Building Traffic With Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are designed for people to let each other know about their blogs, websites, and other projects.

The popularity started with MySpace, which was soon overwhelmed with thousands and thousands of users. It's still a great place to promote your site, but there are others to try, too, such as the new Facebook.

A Site to Promote Every Interest

Then there are the sites specializing in a particular category. If you want to promote your band or your new musical compositions, you could join Buzznet. Bebo is aimed at schools and colleges, and Care2 is all about green living.

Photosharing networking sites include Flickr, Fotolog, and Zooomr. Book people will want to see and be seen on LibraryThing or Shelfari. There are sites for people who have dating websites they need to popularize; XING is a site for business networking; and Sermo is for physicians. There are sites where you can meet others in communications, blogging, online journaling, and all kinds of technology.

How to Join and Work These Sites

I suggest getting involved with two or three sites: one specializing in your niche, and the other a more general site such as StumbleUpon, Technorati, del.icio.us, Squidoo, or Tribe.net.

Keys to bringing in the most traffic to your own personal website:

1) Update your networking site as often as possible. Daily is great.

2) Make your networking space - be it a page, a video, a blog - attractive, creative, original, and professional. (Don't ever post anything without going through Spell Check and proof reading it personally.)

3) Visit the spaces that others have created on the networking site. Leave comments. You never want to trade links, or trade ratings with people - that's against most sites' rules and it's not fair. But honest contact with others on the site is great. In fact, that's what it's all about.

Never join a site that requires payment. The good ones are free.

To join, go to their homepage (Google the name to get their URLs) and register. You'll get a login name and password, and you're ready to go. It's as easy as that. Each site has its own rules and its own tools. Sometimes it takes a little reading to learn how to use their particular tools, but it's well worth it. For instance, to use YouTube you need to know how to shoot a video that views well in that medium.

For tutorials on website building and more articles on commercialization, be sure to check out the do it yourself website design site

Suzann Kale is a technical writer and copy editor. A graduate of Northwestern University, her articles have appeared in national magazines and on the web. She's currently working at http://www.Website-DoItYourself.com, and building her own websites.