You’d be hard-pressed to find someone these days that isn’t a part of at least one social network. You should use this to your advantage. Join up and find free ways to promote your website development and increase your traffic for free.

With social networking, you can stay in touch with family and friends wherever they are. You can share pictures, stories and send instant messages when you are both logged in. This way of keeping in touch has extended into the business world and become useful as a marketing tool. Joining a social network is free so there’s no reason not to give it a try. These sites bridge the gap across the miles better than simple email.

Which sites can you use? The following sites have been found by business owners to be the most appropriate: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and MySpace. The results from each site are different for every business so don’t be afraid to test and track which ones yield the best outcome for your business. Once you sign up with a valid email address and password, you are ready to get started.

Use these sites to create a page telling everyone about your business. Look for friends, family and business associates who are also connected so you can keep up with what is going on in their lives and businesses as well.

Let’s look at Facebook. This is one of the most popular sites and can be beneficial for personal and business reasons. In business terms, post links to your website when you launch new products, spin the newsletters or to publicise sales.

You can post links to your latest blog posts, or if you are guesting at another blog elsewhere on the Internet. Highlight contests, guest bloggers and other events that you are a part of. Do you have an online radio show? Encourage your friends to listen to live podcasts and learn more about what you do.

Turning to YouTube, post videos and links to your Facebook profile, your Twitter account and so on. Invite all your friends to interact and leave you comments.

The beauty of these social sites is that business contacts and friends can distribute your links to other people who may be interested in what you do, as well. This is what they called viral marketing at its best.

As any professional virtual assistant will tell you, the one thing to remember about promoting your website or blog on social networking sites is not to do so just for that purpose. Take it easy and get to know the people you are interacting with. Be careful, because they say that social networking can be addictive. You should set boundaries and be somewhat cautious, but if you grow your business, this can be addictive by itself. If you’d really like to experience the incredible gains of social media, but you just don’t have the time, take on an expert virtual assistant to ‘get the ball rolling.’

Just like so many other online marketing tools, the name of the game is relationships. You can build meaningful ones not only with friends and family, but with your target audience and business associates on all the social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook of course, and others.

Comment on your friends posts and visit their links as well. As an Internet marketing tool, social networking works both ways. It’s not a means to an end, but is a fun way to market and grow your business. Above all else, remember that it is free!

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 12:42 am and is filed under Web Development. 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.