Empire Avenue is becoming the hottest thing on the social web. If last year was the year of the location game this is the year of the social game, and Empire Avenue is leading the pack. Even Ford and Intel have are marketing in the social media gaming world. Empire Avenue offers several things that make it a complete social marketing package: complete integrated profiles, niche communities, lightweight analytics, and most importantly marketing opportunities.

Here are 5 places on Empire Avenue you can advertise your business.

1. Shareholder Mail

Empire Avenue lets you send emails to your shareholders in exchange for just a few eaves (e). They can literally say whatever you want and have links to wherever you want. You can market your website, affiliate products, get people to fan your Facebook Page, or accomplish many other goals for free just by sending a shareholder email. Right now this is a very under utilized social marketing tool that I have had success with. I sent a mail to my aproximately 250 shareholders and got 7 Facebook Page “Likes” for a conversion of about 2.8%. It may not be a huge conversion, but what’s the ROI on free?

2. Influencer Advertising

Influencer advertising is a tool in Empire Avenue that allows you to purchase advertisements that show up in various places across the website. While most people put catchy sayings or other things to entice you into buying shares in them you can actually put whatever you want. You can create an advertisement to get them to your website, Facebook Page, or anywhere you want. Use a bit.ly link or other short link and you can track how much traffic it actually sends your way. Once again this can be done with just a few eaves.

3. Personal Bio

There’s nothing super special here. Your Empire Avenue bio is basically the same thing you put on any other social network. The trick is you can get permalinks put in your bio to advertise any site you want. One thing to remember is you do need to go over the bio excerpt limit so you get a “read more” link. The link is stripped out of the excerpt but when an influencer clicks your read more the links are intact and ready to be clicked.

4. Status Updates

A social network wouldn’t be a social network without a way to update your status. Empire Avenue status updates aren’t much different than Facebook or Twitter updates. They show up when people view your profile as well as next to your name when browsing lists of people to purchase. In most places links aren’t stripped out of status updates. This is once again an opportunity to promote a website of your choosing.

5. Your Name

You can actually use your name as marketing in Empire Avenue. I’m not talking about your handle or ticker name, but your actual real name. A first and last name are required to play but you can put essentially whatever you want in these two fields. I have my first and last name in my first name field. Then I have @CommercialScott which is my Twitter name followed by #SocialEmpire and #TeamZen, two communities I’m active in on Empire Avenue. There are certain situations the tag and @ name are clickable in Empire Avenue. It will take people to a search page containing those terms. The largest benefit is when someone tweets about your profile. Rather than just having your name and ticker name your Twitter name and the attached hashtags get passed through. The followers of the person that tweeted your profile can then click through and find you.

Can your Farmville market like this? As you can see there are a lot of opportunities to market your business on Empire Avenue that are completely free. If you know any I missed or have a comment on these methods please share with the comment form below.