Social networking is the networking of individuals together into specific groups, often like a small community or a neighborhood.

The most popular online social networking sites are Google+ (even though it still under beta and by invitation only, but within 16 days, it already reach to 10 million subscribers), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. There are many more in the market, such as Squidoo, which are increasing in popularity as well.

One of the many reasons why the social networking sites are so popular from a business stand point is because they are a fantastic source of free advertising, not to mention fun to use!There are something about these sites:

- They are fun and easy to use.
- They make it easier to connect and meet new people.
- They make building a list of prospects (friends) a breeze.
- They give you the ability to reach around the world.

I like to think of these sites a kind of like free bulletin boards to the world where you can create a business profile that is all about networking, communicating with prospective customers and attracting new ones.

To socialize for profit, here are the things I wanted you to keep in mind, the main goal for it is meeting new people, building new relationships and increasing the visibility of your business.

Imagine for a minute having the ability to reach hundreds if not thousands of people all interested in what you have to say! It gets your blood pumping, doesn’t it?

However, social media is one choice to use in your marketing plan, not the plan itself. Your marketing plan should include market research, goals, your competitive advantage, strategy and a system to track results.

But, before you dive into the social sea, you have to do research and find out which one is the best fit for you and your business, after that create your profile.

Research tells you the demographic description of your customers, which includes things like age, sex, income, occupation, marital status, location, interests, opinions and values. You need to match your customer demographic to the best social media service like Google+ or Facebook to reach that demographic.

Quick tip: When you do your research and homework, try to put your niche keyword in front of the word networking, for instance, if your niche is pets, type in “pet networking” and see what type of results you come up. By tightly target your niche, you will have much better result in your socializing for profit campaign.

To sell the product or service that you give, you need to find a way to get your message out to your potential prospects. After all customers can’t buy from you if they don’t know that you exist.

And to promoting your business on social networking websites, you have a number of options.

1. Include a link to your blog or business in your community profile or profile page, this will allow other community members to checkout your blog if they wish to do so.

2. Inform your online friends about your business through private messages. Once you join a social networking website and create or join a network of friends, you should easily be able to communicate with those friends. Sending each of your friends a private message with information and a link to your blog tends to be more effective than just placing a link in your profile or on your profile page.

Remember this – your overall goals for socializing for profit should be to first keep your existing repeat customers, secondly to have those existing customers use your social media space to endorse your product or service and recruit their friends to become new customers. Personal referral is a powerful tool to recruit new customers.

Finally, to make more profit by socializing, you can through offering promotions, discounts and contests with prizes sell your product on those social media sites. And consistency is essential to keep up the ongoing communication with customers that social media customers expect. So in conclusion, to have a successful socializing for profit, it depends on your customer demographics, type of product or service sold, your consistency and skill in communicating with your social media customers.

When it comes to advertising there are many business owners who literally cringe because advertising can cost big bucks. And as a business owner you want to make money and at the same time you don’t want to spend that much money on the ads.

Although you may have to spend money to make your business what you want it to be, you know there are ways to promote your business and the products or services that you sell without having to spend any money on advertising, which means through social networking method.

When it comes to social networking, did you know that a large number of Internet users, in fact millions of them, belong to at least one social networking site if not more.

Over the past few years social networking, especially the online model have rapidly increased in pop­u­lar­ity, which caused many peo­ple to won­der why, together they learn that there is a lot of profit to be made by socializing, continuing read this week’s MBA Digest