There is no doubt that social networking sites are becoming ever more popular by the day. But can you convert this popularity into cold hard cash?
The answer is yes, so long as you go about it in the right way. The key thing to remember is that every site works in a slightly different way, so it’s important to become familiar with each one before you start using it.
But if you have a website or a blog that you would like to promote, this is definitely the way you should go to do it – free of charge.
So where do we begin? The first thing to bear in mind is that you cannot make money directly from the social media sites. If you read through the rules of each one you will notice that they frown on directly touting for business in this way.
But that doesn’t stop you from finding people on these sites who fit it with your customer profile and encouraging them to visit your website. All of these sites allow you to post your website address – most of them even provide a space especially to put it in – and if you take some time to build up a profile and a presence on each site you will soon start seeing some traffic going to your website.
The trick to attracting the right kind of people is to build your profile to reflect what your site is all about. So if your website is focused on selling DVDs for example, you could position yourself as a DVD freak who collects all kinds of different titles. This would attract the kind of people who will be most likely to actually buy DVDs themselves. Get the idea? All you need to do is make sure they can buy DVDs from your website, whether you mail them out yourself or you simply have loads of affiliate links leading to websites which will make you a commission every time someone buys something.
The best way to drive the biggest amount of traffic to your site is by joining as many social networking sites as you can manage and linking them all together. For example if you join Twitter you can post a message asking people to see your profile on MySpace, or wherever else you have an online presence.
The same goes for social bookmarking sites, where you can share your bookmarks with everyone else online. Make sure you bookmark your own website wherever possible – on sites like Digg and del.icio.us – to ensure you get more publicity to promote your website with.
One of the key points to remember in all this is to try and insert relevant keywords to your area of interest in your profile at each site. So for example if you have a blog at MySpace make sure you blog about relevant issues and pop some good keywords in there while you’re at it. Once you’ve had some practice you will find you can do it quite casually without it seeming like a sales spiel – which is exactly what you don’t want.
It can take some time to build up a decent following on the social networking sites but there is no doubt that it’s worth the effort if you do it right. It is more responsive than a lot of paid advertising you could do online, and you have a lot more control over it too.
But before you go and sign up to MySpace, Twitter and all the rest, leave a comment for us by using the form below. Many thanks!