How To Make Money On Social Networking Sites
Over the past few years many new social networking sites have popped up all over the Internet. These sites are a great way to establish yourself online and get your name out there as well as a great marketing tool that can be used for free traffic. Making money with social networking sites is easy. Some sites will even pay you to refer other people into your network of friends. Imagine if on a site like MySpace that all of your friends were not just friends but also part of your downline. You can get paid just by making friends on business networking websites like Direct Matches where you can advertise your business or product for free to thousands of other business networking professionals.
When you first sign up for a social networking site the first thing you want to do is to create a user profile. This is where you get your own personal space where you can put a picture, a short bio, a link to your websites and even start a blog. You can customize it any whey you want, but the first step is to let people know who you are and what it is you do, but be sure to talk more about yourself and not about your product or company. This can be seen as spam and will not work as effectively as selling yourself.
Now that you have your profile you are ready to go out and network with others which will increase your friends, income, mailing list and website traffic. On many of these networks like Direct Matches you can join groups and forums that allow you to interact with other members who have similar interests. This is where you can introduce yourself to the community and promote who you are and what you do. People will wind up checking out your profile if they like and become potential customers.
You can also get extra exposure by leaving comments on profiles of other members. This will give you a link back to your profile which will be seen by everyone visiting the profile of the person you left the comment on. Another thing that you can do is build your list of contacts by sending out requests to other members to be added to your friends list. Many sites like Direct Matches allow you to browse through profiles and customize your searches to specific interests. Once you build a big network of contacts you can send out mailings to them through bulletins or emails.
Many of these social networking sites also have other marketing tools for members who upgrade for extra exposure and traffic. Some allow you to place banner ads, pixel ads or text ads that get rotated around the site bringing you an extra source of targeted traffic to your website. These sites can be a very good source of cheap paid advertising for you to use.