Options for creating your own social network
December 14, 2007
This year really has been about social networks. Blogging, forums, personal webpages, groups and information sharing have all started to merge. Of course Facebook has dominated the space this year, but with privacy concerns becoming an issue, people might start looking for alternatives in the new year.
I would expect lots of niche social networks to start appearing in the coming year. I have some ideas to run my own social network and I have been exploring the different options available.
The first one is Ning. This is a fully hosted solution, that is probably best for the novice or someone just looking to add some social networking functionality to an existing site. You can get access to the code but you need to apply and probably need to show you have experience with PHP. To start making your own money from the site you need to pay certain fees. $19.95 per month to run your own ads, or to remove Ning’s advertisements. $4.95 per month to use your own hostname, instead of using a subdomain of Ning. $7.95 per month to remove the option to remove, “create your own social network”.
As you can see, if you want to make money from it you could be looking at around $33 a month. Since this includes hosting it is a reasonable deal, but then you would need to spend money and time promoting your network and you are going to have limited ownership rights. Ning is basically the blogger for social networks.
Drupal is something which I have played with but not used on a site yet. It seems to have everything, blogs, forums etc, but people still seem to use vbulletin to run the forum. Using bridges is one thing I want to avoid. It has a reasonable number of add-ons but nothing like Joomla.
PhpFox is a MySpace type clone. It is not cheap at $300 and I have read pretty mixed reviews about it on forums. I have never used it, so I can’t really comment.
Vbulletin is forum software, but they are offering more social networking mods like blogs, photo galleries, classifieds and individual user pages. If the forum is going to be the main emphasis of your site, I would go for vbulletin. It is very search engine friendly with the VBSeo module.
I spent yesterday looking at the new components and modules available for Joomla. I was very impressed with what I saw. The community builder component is really the core of their social networking capability. The many other good modules available have some tie in with community builder. I have an idea for a site that would include things like property classifieds, general classifieds, galleries and forums. The new fireboard forum is getting some good reviews and you don’t have to worry about bridges. A good multi-user blogging component is one thing which Joomla lacks.
Ok, my review is a little biased as I am already pretty familiar with Joomla, but in the time I have been away from the Joomla website, I am very impressed with the developer support it is getting. Lots of fantastic new modules. Most of them are free. You don’t have to be a programmer to set up your own site, but you do need to follow instructions and if there is no instructions, well you just need to be someone who likes playing around with this kind of stuff 
Joomlashack also have some very nice new templates that can give your site a professional look.
More on hub pages
November 8, 2007
I have written about hub pages before. I took a bit of a break from the site and then have come back again to it recently.
I had a feeling that it was hard to get traffic to the sites you create, then I saw this post. The fun thing I like about the site, that it really is a community site with people sending each other comments and helping each other out. The regular people seem to concentrate on producing quality articles, rather than just promoting their sites.
It is an excellent way for people who have no clue about how to make money on the internet to get started. It is great for testing new ideas. Better to write an article there and see how it goes before you go off registering domains and so forth.
The other thing which makes it fun is the scoring system. You may not be making much money, but the more you contribute the higher your score goes. The more traffic you can get to your hub, the higher score you get for the hub. It feels like a bit of a game.
I can only see the site becoming more popular and it could be worth investigating how you can profit from the site more.
Two great new blogs to check out
October 26, 2007
In a world of thousand dollar ebooks and membership sites, it is nice to find people offering no nonense, BS-free tips and advice for making money online.
Financial Hack As the author says on his about page:
You probably don’t know my name. You have likely never heard of any of my websites or blogs. I don’t sell anything. I don’t pay for advertising at all. I am not an A-List blogger and my website would still be considered quite small within its category. In all likelihood, you are a better writer than I am. You definitely know more about computers than I do. And despite all this, I take home a six figure income from the Internet.
This blog is going to be an interesting one to follow. I have known the author for sometime now and he has given me plenty of helpful advice. He has been working online full-time now for four years. He is a perfect example of someone who puts in a lot of hard work and has been very successful, despite keeping a pretty low profile.
Nerdy Nomad is someone else I have seen who has gone from making a small online income to one where she can now quit her job and make enough to travel through Asia while working on her sites. Again no-nonsense, bs-free tips and advice for making money online.
Madville
October 13, 2007
One website which sent me a bit of traffic when I had a big spike in traffic was Madville.com. I had never heard of the site, but it looks like you can submit a link and if it is accepted it stays on the front page for a day.
I just submitted a post from my Beijing site and it was accepted. Another one was rejected.
