Popular Social Networking Websites

Posted on 05. Dec, 2009 by admin in Training

While all social networking websites have their own rules and restrictions, many websites operate in a similar way, with the same goals in mind.

Their goals are to allow Internet users to connect with other Internet users, often from all around the world.

There are many websites that are considered “general,” websites. These websites do not really have any particular focus, but there are social networking websites that do have a particular focus. Those focuses often include dating, religion, business, and school.

Here are a couple of suggestions I urge you to bear in mind when creating an account with a social networking site:

Always use your real name!

Think about it. Would you want to buy something from a person you know only as coolguy77?

Not likely. We’re talking about real business networking in this report so please act like a professional when you get out there and you’re results will be far greater.

Always Add Your Photo!

People like to have an image of the person they are meeting and talking with in their minds and a picture is the obvious best way to help with this. And it adds credibility to your cause.

Don’t be one of the people who are too self-conscious or just plain scared to display their picture on the Web. A clear photo of you on your profile page tells the world you are confident about who you are, and it will encourage others to have confidence in you as well.

Listed below are a few popular social networking sites for you to check out:

Orkut – Google’s Own Networking Site

Orkut is Google’s version of a social networking website. This website was created and officially launched in 2004. Orkut has a large number of members from all around the world. What is nice about Orkut is that the system is easy to use once you get in.

To protect their social networking communities, a large number of social networking websites, including Orkut, have restricted access to the site. If you are interested in joining Orkut you must know someone who is already a member and they must invite you to join the community. If you do not personally know anybody who is an Orkut member, ask them for an invitation.

Classmates – Worth Mentioning For Personal Interest

Classmates is an online social networking website that is rapidly increasing in popularity. This website focuses on connecting long lost friends or old classmates. Classmates is free to use, but you must become a paying member to enjoy many of their member benefits. These benefits include, but are not limited to, searching for old classmates, reading their profiles, requesting more information from your classmates, or even contacting them.

MySpace – The Biggest Networking Site Of All

MySpace is probably the most popular of all the social networking sites. They currently have over one hundred million members! MySpace, like many other social networking websites allows you to create your own profile, in fact, your own personal page.

Once your page has been created, you can easily invite other members to become a member of your network and visa versa. In addition to having a traditional profile page with your personal information, you can also display a large number of pictures, video clips, and music clips. And MySpace is completely free to use.

MySpace at one point had taken the world by storm. This is because, in what seemed like no time at all, MySpace had grown to become one of the most popular websites in all of cyberspace.

At that time, almost everyone knows about this site. It was virtually a household name at that point.

And while at one time it was believed to be a place for teenagers to share pictures and talk about the latest pop concert, studies had indicated over 50% of the users at MySpace are over the age of 30!

Business people from every niche are now using MySpace to build their network of prospects and drive traffic to their business websites.

The first step in joining this popular online social network is to register for an account. This can be done in a matter of minutes. Although you can view a number of different MySpace pages without registering, you can’t fully interact without your own account.

Registration will allow you to not only create your own MySpace page, but enjoy many of the other features that can be found on the site. Again this service is completely free to use.

Your Profile Page

Once you join MySpace, you can create your own profile page. Don’t settle for the generic profile page they start you out with!

You need to customize this profile right away so it looks different. Use the profile editor to change the colors, add background images and photos, and fill in your bio information. Then add plenty of good content, including pictures and links to your other websites, on your profile page.

To make the experience easier, MySpace has a fairly large collection of profile templates. These templates not only have an impact on the background of your profile

page, but the text fonts as well. In addition to using the pre-designed templates, you can also create your own, especially if you have basic knowledge of HTML. You can even purchase custom profile layouts or hire a pro designer to build you something really slick if you wanted.

Remember your MySpace profile is an extension of you in this cyber community so you want it to be a great representation of who you are and why people would want to get to know you. Add your personality and don’t just post a bunch of hype or business talk; remember people come to MySpace to find other people so if you seem fake on your profile you won’t do well with this site.

You can (and should!) even post an autoresponder form right on your profile page and offer visitors a free gift for joining your newsletter!

After you have created your own MySpace page, you can easily search for others. You can search for others with a wide variety of different keyword phrases. If you are looking for someone who lives near you, you can search for your town. If you are looking for someone who shares your love of animals, you can search for pet lovers. Once you have found the MySpace page of someone who you would like to become friends with, you can invite them to join your network. In addition to inviting others to join your network, there is a good chance that you will be invited to join others… this is the main benefit of being on MySpace.

In addition to your customizable profile page, MySpace gives you a slew of other powerful options.

Interaction

When you find a profile page or blog that you like, get involved! Post your comments on the profile or blog, and give the owner an invitation to join your network.

Remember you should avoid leading with a sales pitch. This is cheesy, unprofessional, and will alienate you from other users. Just be yourself and add friendly comments and greetings in an effort to attract like-minded people to you.

Friends

The purpose of MySpace is largely to make contacts. And you do this by inviting other users to be on your friends list and accepting invitations from other folks in the system.

Here’s a great example of how this can be used to further your business cause.

