Creating Social Networks
There is no doubt, social networks are the rage. People use them to stay in touch with friends and family. Marketers use them to promote their products and services.
The purpose of this article is not to discuss the benefits of using social media to promote a business. There are plenty of articles on that topic all over the Internet. The purpose of this article is to discuss creating your own social network as a business.
A fun business it is, too!
New social networks are popping up all over. Developments in software have made it simple for anyone to start their own network. That said, you might wonder if it is even worth the time to create one of your own when there are so many already.
The answer is yes!
The key to building a successful and profitable network is to be unique, and to have a well defined niche. Do not let the fact that there are other networks within your niche scare you off. If you visit the other networks, you will see that each one is unique, and yours will be, too. It is your personal touch that will set the tone and focus of your network, and that is what will attract new members.
Now that you have decided to create your own network, how do you go about doing that?
There are two major players in the Social Network arena. There are actually more than that, but this article will only cover the top two. Having built a network of my own, I can tell you, I tried them all, and these two are by far the best.
The first is Ning, a free, hosted platform that allows you to create a network, hosted by them. As a free member, your network will have a Ning url based upon the name of your community. For example, yourcommunity.ning.com. For a fee of $4.95 per month, you may direct to your own url, yourcommunity.com. Ning places Adsense on your community, which is how they make money so they can provide this service free. You may have their ads removed, and replace it with your own Adsense or other advertising for an additional fee of $24.95 per month.
Ning also has their Logo on your community, which you can have removed for $24.95 per month. All together, to have a totally branded community with your own Adsense, and no mention of Ning, with your own url, the total cost is $55.00 per month.
Mt recommendation, should you choose to go with Ning, would be to pay the $4.95 for your own url right away. Once you have a few members, pay the $24.95 to have their logo removed, thus giving you a branded community. Branding will be critical to your income in the months to come.
Until you have a few couple hundred members, you will not make much money from Adsense, because Google seems to have trouble communicating with Ning’s platform, and the ads are not as targeted as they should be, and would be with other community platforms.But there are other ways you can monetize your community without Adsense. This will be a topic of a different article.
The next is Boonex, developers of Dolphin software for Social Networks. Dolphin is a free software package you can download, tweak the design, and host on your own server or hosting account. The free version has the Boonex logo and link to their site on it, but you may purchase the license from them for a nominal fee and have that removed, allowing for total branding of your community.
Dolphin software takes more programming knowledge, but if you have basic php and css skills, or if you can tweak a WordPress blog, you should be able to design and customize your Dolphin community. If you have no skills in this area, you would need to hire someone to do it for you, or have a lot of patience, and a willingness to learn. It would not be simple, but it would be well worth the effort.
The benefits of Dolphin is it’s complete customization, and flexibility. With Dolphin, you can set varying degrees of permissions for users, charge for memberships, and more. With Ning, you can not do this. You could set your Ning community to private and charge for membership, but visitors would not be able to see your community except for the front page.
With Dolphin, you can set degrees of membership. For example, a free member can browse, but not post, or a free member could browse and comment, but not create a blog or access message boards. It is up to you how you wish to set up your community, either free for all, free for some, free for no one, or a combination.
Which provider you choose will depend on what you want to do with your network. If you want a very unique, totally branded community that you can monetize right away, or if you are going to charge for memberships, and you want more flexibility with regard to varying levels of memberships, and moderation controls, you will definitely want to go with Boonex.
If you want a quick and easy, out of the box solution, that you can have up and running in minutes, and you plan to offer free membership, and rely on advertising and affiliate sources as your primary income source, go with Ning.
And whatever you do, don’t forget to invite me to your new community.
Disclosure: The writer of this article is an affiliate of Boonex. Should you choose to purchase from Boonex via the link in this article, the writer will receive a commission.
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