Social Networking

Yes, you can make new business contacts online. Joint Venture's, which are so common today, proves the simple principle that in the end, people do business with PEOPLE. Old fashioned networking is still alive and well, online. And it’s a great method for getting some good exposure if you’re just starting out and have no money for marketing. By building some business relationships, you’ll soon have other marketers offering to link to you, publish your articles, write about your site in their newsletter, and even offer you free advertising.

One of the best places to make business contacts in your field is in Social and Business Networks. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace are good examples. Also, Direct Matches, and Earners Online are good places to build relationships with others in yours or related fields. But instead of trying to convince consumers to visit your site, make friends with experts in related fields. Marketers, Traffic, E-mail experts can all be found on these networks. There are also other website owners who may be interested in your product or service.

As with all business networking, look for ways to help your colleagues. If they have their own site, offer them a link on yours. If they have an opt-in list, perhaps you can set up a special web page, and give them a rebate on any commissions you make. If they write their own articles, perhaps you can turn them into a mini-ebook and offer it to all your visitors. And there’s no reason you can’t be agressive, and send an email to noncompetitors (or even competitors) whose sites you admire. You don’t have to consider every competitor your enemy. Simply look for opportunities to be helpful.

One easy way to help (provided you do it diplomatically) is to point out a problem on someone’s site or in their ezine. If you find a broken link or some other error, drop them a note. Most webmasters WANT to know if a link suddenly stops working or if their database is generating internal server errors. Another way to make powerful friends online is to read your Spam. That’s because ALL online merchants want to know if someone is promoting their affiliate product via Spam. It’s not just the Spammer who can suffer some stiff legal penalties – they can too. So if you see someone’s ebook or software being sold via Spam, write to them and let them know. Make sure you keep the original Spam, and send it to them as an attachment (not forwarded) so they receive all the headers intact.

How can networking help get you targeted traffic? If you make 15 good, personal, one-on-one business contacts every month, at least 3 of them will end up sending you traffic. Someday, they’ll start pushing the right kinds of visitors to you. It might be by linking to you. They may mention your site in a viral ebook or one of their articles. They might want to do a joint venture or partner on a money making project. They might do all these things (and many more). Yes, it’s old fashioned. It’s not autopilot. It’s not passive. But networking costs you nothing except time – and can be worth gold in the long term.