Earn money using Social communities

Social networking is hot these days. Facebook is on the lips of many who are passionate about linking with other people who share the same passions and interests all round the world. While most are interested in using Facebook to network, there are some who have found the means to use it as a platform to make money. How do they do it?

The idea is to tap into the Facebook communities and turn friends into customers. Here’s a method which could put you on the track to making money with Facebook, albeit over a period of time.

Create a Community

The first step would be to create a community that will be interested in your product or service. You then work towards winning the trust of the community.

Offer the community useful content. Establish yourself as somebody reliable when it comes to information on a particular interest. Better still, establish yourself as an expert. If you can interest your community with your information, chances are they’ll take you up on a product that you recommend.

So, instead of setting up only profiles, you can concentrate on creating Facebook pages, which is open to non-Facebook members and an unlimited number of fans. A profile limits you to only 500 friends.

Set Up a Blog

If you are selling a product or offering a service, it would be wise to set up a blog in advance. It’s a place where you continue your conversations from Facebook. Google’s Blogger is recommended as it’s free. There are no restrictions placed on affiliate programs or product sales.

Your blog must be an extension of your profile on Facebook. Your friends must not sniff a commercial element in it.

As has been explained earlier, your focus should be on valuable content. Eventually, they’ll discover what you’re selling and when they do, they’ll be under the impression that you’re offering them something valuable as you always do when you participate in the community.

Add Your Blog to Your Facebook Account

The first thing you would want to do is add your blog to your Facebook account. Apart from directing your Facebook friends to your blog. you also get the benefit of a backlink from Facebook’s high Page Rank website. This will help you with the rankings on the search engines and help potential customers outside of Facebook find you.

Get as Many Friends as Possible

The next step is to get as many friends as possible who you think will be interested in your product. You can check out other groups similar to your intended group and apply to join.

After you have joined other groups, you should now concentrate on setting up your own group. The most important element here is to include your blog URL which will show up at the top of your group page. If you have generated enough interest in your group, your friends will surely be curious to learn about your blog. As a clickable link, your blog URL will also be indexed by Google within a short period. This is an effective way to increase traffic to your blog.

Once you’ve done this, you can rest assured that you’re on the right track. Don’t be discouraged that your friends are not showing much interest in your product at the beginning. It just takes time for people to feel comfortable with each other, especially over cyberspace. So, keep focused on creating valuable content for your blog.

If you keep on adding friends to your group and participate actively in your community, it won’t be long before you see results. The more friends you get, the better the chances are of you getting Adsense clicks, selling affiliate products or promoting your own product.

Promote Directly

After some time, with increased familiarity with your friends, you can promote products by talking to them on their Wall. You can also post notes on products that have benefited you. You can even reveal that you’ll be making a little money to pay your bills. They wouldn’t mind since they know you well. As friends, they would want to get worthwhile products through you because they trust you and know that you’ll only want the best for them.