If you’re interested in ways to make money online, starting your own social network may be one viable way. Starting your own social network is actually really easy these days with online platforms and pre-programmed software. You can literally be up and running in 10 minutes if you choose a free online platform such as Ning.com. But don’t be disillusioned by the ease of setting up a social network. It takes planning for your network to be successful and more planning for it to be profitable.

Although many people have created successful social networks, or community sites, using Ning.com, it is also littered with dead social networks that were started by people who didn’t have a plan and only the romantic notion that “if you build it they will come”. I am sure some of you have started things online that didn’t quite pan out the way you had hoped and that is mainly because of the fact that there a bazillion websites competing for some attention.

In this article I will show you how to create your own social community site using Ning.com and:

• how to decide on the kind of social network to start
• how to drive traffic and prospective members to your social network
• how you can make money online with your social network

So let’s get started!

Ning.com is a free “DYI” social network platform. It offers a great range of tools, gadgets and widgets to make your community site look and feel very professional, fun and easy to use for both you and your members. I recommend using Ning.com for your first project because it really is so easy to work with and you don’t need to know any HTML or programming. It is also 100% free and for a free platform it really kicks butt.

I’d recommend reading through this tutorial before setting up your account with Ning.com. Also when you do create an account, use a generic username in the event you one day decided to sell your site or if you are creating it for someone else.

Decisions to Make

The first thing you need to do is decide whether or not this particular way to make money online is right for you. Although it’s a fun project it will take work to make it a flourishing society of bountiful income.

Next, decide who will make your online community a place people want to hang out and come back to. If you plan on doing it yourself it’s really not too difficult, it’s just time consuming. If you plan on hiring someone to moderate your online world, or if you’re doing the project with a friend you really need to have a clear division or outline of tasks and what’s expected.

Another decision you’ll need to make is the niche or topic your social network will target. Perhaps your thinking just something broad like Facebook. A broad spectrum like Facebook will take time, money, personnel and a serious game plan . But it’s not impossible. Ning.com won’t be the platform you’ll want to use if this is what you’re after. For your first try at a community site, I’d suggest sticking to a specific niche.

If you already know what niche you’re going after, make sure you do some research as to whom your competition is and what they are doing and how you can be better or different.

Your domain name must be easy to remember and preferably have your niche/keyword in it. So if you’re community site is for Olympic swimmers and Olympicswimmers.com is of course taken, opt for something like Olympic-swimmers.com, .net, .org, or MyOlympicSwimmers.com, OlympicSimmersGroup.com, OlympicSwimmersOnline.com, SpeedoWarriors, OlympicWaterRats, etc., etc. If you can’t get your keyword in there make the URL easy to remember and catchy. To be honest I’d choose SpeedoWarriors over OlympicSwimmerOnline because SpeedoWarriors just sounds that much cooler, is kinda funny, and easy to remember. Sometimes creativity reigns over functionality ya know?

Not sure yet what niche you want to tackle? Here are some ideas for community sites you can start.

• Animal lovers of whatever kind
• Bands who have a fan base
• Biker clubs with a large number of members
• Book club
• Business network
• Chambers of commerce
• Cultural Groups
• Religious organizations with a lot of members
• Moms network
• Local regions - your city, county, province, state etc.
• Stuff to do network
• Medical professionals
• Non Profit Organizations
• Yacht clubs with large number of members
• Schools that are noteworthy
• Sports of whatever kind
• Support groups

…Or leaf through magazines, yellow pages, books, search online at forums, other social sites etc. to get some ideas.

Planning Your Social Network

Now that you know what social network you’re going to launch, you’ll need to figure out what you’re going to offer to your audience. The nice thing with using Ning.com is that you can, by the click of a button, allow your members to upload video, photos, personalize their pages, ad widgets, chat with other members, post to a forum or blog, create groups, participate with your online forum, and post events to the calendar. You as the moderator/creator, don’t have to program anything! Just click, drag, and activate the things you want your members to be able to use

A side from these nifty and easy tools and gadgets, you will need some content, good content, upon opening day. You can post some interesting blog posts, upload relevant videos and photos, ad events to the calendar, provide relevant links, and have some forum discussions already going. This doesn’t take much to do, but you must maintain the interesting content until your member count is strong enough to where the members are contributing this interesting content for you.

