With the success of the website Facebook, it's not surprising that there is a great deal of interest in social networks and making money from running your own social network. A number of companies have created platforms so basically anyone create their own community.

If you want to start your own social network and be successful at it, it is better to think of a specific niche and target your community to that niche.

You might be interested in fishing for example, but that topic is fairly broad so you could create a community based on a niche like "fly fishing". If you wanted to create even a smaller niche you could keep it specific to a location, like "Fly fishing in New Zealand". The smaller the niche, the easier it will be to get people interested, but the community can only grow so much.

Most of the platforms allow you to use their software for free. This is great because it doesn't cost anything to get started and if your community becomes popular, you can add some of the different paid features later, like running the software on your own domain.

If you then want to move the community to your own domain and start making money from advertising, you will then be charged a monthly fee. The options though are fairly scalable and the costs of running it only increase as your community grows, but it should be fairly easy then to sell advertising on the site with the increase in traffic, thus creating a successful new business venture.

Here I want to take a look at some of the different options available for setting up your own network.

Ning is perhaps the most well known social networking software or platform. They offer a number of options for starting your own site. You can get the free version, which will be hosted a on a sub-domain of ning.com. like: flyfishing.ning.com

If you want to run it on your own website, there is an additional cost, but then you can insert your own adsense ads. Currently it is $24.95 a month to use your own ads (or to remove Ning's ads) and an additional $4.95 a month if you want to run it on your own domain. Also if you want to remove the links to Ning, it is an additional $24.95. This will stop giving any disgruntled community members of thinking about starting their own community.

One advantage of Ning is that people only have to sign up once to ning.com and they can use the same ID on any of the different Ning websites available.

SocialGo has a very similar look and feel to Ning. The premium version is a little cheaper at $24.99 per month to use the software on your own domain name.

One of the useful features of SocialGo is that it is easy to charge your members to join or to charge them monthly or annually for using the site. All you have to do is put in your Paypal address and your payments will be sent there.

If you are looking for open source social networking software to install and run on your own website, Boonex might be what you are looking for. Despite it's strange sounding name, Boonex is a feature rich platform which started out as software for dating sites and added more features to become a fully fledged social networking package.

It has more advanced features than the above two platforms like video chat, but it requires more server resources, and can be a little more tricky to set up. The software is free to download and use on your site. If you want the "brand-free" version you will need to pay a license fee. For 400 days, the fee is just $99 and a lifetime license is $299.

While Joomla is used more as a Content Management System (CMS), with the installation of additional components you can create your own social networking site.  I would only use Joomla if you are already familiar with it or you are already using it on your website, as there is a bit of a learning curve.

The Community Builder component which is free to use, has some social networking features, but isn't as feature rich as the software already described.  Jomsocial is a commercial component that has features similar to popular social networking websites.  It is priced at $99 for the standard edition.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a simple and robust solution for setting up your own social networking site, Ning might be a good option.  It requires basically no technical expertise to create your own site.  If you want to have more control over your site, you might want to look at Boonex, which is more difficult to set up, but you have greater control over.  It also has active forums and support if you run into any trouble.