Let’s say you are a wedding planner with a nice looking profile on Myspace that links to your business site and blog. This networking site is teeming with young ladies who are

about to get married, so you could invite literally hundreds of these users to be on your Friends list. Of course once they join your network they will have the chance to sign up for your newsletter, view some photos of your portfolio, read your bio, and visit your website.

In the above example it is highly likely some of the people in your network will like what you have to offer (as long as you’re not too pushy about it) and become good customers!

You can use the Bulletin feature at MySpace to broadcast a message to your entire friends list. This can be an extremely powerful feature if used intelligently. You can offer free sample products to get folks in your network on your regular mailing list, inform them of special promotions, invite them to conference calls, and just about anything else you want to do with the Bulletin feature.

Your Blog

MySpace will also provide you with a blog. This is great because you can post valuable content about your field on a regular basis and give other members some good reading material. It’s vital that you provide good content because this is what will keep people on your blog actually reading, and if they like what you write they are quite likely to invite you to a group or add you to their friends list.

As with article marketing and blogging in general, when using your MySpace blog you need to really show people that you know what you are talking about, or at least that your opinion is backed by good logic. Any time you post content on the web, especially on a high traffic site like this your credibility is on the line so be sure to do a great job in providing readers with material that will compel them to regard you as someone who is knowledgeable in your niche.

Classified Ads

MySpace will also let you post classified ads. Of course your response will depend greatly on the quality of your ad, an frankly I would not expect a flood of traffic from this as most people don’t want to read ads in the first place, but it is an option and it takes only a few minutes to post.

Forums and Groups

MySpace is filled with forums and groups on all topics. This is a great opportunity for meeting new people in your niche and using something as simple as a signature link at the bottom of an intelligent post to drive quality traffic to your offer.

Remember though, to really take advantage of these groups and forums you want to honestly get involved. Contribute valuable content to the conversations and start your own discussions.

You want to become a member of the group that other users like.

Of course you will see a ton of ads being posted in these forums. And how do you react when you see these ads?

Exactly. And that’s how people will react if you go in and start posting ads right away too.

So start by joining the group and the discussions, and integrate your promotions when an appropriate opportunity appears. If the group you have joined is targeted to your niche and you have something of value to them the chance to tell them about it will arise.

If your product or service has an affiliate program you can even contact the group leader and ask them if they would like to promote it to the group in exchange for a nice commission. This way you don’t come across as a pushy salesperson; in fact people expect group leaders to promote products to them.

On that note, you might even want to start your own group. Once you have a good-sized network why not just form your own group and start drawing people into this. An active MySapce group could easily become the top of your sales funnel.

Squidoo – Authority Site And My Personal Favorite

Squidoo is a social site that is known as an authority portal. In many ways it’s like Wikipedia, only far more interactive.

Squidoo is made up of lenses (content pages) that are created by members on a wide array of topics. This Web 2.0 resource is especially good for business people because it’s all about learning and sharing content.

Squidoo is a little more high brow than most social networking sites. What I mean is this portal is all about sharing and gaining knowledge so the average visitor quality is very high.

There are two big reasons you should join this site:

Squidoo lenses often come up high in the search results of the major engines because the site is well optimized and the lenses tend to be very keyword relevant. So if you have a good lens a searcher could find you even if you don’t have a well-optimized site of your own!

Many people come to Squidoo every day in search of quality information. This type of Internet user is far more likely to end up making a purchase than a person who is just looking to socialize.

Once you register with Squidoo you should immediately create your first lens. You are allowed up to five lenses per account so you can actually create portals for multiple ventures if you like.

Think of a good title for your lens as this will be part of your Squidoo URL. After your title you will be able to create a description, which should be at least a few paragraphs of good material explaining what your lens has to offer.

Here are the links to two of my Squidoo lenses:

http://www.squidoo.com/smokefreereality

http://www.squidoo.com/realwebmarketing

Look these lenses over to get a feel for how you can set yours up. I use them to capture traffic that is targeted to the appropriate niche and drive them to my business sites and blog.

Important things to add to your lenses are a picture and a good bio. Don’t just leave the generic bio, take the time to add a few paragraphs about yourself and why people should trust your content.

As you will see, a Squidoo lens is made up of many modules.

You can easily add text modules that let you enter articles, and you can upload photos with each article. The text module will be the base of your lens so be sure to add plenty of these.

Plus you can ad Amazon and Ebay modules that display products and auctions relevant to the niche your lens is about. And you’ll get a commission on any sales that result from your displaying these product and auction links on your lens!

You can even add video, or links from your social bookmarking sites.

There are plenty of options, but two things I definitely recommend in addition to your text modules are the RSS modules and the link modules.

The RSS module allows you to plug in the RSS feed from your blog, so each time you post on your blog your Squidoo lens will be updated. This will keep fresh content coming

into your lens, create links back to your blog posts, and bring targeted traffic from Squidoo to your blog.

