There are many ways to build social networks such as joining forums, participating in other blogs, making friends of course, and many other things. The thing is though when you are building social networks make sure your focusing exactly on the network you wanting to build, such as a professional profitable network, a free education network, or anything to that nature. I’m sure you get my drift anyways I have listed some tips on building social networks and where to start at.

1. First is first install a weblog such as wordpress, then vertically define your network. Think of what type of people are your trying to attract. Are you trying to attract investors, teachers, doctors, or web designers. There is several topics you can write about I have seen bloggers write about everything they can think of, but quite honestly I think the best thing to write about is things that your interested in and passionate about.
2. Forums, You know forums can be a good place to meet people which your not always going to meet the “type” of people that you may want to meet, but its a start you can generate community interest from the forums. You can build trends into your blog, and then vertically plant seeds that will make it grow. The reason I say it might not be the people that you want to meet which sounds kind not rude, but I have no intentions of being rude what so ever. Generally search engines have more convertible and high end paying clients, but then again like I said you can build trends to you blog that will build community interest and it will give your self leverage to create word of mouth effects and plus gain links to your website which will result in more traffic from the search engines.
3. Participating in other blogs can help a lot. Networking with other blog owners specially ones that are very popular can build your brand very fast. Thats why I stated in the last paragraph that joining forums can help. Anywhere that has a community in it participate and do something that makes you stick out from the rest, something that will drive people to your website.
4. Benefits, how are people going to benefit by participating in your community. Think of something that will be beneficial to people that participate in your community such as educational information or anything that you can use to build trends into your community driven website.
5. Active Users, make sure you stay in touch with your active users the reason being is because your more active users will be the ones that talk about you highly, they will promote you more. These type of people are passionate about being in your community so make sure you take care of them.
6. Leverages, use anything that can leverage your community and make it grow such as affiliate offers, free give aways, and many other things. Think of programs that will viral out there something that people will be interested in. See when you offer things like affiliates and similar stuff like that for people to make money online you will find they will come very fast, this is a way to vertically increase your community very fast cause you can get people in there and keep them coming back.
7. Review other websites this would fall back under the category of participating in other communities some what. Review other websites for example Tech Crunch writes a story about how to build links faster or how to build social communities fast. Read the stories and then write about them, do like a review or better yet be creative and write your own believes up and post. Another example would be someone at a blog or forum says something, or writes something you don’t think so highly of write about it and then connect it.

The idea behind building social networks is basically just connecting with people, and connecting your website with other websites. Theres not really any mysteries behind it. It just takes time and effort like I have stated many times. There are numerous places you can use to build trends into your website such as Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon, and so many more. The beginning stages of generating a community driven website will be the most complexed specially if your not experienced or have a name out there yet.

Which there is ways to blow your community up fast and I would have to say you would have to virally do something for it to grow very quick. Thats why I said do things like offering affiliate programs, and similar stuff that people will like and that will get into therefore you can get the community into the website and keep them coming back, and then you can build more trends from there on out. Keep focusing on networking, and building trends then eventually it will start to come together.

You know I would almost have to say think of a social network as a circle. Ok now think of what your going to do to make this circle spend and draw people into this circle. Think to your self what will get people into this circle, if you can create the ideas on what you can do to get people into the circle your off to a great start, give it some thought. Just keep testing, testing, and testing eventually the dots will connect.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.