Driving Traffic and Attracting Members

Once your network is ready to launch, it’s time to get some members in the door BEFORE you announce your network to the world. Here are some pre-launch things you can do:

• If you have a relevant mailing list and e-mail list send them an invite to be the first to join your network

• Ask friends and family to join and ask them to ask their friends and family to join as well.

• Post an ad on Craigslist and other free classified ads announcing that this network is just about to launch and that you’ll give the first 100 people who sign up something of value (you decide what that’s going to be). Make sure that they upload a photo and fill out their profile.

• Write a press release announcing your new network and send it off to every newspaper, magazine, radio station and TV station in the nation.

Official Launch and Driving More Traffic

So now that you have some members and you’re social site doesn’t look like a ghost town, it is time to launch it like a space rocket!

It would be cool to have yourself a launch party. It can be as little or big as you want it to be. Big is better of course but just do something to commemorate the inception of your online business. Depending on your niche, you can probably offer to sponsor a club event or other celebration that has some sort of relevance to your site. Contact the person who is in charge of the event and ask them if you can pay for flyers if they are willing to put your logo and launch party details on the flyer and promote the party as a “your community site” launch party. I call this the Piggy Back Launch Party, just cleverly hopping onto someone else’s party bus. Invite some key people, the local news perhaps, maybe even have a keynote speaker…it just depends on you.

Here are other things to do to drive traffic and making your launch more official:

• Create business card size info cards about your site and sprinkle them around town. Make sure you have them at your launch party
• Have a sign up station at the launch party. A laptop, cute girl, a sign, some free giveaways, and a table are all you need.
• Take that press release that you submitted to the magazines and newspapers and submit it to free online PR distribution sites like i-newswire.com
• Write interesting blog posts at least twice per week and social book mark them using SocialMarker.com or Onlywire.com. This will help somewhat with ranking and creating links back to your social site, plus generate some interest form people who’d like to join your network
• Write INTERESTING articles about your niche topic and always end it with a link to your social network. Submit these articles to online article submission sites for people to read and use. Interesting articles get spread around and with your link intact will drive a bit of traffic
• Post comments to forums and blogs around your network niche with a link to your site. Inlineseo.com’s do follow diver tool will pull up forums and blogs where you can post comments and cleverly plob your site’s URL down. You will create some backlinks which will help in ranking, and some interested prospects to join your network
• Do some keyword research! Why is this important to you? Well you’ll want to try to get to page one in Google for some of your niche’s keywords so that you’ll get FREE traffic to your site. Using google’s free keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal , you’ll want to type in your niche topic, which is your main keyword. Google’s keyword tool will give you the search volume for that keyword and several related keywords. Based on your findings you will want to write your blog posts with those specific keywords in your posts (4 to 5 times including once in your title) for search engines to find. To find out what competition you’re up against for that particular keyword you will want to install the coolest free plug in from SEObook.com. Go to tools and click on the SEO for Firefox application. When you are browsing google this plug in (when turned on) shows you how many links a particular site has, the site’s age, and a whole bunch of other useful information you can use to outrank them for a particular keyword. If you are really serious about creating an effective online business you will have to learn a lot about internet marketing and grab some tools that will make your life a lot easier. For super in depth and amazing keyword/market research use Market Samurai from noblesamurai.com. For this project it is worth it to take the 40 day free trial of Market Samurai and learn how to dominate in your niche.
• Submit your site to main search engine directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ.org, MSN etc.
• Include your site’s URL in all of your online and offline communications such as e-mails, online profiles, business cards, letters, faxes etc.
• Create a Blog widget. This is the easiest and coolest thing you can do with your Blog as long as it’s RSS enabled. Just go to widgetbox.com create an account and then got to create widget. Choose Blog and enter your Blog’s RSS URL. Now, if your Blog is interesting and has some super cool content, people who have relevant sites will put your widget on their sites. When someone clicks to read one of your Blog posts they will land on your site, how cool is that. No, even cooler is that it’s FREE. Next, submit your widget to widget directories. Widgetbox has it’s directory but it will not hurt to spread the love.
• Create a contest. Get members to help drive traffic and do a “friends” contest. The person with the most friends wins something or whatever. Be creative and come up with something different. Just make sure you follow through.
• I am not recommending to SPAM anyone but you can HINT to the effect of your website’s existence on Facebook, Tribe.net, Myspace, Youtube etc. to those who belong to groups that are within your niche.

