items are set with obvious limitations and drawbacks, like items that disappear after a set time, have large “DEMO” signs, or whisper the vendor’s SLURL (Second Life linking location) every few minutes, or the like. However, I’ve found a few gems with no disadvantages and they are perfect for the beginning SL business, like this office building from BAPFH Designs.

There are plenty of locations in SL which offer freebies (just search for them with the Search button) and you can also benefit from some of the online stores like SLBoutique, SLSmart, Apez, and SLX.

Get a job.

Depending on how well your computer can handle lag and avatar-clogged venues, you may either want to get a public-oriented job (dancer, DJ, host, promoter, security guard, manager), or a less processor-dependent, more technical and solitary job (model, designer, web developer, photographer, animator, assistant, builder, sculptor or scripter) to help you meet expenses as you start your business up. A single tip of L$50 can get you a week’s advertising on SL’s classified system and L$99 can promote one item of yours on SLX for 30 days. Work enough at both your own and your second job, make the business you run attractive to prospective clients, and eventually it will be as if you have no operating expenses.

Think outside the grid.

If you can find an SL advertising program that works entirely inside the game… please let me know about it! While SL’s classified system can be cost-effective with the right product prices versus classified fees, it often has to be combined with well-established groups and billboard advertising. Often groups (which are still covered later) are quite out of range of the newbie’s grasp for achieving self-sustaining results. This means that networking and promotion has to occur outside of SL.

MySpace, SLX, and to a lesser degree, SLprofiles.com have been instrumental in getting the word out outside the Grid. Had I not used these sites, I would not have learned of my favorite item, the ASM-1000, or checked my friend’s credentials as a would-be SL circus performer at Mrgreggy.com. Google is making inroads into SL with its real-time world maps, and between SL’s memorable, low-competition sim names, SL’s service and item jargon, and avatar names, it’s actually possible to compete with almighty keywords which have been played across Google like broken records: money, music, business, and many others.

Budget!

SL can be one of the most hectic online ventures when it comes to keeping track of cash flow, which can come in amounts smaller than pennies at a time (L$1-L$2). Once you get a few hundred transactions a day from several sources, good luck tracking it all! While SecondLife.com’s Transaction History page can keep track of your overall daily credits and debits, be sure to keep a regular log of your land tier/rental costs, advertising, wages, performance incentives, commissions, deals, and other costs.

Tools=Time.

When I started using SL, way back at Version 1.12, I was put off by the building interface. As you put prims together to build your buildings, furnishings, vehicles and tools, you often had to step back a little bit. Every time I would select a prim to modify, I might step back just that little bit, and the interface would deselect what I was working on. It often wasn’t a major nuisance but sometimes getting back into the middle of a big build could be a time-consuming chore. My first building project must have taken a few hours for what would probably take me only ten minutes today.

And yet, I could still be spending even less time than I am on building, instead of on badly needed promotion and business administration, because I’m not using tools like Skidz Primz. Other tools can save you lots of time animating, like Puppeteer, while texture packs (Virtual Builder System), vendors (Apez), rental devices (Hippotech), update servers (MEG), timeclocks (Merlin’s Tower), and others can round out your business and even be passed on to employees who can free up your time for bigger and better projects.

Group!

One of the best ways to get relatively inexpensive exposure on SL is to create your own group. For L$100, about the cost of a sip of coffee at most upscale coffee shops, you can create and own a group for the life of your avatar. The only downside to using groups is that if you don’t keep your members informed or entertained with regular posts, or make them happy with freebies attached to your group announcements, you’ll find yourself with dwindling group numbers and you’ll be spending time propping up an advertising tool that really doesn’t work for you. SL avatars can only handle 25 groups at a time, so when push comes to shove, the wheat will be separated from the chaff and people will get rid of the dullest groups to make room for fresh new ones. Make sure if anyone has to drop a group, that it’s to make room for yours!

Go for it!

Starting a business in SL is one of the fastest ways that I have seen in 20 years of my own business attempts. Achieving a real-life level of income still takes a lot of hard work, networking, and focus, but it can be done — just ask Anshe Chung– and hopefully these tips will help get the newest SL users into the middle of rewarding SL trade and commerce!