One of the major problems that people have with social networking is that they try to spread themselves too thin. They join a half-dozen networking sites and then cannot devote enough time to adequately network on any of them. The result is that they have a half-professional appearance all over the net.

Narrowing your focus to just a few sites and then building from there is the best way to approach social networking, especially if you want to make money. A strategic plan will help you build traffic in a measurable way without scattering your time and energy in many different directions.

At the core of your social networking plan is your “launch pad,” the site to which you will drive all of your online traffic. This can be a blog, a website, or a squeeze page. For the purposes of this plan, we’re going to make it a blog.

There are several reasons why using a blog for your launch pad is a good idea. Blogs have a higher level of interactivity with the audience. The content on a blog is constantly changing, so it always stays fresh and therefore ranks higher in search engine results. A blog will help you build a relationship with your niche and become a more trusted advisor.

You should use either Blogger or Wordpress to set up your blog. Do some keyword research in your niche and find a blog title that incorporates a popular keyword. This way you will get some automatic traffic from the title of the blog itself.

In fact, you should develop a short list of keywords that you will use to tag your content later on in the other social networking sites. When you focus your keyword choices around a short list, you will be able to rise in the rankings for those keywords pretty quickly.

When you start your blog, you will need to focus on creating interesting, compelling content. Map out five to ten blog posts and add them before you start promoting your blog through social networking sites.

For example, let’s say you are in the wedding niche. You have an affiliate relationship with a company that sells wedding favors. You decide that you want to develop a social networking plan to promote this particular company’s products.

Looking at some keyword results, there are many different types of wedding favors to choose from and many are the focus of lots of searches each day. You could use a URL that is general like www.weddingfavorinfo.com and then offer information on the many different types of wedding favors. On your blog, you can use banner ads or small graphic ads to link back to the affiliate site. You can also provide text links within your blog posts for visitors to click on as they read your suggestions.

Once you have your blog up and running, then it is time to create some Squidoo lenses (www.squidoo.com) and Hubpages (www.hubpages.com). To start, you should create three lenses and three Hubpages on similar keywords, all pointing back to your blog. With our wedding favor example, you could start with the three most popular types of favors and build pages around them (golf wedding favors, cheap wedding favors, unique wedding favors).

After you have built your lenses and pages, you can network within each site with people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can post comments on other people’s lenses or pages, and link to their sites. Look for people who have similar sites and network with them.

You can add your blog’s RSS feed to your lenses and pages. This way they will be constantly updated with the fresh content from your blog. In addition to the links back to your blog, you can also have links to the affiliate program within your lenses and pages.

Over a period of time, you can begin to add to the network of lenses and pages until you have criss-crossed all of your major keywords. Stumble Upon is a terrific tool for adding more power to your blog, lenses, and pages. When you sign up for Stumble Upon and download the toolbar, you will be able to check “I like it” as you visit your own sites and sites that are within your niche. Over time, you develop a list of your favorite sites which becomes a catalog of popular sites within your niche.

It is important, as you use Stumble Upon, that you not limit yourself to just

bookmarking your own sites. Your Stumble Upon profile will have much more impact and draw if it covers a wide breadth of sites within your niche. What makes Stumble Upon a great social networking tool (better than many social bookmarking tools out there), is that you can find users who have similar interests. On the main site, you can search the community for keywords and then make contact with people interested in your niche.

When you add someone as a friend on Stumble Upon, they will very likely look over your list of sites and bookmark them. Then your links will spread throughout the community, bring you traffic and make you more money.

These simple steps will create a broad network of backlinks and some

great Web 2.0 traffic. It will help you establish your site as an authority in

your niche market, and bring you targeted, interested traffic. The type of traffic that makes you money online!

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

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