There are a couple of ways to take advantage of social networking sites to grow your business:

1. Blog: Blog about the blogs and the websites that you want to get noticed by. Most bloggers are obsessed with checking their stats and keeping track of who’s linking to them. If you link to a website in a blog post, you can bet they will find your post and read it.
2. Comment: Read blogs about your industry and comment on them regularly with honest, quality responses. Other bloggers that read your comments are likely to click back and check out your website.
3. Sign Up: Create profiles on business social networking sites like LinkedIn and FastPitch where you can interact with other people in your business or industry.

The golden rule of social networking is to be honest and genuine. Remember that at the end of the day, people like to meet other great people. Making connnections with others is the purpose of social networking sites and it’s also the best way to build a business – online or offline.

To show you that we practice what we preach, here are a couple of links to two client’s that have also become great friends. Lets see if they mention these links I added from our blog to their site / blog: Golf Franchise / Kids Furniture. Just passing the “link love” around.

The very first social networking site was Classmates.com, formed all the way back in 1995.  Today, there are hundreds of social networking sites – each with their own target community and each with their own unique purpose.

One of the reasons for the growth of social media is the notion that we trust each other more than we trust businesses interested in their own self promotion.  Social networking sites enable us to find good, reliable information generated by others.

According to eMarketer, U.S. ad spending on social media will hit $900 million in 2007, up from $350 million last year.  By 2007, it’s expected to reach 2.7 billion.

Different Types of Social Networking Sites:
Sites like del.icio.us and Digg allow users to share information about the websites they like most, so if you want to find cool new websites that you may not know about, give these social networking sites a try.

Sites like MySpace are more for social purposes.  They connect like minded users with similar interests (mostly teenagers and young people that like music and chatting online). 

Sites like LinkedIn allow users to share their network of friends and business associates (mostly business people sharing business connections). 

To sign up for some of the most popular social networking sites, check out these links:

• Join del.icio.us
• Join Digg
• Join Stumble Upon
• Join Furl
• Join Reddit
• Join LinkedIn
• Join FastPitch

For a complete list of social networking sites, check out Wikipedia.

I am not a big fan of podcasts.  I don’t like podcasts because I like to surf the Web and browse information before reading it in-depth.  If you listen to a podcast, you have to sit and listen to someone’s entire opinion – no skipping to the good stuff.

BUT, if you want to create podcasts for your own website, here is a short list of all the equipment you will ever need: