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DALLAS — Chella Cardona has found the perfect advertising vehicle for her young, small business. And it doesn't cost her a cent.

She's able to keep in close contact with loyal customers, who instantly spread the word to their friends. When she wants to promote an event at her Dallas specialty shoe store, Passport Exhibit Gallery, she can immediately distribute information to hundreds of people.

"It's been a huge benefit," Cardona said. "Because we're a small business, we don't have a lot of money allocated for marketing."

Cardona has discovered the lucrative promotional secrets of MySpace.com, a site that enjoyed its first wave of success when bands used it to spread word about their music. Since Passport Exhibit Gallery set up a MySpace page in December, hundreds of customers have visited the store after discovering it on the Web, she said.

As it has become one of the most popular Internet destinations for young people, MySpace has also attracted legions of small businesses — restaurants, bars, clothing stores, tattoo parlors — trying to reach an audience with tastes outside the mainstream. All of them use the site for free.

Now MySpace is part of corporate America. Media conglomerate News Corp. bought its parent company in July for $580 million.

News Corp. executives have made it clear they want to boost the site's ad revenue, inviting large companies to advertise on the site.

Thus MySpace stands at a crossroads, with major corporate brands trying to figure out how to reach its young, hip audiences while small businesses pioneer the art of reaching customers with help from customers themselves.

Users have created roughly 70 million profiles on MySpace, and the site had 47 million unique users in February, according to its own statistics.

It's the second-busiest destination on the Web next to Yahoo, according to comScore Networks.

Each MySpace profile page contains space in which users can post photos, write messages to friends and list links to their friends' pages.

Setting up a MySpace page requires only the most basic computer skills, an asset that has helped the site attract so many users. It's also appealing for business owners.

A MySpace user can stay in contact with friends by agreeing to receive bulletins from them.

The user can also make "friends" with businesses that send out bulletins as well. When a bar has a Friday night party, for instance, it sends out an image of a promotional flier to all its friends, who can then spread it to their friends.

Web companies that include Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have of late been trying to attract businesses such as Cardona's store to use their free listings and — eventually — to advertise.

MySpace's no-frills, laissez-faire approach appears to have already produced a version of this local search idea, allowing users to find businesses they'll like through a Web version of word-of-mouth.

In some ways, it's better than having a regular Web site, said Chris Howell, a Dallas filmmaker who has used a MySpace page to promote "Sweet Science," the boxing documentary he's making.

"With this, you have a little bit more control as to affecting your demographic," he said. "You can go out and see people's interests. You can go to groups of documentary filmmakers or film critics and make yourself known there."

It's also cheaper to have a MySpace site than to pay for the design and Web space of a professionally rendered page. And it's a free alternative to a marketing and advertising budget.

Big companies are dipping their toes into MySpace's waters. The square patty on a Wendy's hamburger has its own MySpace page, which includes "movies" in which the meat sings.

Ad sales are jumping at MySpace. News Corp. is trying to move up the price for ads on its home page to $750,000 from $100,000, an executive told Fortune magazine this month.

MySpace has also been cleaning up its pages to make itself more attractive to squeamish advertisers turned off by its unfiltered content.

Last week, the company announced the hiring of Microsoft Corp. executive Hemanshu Nigam as its chief security officer, putting him in charge of overseeing users' safety after media reports of concerns about pedophiles using the site.