Many the tasks above can be outsourced. I certainly don’t do all of the work myself, I pay others to do it for me J. And the above mentioned ideas are only a fraction of the things you can do to drive traffic.

Making Money With Your Online Community

Let’s say your online community is thriving, people are coming in and signing up, your daily visits are sweet and you’re feeling that this is going to be a keeper, time to start rolling in some dough! Well, depending on your niche, there are literally hundreds of ways you can make money. And if it is your goal to make money with your online community and pretty much your main motivation, then this is the step you would start with first. Figuring out what niche will drive the most profit and building your community is based on your findings. But regardless of your main objective, your content has to be good and people need to want to be active members in order for you to make any kind of money.

Let’s go over the money making opportunities:

• Create a FREE amazon.com store and sell relevant books, cds, DVDs, and other merchandise. Nope, you don’t need your own products, Amazon.com will pay you a commission based on the sales that are generated with the cool store you build through them. It’s super easy, fun and you pick the stuff you feel fits best with your niche. Just go to Amazon.com and scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “join associates” follow the instructions and you’ll be up and running in not time. Once your store has been created you can just take the store’s link URL Amazon provides and past it when you create a tab in your Ning community site for the store.
• Take control over the google ads on your Ning network pages. Now, Ning will charge you to have control over the Google Ads on the right side of your pages so that you make the revenue for each click rather than Ning. I would not pay to have control over this feature until your site is really roaring and guaranteed to get some clicks on those ads. But this doesn’t mean you can’t run your own ads on your network. What you can do is use a “text” box feature and place it where ever you want. Then ad your own Google Adsense account code to the text box and you’re in business.
• Sell advertising spots. The “text” box feature in Ning allows you to put HTML or third party stuff. This is super cool because you can use the left side and middle for advertising banners or text. Don’t go over board with the banners and ads because your members will be turned off quickly.
• Sell a spot on your site for live online help, consultations, advice, you name it from a real live person. If your niche is “single dads”, then you can sell a spot on your site to a legal service that can answer people’s questions about family law issues. It’s very easy to do and it’s something most community sites don’t have.
• Sell your own stuff. If you’re just starting out and kind of testing things out, you don’t need a shopping cart or merchant account. Just use a FREE online marketplace such as blujay.com and get your payments taken care of through Paypal. It’s all very easy, free, and effective. I sell videos this way and eventually I will have a professional storefront but for now this works just fine.
• Sell off your site. That’s right, get rid of it to a willing buyer, the whole network you’ve created. If you have 10,000 members, get 1000 hits per day or more, are generating $100 per day or more, you better believe someone is going to want to buy it from you. Use an online escrow service such as escrow.com to help make the transaction legit.
• The easiest way to make money with social network sites is by setting one up for someone else. You will be an online champ because the site looks so cool, you're client will love it, and it only took you an hour. Your client will have to provide you with the content and they will have to do all of the member getting work themselves unless they pay you to do it. If your client has a mailing list or e-mail list, it will be very easy. You can charge no less than $500 to create the site for them and $150 or more per month to help maintain it and send out newsletters to members. You will spend about $50 per month for Ning's premium features such as removing their Ning.com links, taking control over the ads, and using your own URL. You do want to pay for this if you expect to be paid handsomely. Leaving the Ning.com stuff on there is super tacky and your clients will notice that they could have done themselves for free.

So there you have the basics on ways to make money online with your new social network site. I can go on for days about other ways to drive traffic and make money so the best thing to do is keep checking for more posts or log on to www.moolamonkey.com and become a member, it’s free. I will soon launch a more in depth “how to” for creating your own social network for Moolamonkey members and discuss different platforms, step by step how to setup your Ning account and network, cool tricks, offer you my personal help and much more.