If you spend any amount of time online or for that matter off-line you know that the fastest growing web properties are social networking sites. Sites like twitter, Facebook, and squidoo are all the rage.

Part of the reason for this is that the Internet is a lonely place. People who run online businesses from home want to reach out and talk to somebody who understands their world.

Once websites become popular it does not take long for marketers to wonder how to reach out to the millions of users who are currently using the site.
Social networkers will insist that social networking sites should never be used for marketing. However, just like with everything else there are ways to market to people on social networking sites without them ever knowing that they have been marketed to.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

People on sites like twitter and Facebook are constantly pointing out online videos to their friends. They see a video on YouTube that inspires them or gives them information that they feel a friend would be interested in, so they send them a link. It is natural to want to share things we find interesting.
Now, there are websites that will pay us for sharing videos but there is also an opportunity for us to create a video about our product and secretly share that link with friends we have made on twitter or Facebook.

I talk to people daily that want to create websites like twitter, MySpace, Facebook and the list goes on and on. The money is not in creating a website like Facebook and trying to compete with Facebook the money is in learning how to market on Facebook or twitter and make money selling our own products.

Social Networking

When it comes to marketing online a lot of what I’m going to be talking about has to do with social networking. You might be thinking it has nothing to do with ranking on Google however; it has everything to do with ranking on Google.

I read the other day that in one day last month 75,000 people lost their jobs.

Now that’s a lot of people losing jobs and while the news media wants to scare the heck out of everyone, everything is not what it seems. Did you know that there are pockets of strength in the economy, areas that are still hiring and seeking people?

Checkout this graph Graph that shows the number of people looking for social networkers and you’ll see that these people are not getting laid off.

The reason these people are in high demand is because there is money to be made in social networking. I just wanted to make sure you knew this before I started posting and writing about social networks. Oh and before I forget, social networks are great for getting ranked in the search engines and driving traffic to our sites.