And the link module of course allows you to post links to your favorite resources. You can give your link module a title like “Check Out My Websites For More Quality Information” or “Have A Look At Some More Cool Resources” or whatever, and then add the links to all of your sites, blogs, ezines, and affiliate programs. This will generate quality visitors to your sites, and give you link backs from a high PR site to help with your SEO.

In addition to your lens modules, Squidoo gives you the options of commenting on other lenses, adding other lenses to your lens roll (links list), and joining groups or inviting other Squidoo members to join your friends network. Bear the same general rules in mind that were covered in the MySpace section above when interacting with other Squidoo users.

I believe Squidoo is set to explode in the near future. There are already many thousands of users there, and since most of these people are either in business or honestly looking for answers and solutions the caliber of people you can meet through this social site is superb.

YouTube – Visual Networking

YouTube is the premier video networking site on the web. This site is all about sharing video clips with other users. You can upload your own videos, and watch clips added by other users and rate these videos.

This site receives millions of monthly visitors, is said by many to be a real competitor in the broadcast advertising arena (even compared to network television!) and was called the “Invention of the Year” by Time Magazine in 2006.

It’s safe to say this resource is hot! In fact many top marketing analysts predict online video will be the #1 form of Internet promotion during 2007. Think about that for a second… makes you want a piece of the action huh?

Other Networking Sites Of Interest

In addition to the sites above, there are many other social networking sites worth checking out. The number of sites you join really depends on how much time you want to put into this strategy.

Three websites that have a good member base, and are completely dedicated to business networking are Ryze, Business Entrepreneur Network, and Focus 4 The Future. All of these sites are quite similar and have a MySpace sort of feel to them.

You can set up your profile pages and blogs, post classifieds, invite people to join your network, and participate in groups. Check out each of the above sites and see which ones are a good fit for you. You won’t know which social networking communities work within your personal strategy until you join and have a look around so take action on this and measure your results.

Social Boomarking Sites

In addition to networking sites, there are many websites that are designed for the sole purpose of sharing links with other Internet users. These resources are called Social Bookmarking or Tagging sites and they can be a great way to drive targeted traffic to a number of websites.

Social Bookmarking is exactly what the name implies. It’s a way for users to store their bookmarks or favorite links online, and in most cases publicly (hence the ‘social’).

Why would you want to do this? Two reasons:

Most bookmarking sites have a high Google Page Rank, making them great sites to link to your sites from for SEO purposes.
More people are turning to social sites like this to find resources they are looking for. And once you add your sites, other users can see it and if they like what they see they will add some or all of your links to their list! This could mean BIG traffic.

This is a simple process. You just register with a good bookmarking site and then start adding your favorite links to your list.

Most bookmarking sites require you to download a toolbar that allows you to instantly add a site to your list as you cruise the web. And of course your first step after registration would be to add all of your personal web pages and blog posts to your list.

Note I said all of your pages and posts. Don’t just bookmark your home page and leave it at that, really leverage these resources by adding all of your pages for the world to see.

Something you should seriously consider when you have a good selection of sites bookmarked on the web is finding other people (perhaps some of the contacts you are now making via social networking sites!) to join you in a bookmarking network. Here’s how this would work:

You find ten other people with websites they want to drive traffic to and form a network. Then all of you agree to bookmark each other’s websites using the top social bookmarking sites!

Ideally once a handful of people bookmark your sites others will jump on the bandwagon and start visiting your sites and adding them to their lists. Pretty soon you can have lots and lots of people checking out your site, joining your mailing lists, and even buying your products.

There are a number of good social bookmarking sites to choose from. Here are three of the most popular which I highly recommend you join and start using right away:

Furl
Delicous
Magnolia

Check these out and get registered. Also there are two other sites I’d like you to keep in mind.

Digg is a news site that works very much like a bookmarking site in that it is user fuled. You’ll see when you land on the page a number of new ‘stories’ that were posted by members and then ‘Dugg’ by other members.

You’ll find Digg buttons on Squidoo lenses and Blogs all over the web, and now you know why. This is a heavily trafficked site and having your article Dugg by its users is a great way to brand yourself and drive traffic to your site.

To Digg one of your web pages or blog posts, all you do is (once you have an account) enter a title, short description, and add your link. Then select a category and confirm your submission.

If you submit something interesting other users will come across the story and Digg it as well. A word of caution here – do not post spammy adverts on this site or you will be flamed and even marked as a spammer for all to see; only use Digg to bookmark quality articles and stories from your blog and other web pages.

You should also know that Digg places the nofollow tag on all outbound links so it’s worthless as an SEO tool. Use this site only to brand yourself and drive traffic.

OnlyWire calls itself ‘The only bookmarking service you’ll ever need” and for good reason. This site is a hub of sorts that allows you to use one interface for bookmarking your pages on 16 social portals!

I recommend signing up at OnlyWire and joining each program listed there. Then you can simply add a special link to your favorites and use that link in the future to bookmark a page on all of the sites listed with OnlyWire!

However don’t be surprised if you find some of the sites you try to join through OnlyWire are down. Just skip them and go on to the next one, although you will have to enter something in the field for each site so if you find one that is offline just enter a generic username and keep going.