How To Make Your Own Social Networking Site
1. Decide on the theme and goal of the social network
There are a lot of reasons why you would wish to setup a social networking site. You’ve seen the success of huge sites like Facebook and MySpace and want to give it a shot yourself, in a specific niche. You’re absolutely right, every niche community available is really a social networking site waiting to become born.
Whatever provides your motivation, you’ll need make sure you can ask the next questions:
- Do you know the niche by which you want to launch and would you already know others inside the same sector?
- What’s your financial allowance?
Choosing your niche…
Starting your personal network on the specific theme or niche can be really difficult if you don’t have a minimum of a fundamental understanding of the niche. It’s no good creating a community site for expats in Detroit should you haven’t got an inkling of what are the expat community is like, for example. Some people will say that community sites are self-provisional. This is true for a completely functional community with active members. Nothing could be less true however for a new community site that has only both you and your nearby neighbour as members. Try to choose a theme that you are passionate about if this is your first community site – research and providing content will be a lot easier. Knowing people who are prepared to help you to spread the word and prepared to pump life locally beforehand is a good advantage. If you don’t know people such as this, hit the forums, facebook and then try to have them aboard to help you.
Before starting any site, you must have a clear idea of what it’s you think the audience in a specific niche would like. As an example, the crowd for any site built around e-readers would certainly require a manner to review the latest e-readers and could perhaps possess a small marketplace, where members can sell their second hand e-readers or other gadgets. A site like FMylife for instance, understood how the site needed to be made to allow quick commenting and easy reading of people’s stories.
Choose the niche, than decide what the audience in that specific niche could enjoy. Look towards niches. You can create social networking sites around anything. Bear in mind that successful social networking sites aren’t actually creating communities – most of the time, the community already exists. The site helps them organize, achieve something, share things. Consider what your target niche needs, and pay attention to them once it gets going.
Deciding the goal
After you have the theme, decide on your ultimate goal. This actually usually goes together using the theme. If you are small business selling car-cleaning products, you will be establishing a review site with the goal to become known as as being a brand that listens to and interacts with its market. if you are establishing a residential area site for voluntary workers in Africa, your ultimate goal is going to be non-commerical and based around while using great organizing potential of community websites (we only need to take Barack Obama’s campaign as an example). If you are an affiliate marketeer, you can produce a community around the theme of insomnia – using the concept of developing a firm membership list to which you are able to promote then sell products to afterwards. Although your goals will inevitably evolve as your community evolves, attempt to be sure you curently have a basic idea of what it is you want to achieve. This will help you in understanding the functionality you need and help you in selecting the right software.
Defining your budget
Whatever your goals and theme, you’ll need some sort of budget to make it work. Based on how you desire to create it, your budget will be different. Lets take a look at the typical costs:
- Hosting plan: anywhere by 5 USD – depending on how large your community gets. To start up, I suggest Rochen Host – a great hosting provider in the UK that has 24/7 customer support, even on Christmas day. Once your site becomes to large to handle for your budget, you are able to count on these phones upgrade you inside a correct and joyful manner.
- Plug in script – a complete social networking software solution that you could download an upload since the platform for your site. By 250 USD onwards (see the link during my signature for some top solutions)
- Logo/graphic design – can be easily found by 50$ onwards.
Optional costs
- Programmer: if you want to customize your social networking software, or create a platform on your own using open source software like Joomla or Drupal, you’ll need a good programmer who knows what they are doing. There are a lot of low cost providers in India. Always try to encourage them to prove what they are worth beforehand and then try to find out using their existing clients how they perform. Cost: as of 500$ for large developments, by 80$ for small changes to existing software (guidelines).
- AdWords campaign: marketing your site on search engines can easily be done using Google AdWords. If you are going to select this method, you will need a minimum of 500 USD to get a campaign going for a few weeks
Based on that which you outsource, your costs will rise. It is however perfectly possible to set up an excellent looking social website as little as 355 $. A small investment that can have fantastic returns.
2. Deciding on the social networking software
We’ve already briefly spoken about social networking software solutions. For almost every kind of social site, may it be video sharing, information sharing, user review, music sharing, you’ll be able to buy an affordable as they are social networking software solution.
Like a guideline, stay away from the free open source solutions unless you possess the time and knowledge to develop everything yourself. In that respect, Joomla and Drupal are probably the strongest systems available. Its free, but will take you a while to comprehend if you having no prior coding knowledge. Getting a programmer to construct everything for you can change to be rather expensive.
3. Building the main content and getting people to participate
If you are a existing business or website that likes a lot of traffic already, you could use your newsletter to actively promote your social networking site. If you are beginning with scratch however, things will receive a little more complicated.
In both ways, you will need to choose an efficient manner to put interesting content in your site to attract the search engines and visitors. Like a must, you need good quality articles about them. A great way to create good content would be to incorporate a “news section” on your niche on the site that you update on a frequent basis. To grab all of the news, sign up for an RSS feed from Google or other sources and summarize that which you like and throw it onto your site. People will come back just to see whats new.
If you have previously contacted many people to help you, make sure they get active after you have some primary content. Place the social network of Facebook, on Digg, Squidoo, Twitter, get your contacts to ask their contacts, etc. When the ball is rolling, it will become viral. the difficult part is the beginning.
For those who have good quality content along with a couple of members, consider creating an adwords campaign if you have the budget. It ought to be a one time effort – if the campaign works, you’ll end up getting enough members and the viral effect will require place.
4. Pay attention to your audience and adapt
Why is sites like Facebook and twitter huge is that they allow individuals to develop stuff onto the network they offer. Facebook apps, games, polls, you name it. This enables you to build up their own community. Like a new social networking site owner, try to study from this. Always listen to your users and then try to provide them with just as much freedom as you possibly can to consider initiative. This is what can make your social networking site a success.
Hope that helps.
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on December 11, 2010. Filed under 
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