If you write an interesting article, it is one way to get some extra traffic.
Providing content for other websites
September 23, 2007
I have been going a bit mad with Hubpages, writing more articles than I normally would with my websites. I suppose that in some way I am restricted on the themes I can write articles for on my websites and after a while it is easy to get stale.
With a site like hubpages, you can write about just about anything. It seems that there are a few “newbies” there looking to make a buck online, so it is easy to write stuff for them. Things like, getting traffic to your site, affiliate programs etc. It is also a way to get some new links to your websites and a little bit of traffic.
The question is however, how much time should you be spending basically creating content for another website. This is a difficult question. If you have a hugely popular website, you probably wouldn’t bother with trying to get traffic from a site like hubpages and would spend all of your time on your own website. If you are like most of us, you probably need to spend quite a bit of your time writing comments on other blogs, participating in forums and writing articles on other websites to get extra links and traffic.
The advantage of writing content on another site like Hubpages or Squidoo is that it will get indexed by Google very quickly and if the keywords are not too competitive, it might even be easy to rank for some long tail phrases. It’s probably a good idea not to put your best articles up on another website, but perhaps write a teaser article that links to your website to get people to click through. If you just want to make money, include plenty of affiliate links.
Unfortunately for me I haven’t made any affiliate sales yet, but I am having fun with it for now, so will stick with it for a bit more.
My milliondollarwiki page
September 14, 2007
After reading about the milliondollarwiki on John Chow and Shoemoney’s blog, I couldn’t resist buying a page as an experiment.
I actually considered buying a page a while ago but because they didn’t accept Paypal, I gave them a miss. I even wrote to the owner saying I would only buy a page if they accepted Paypal. I basically use my Paypal for buying scripts, templates and some links and anything else that looks like it could be interesting. Well now they also Paypal so I bought my first page: foreclosure. I thought it would be a good, high paying keyword to have and there are lots of clickbank and affiliate products available.
The site is getting some good traffic with lots of links from bloggers and some major media outlets including CNN. The site is a simple, yet original way of making money online. It is one of the ideas that as soon as you see it you think “why didn’t I think of that”.
Facebook and the 30 day challenge
July 30, 2007
I just finished watching Ed’s video on Facebook for the thirty day challenge. I was intending to send a friend invite just to the people in my team but before I knew what I was doing I sent an invite to all 400 contacts in my address book.
It’s not too bad in a way, as I then received quite a few messages from my friends. I didn’t realize how many people I knew had profiles. Facebook has some great features. I started chatting with a friend asking me where I am right now. I pasted a link from my travel blog and it put in a nice thumbnail into the message. How cool is that?
The thirty day challenge has given me renewed interest in my web sites and how I can promote them better. If you have the time I strongly suggest everyone to join the challenge. It is not too late to join, but you will need to set aside some time to go through watching the videos.
Please add me as a friend if you are using Facebook.
I have also started a Retire Young and Wealthy group.
Anyone using Twitter?
June 3, 2007
I keep hearing things about Twitter but still not sure what it is all about even after signing up.
You kind of get the feeling that people are starting these companies just to get bought out by Google/Yahoo/Microsoft.
Doing business in your bathrobe
January 29, 2007
February 12th marks the 5th annual “Doing business in your bathrobe” day. The day was created by Webmomz and they describe it as:
“It’s an internationally national holiday to call attention to the millions of home business owners who have waved goodbye to the corporate rat race and settled into a better quality of life. We felt it was high time to recognize the efforts and dreams of entrepreneurs.”
Looking forward to celebrating my first day, although it could be too hot here for a bath robe.
Bum marketing
January 22, 2007
I have been concentrating so much lately on creating new sites, I haven’t been looking into ways to promote my existing ones. I often fall into this habit, but I know I have spend some time every day on getting links and promoting my existing sites to increase my income.
I have read a little on the “Bum marketing” method. At least the title sounded interesting! The information is free by signing up here. I suggest creating an email address primarily for these types of signups as you will get a tonne of email.
The author suggests writing articles and submitting them to sites like Ezinearticles and Goarticles. He also suggests using wordpress.com and squidoo.com. He suggests targetting longer search phrases with fewer search results.
With goarticles you can include affiliate links, where as ezinearticles you can only include a link to an actual website.
He also suggests using US Free ads to promote products. I have no idea how effective this would be, but for people who don’t have a website and can’t be bothered to write articles, it could be a way to get into internet marketing.
Nothing too original here, but I had kind of forgot about writing articles to get links.
