Social networking is obviously very popular online today. Unlike general networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, there are a number of smaller networks that focus on professionals and businesses. These sites can be an excellent place to gain some exposure and to communicate with other entrepreneurs. Here is a quick look at 10 networking sites that should be considered by entrepreneurs.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn has quickly become the leading social network that specializes in professionals. Many users have their resume posted on their profile and a growing number of employers are using LinkedIn as a recruiting tool. Entrepreneurs who are not looking for jobs can still use LinkedIn as a great resource for meeting other professionals and gaining some exposure for their own work.
PartnerUp
PartnerUp is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs find joint venture partners, co-founders, executives, and board members. You can either post your opportunity or search the listings placed by other entrepreneurs. There are networking capabilities through forums and an Ask a Question feature.
Konnects
Konnects focuses on professional networking by giving each member their own profile page. You can join communities, get to know other members, and just generally network with other like-minded professionals.
Ryze
Ryze has been around for a while but isn’t as well known as some other networking sites. On Ryze you’ll get your own profile page that can be customized, you can add friends, leave messages for others, and join groups.
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We were contacted to take a look at a new site called Click2Sell that bills itself as a direct competitor to sites like Clickbank and Paydotcom. Clickbank has enjoyed such a stranglehold on marketers for so long that I must admit, I was skeptical.
They may bill themselves as a direct competitor with Clickbank but at first glance it appears to be no competition. Feature for feature they compare very strongly to Clickbank and should enjoy a significant amount of success if they can execute well.
I signed up for their service tonight and spent a few hours checking out the site and what they have to offer. I will be honest, I like what I see for the most part with a very few exceptions. Click2Sell has improved on Clickbank in many ways but has a few negative points that I don’t like.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of the site and what it offers each set of users. The feature list I have below is only a small sample of what they offer so make sure you check it out for yourself.
Merchant Features
Free Account - Unlike others, Click2Sell offers you a FREE account with an unlimited number of products to sell or promote, no hidden costs.
Advanced Reporting - If you use Clickbank then you will understand how much of an upgrade these tools are for your campaign. A few benefits are real time sales reports, product conversion rates, affiliate’s performance, best converting keywords, different traffic sources, refunds, profit and more.
Creatives - Banners, emails, text ads, etc. You can make your affiliate program more efficient by providing your affiliates with promotional materials that they can use on their websites.
Fast Payments - Whether you have Paypal, Moneybookers, Authorize.net, Worldpay or Google Checkout account - all payments from your customers will be deposited straight to your chosen merchant account. No more long weeks of waiting for your payments!
Low Fees - Click2Sell charges a flat fee for your transactions. They range from 1 to 3 dollars depending on the purchase price. This is one of the lowest fee structures available.
Affiliate Payments - You may see this is a positive or negative but unlike Clickbank, vendors pay their own affiliate commissions. They do offer a simple to use interface to make this easy, but it is an extra step that ClickBank doesn’t require.
These are just a few of the features available to merchants in the Click2Sell system. It’s hard to appreciate just how well this matches up to the competition unless you use the others. As I said before, this is only a partial list, you can check out the complete list here.
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I’ve talked to a number of bloggers who got started out because of an interest in a particular niche or because of a desire to make money, only to find down the road that there are a million other blogs doing the same thing as them. With the constantly increasing number of blogs online, it seems almost impossible to have an impact in a saturated market. I’m sure you’ve read about how you should avoid choosing these crowded industries because of the difficulties you’ll face. Many of you probably blog in competitive niches, and I’m sure some of you would choose a different path if you were to do things over with the knowledge that you have now.
While I completely agree that analyzing the niche is a critical step before launching a new blog, I also see some strong reasons to want to be in a busy and active niche. My primary blog covers topics related to web design. Of course there is no shortage of information already existing on the subject, so yes, it’s not easy to stand out. On the other hand, I have some incredible opportunities that bloggers in smaller, less popular niches simply don’t have.
If you’ve been building your blog for a while, you’re probably not too excited about the idea of giving up and starting over just so that you can choose a less competitive niche. If you haven’t launched your blog yet, maybe the topics that really interest you have also interested thousands of other bloggers. If either of these situations applies to you, you may want to consider simply accepting the challenge that you have in front of you, but recognize the opportunities that come along with this situation.
To start with, blogs in crowded niches have opportunities for:
1. More Links - Since there are more blogs and websites on the subject, it should be easier to build links.
2. More Traffic - Crowded niches provide loads of traffic to the blogs that are popular. With more people interested in your subject, there’s simply a larger potential market.
3. More Subscribers - Blogs in tightly-focused niches often struggle to gain subscribers, but popular blogs in a competitive niche will have huge audiences.
4. More Exposure - Of course there are many ways to get exposure, but a crowded niche can provide plenty of opportunities. There are more blogs to get links from, more blogs to write a guest post for, more social media sites that cover your topics, more chances for search engine traffic, etc.
5. More Advertisers - One of the things I love about blogging in the web design industry is that there are tons of companies that are interested in advertising to designers and developers. There are so many products and services in this niche that it’s not very hard to fill advertising spots with competitive rates.
A Plan for Success in a Competitive Niche
1. Make an Effort to Get Exposure from Other Blogs (Preferably Major Players) in Your Niche
As I mentioned above, there are more opportunities for exposure in a crowded niche, but you’ll need to make them happen. One of my favorite methods is guest posting for other blogs with a similar audience. When I was just getting started with my blog I was pretty active with finding other blogs to write for, including Blogtrepreneur. Over a span of two or three months I wrote about 20 -25 posts for other blogs. While I didn’t see a huge response from any post in particular, all of them added together to lead to more subscribers, some valuable links, and the one thing I didn’t really expect, some great contacts that helped me to build a strong network of other bloggers. I think many bloggers don’t pursue guest posting because of the added effort and time that it takes, but I highly recommend it and I think you’ll find that it’s well worth the time.
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You may have noticed a trend recently that more and more websites are including job boards as a way to add value to their visitors and to produce some revenue for the site. Smashing Magazine, Freelance Switch, and ProBlogger all have popular job boards that provide relevant job postings for their target audiences. It’s interesting to see how well some of these niche or industry specific job boards are doing. Because they focus on a specific industry, they are able to avoid competition with major job sites, and they’re able to provide employers with a great opportunity to reach the right audience.
I think the job board approach could be used by even more sites, and there are a number of different options for easily adding your own job board. Here we’ll take a look at 6 of the leading choices.
Job-a-Matic
With Job-a-Matic you can get a free hosted job board that’s quick and easy to setup. You can keep the job board on your domain and give it a customized look to keep things consistent with the rest of your site. You can also get a widget to promote the job board on your sidebar to get more exposure. If you want to avoid having an empty job board until you start getting more listings, you can choose to fill it with jobs from the Simply Hired database, and you can make money for clicks on these jobs. They handle all the payments and “dirty work,” and you get a check. Job-a-Matic provides a nice dashboard that lets you track and manage everything you need, including the prices of the ads.
Beyond
Beyond claims to be the most comprehensive job board software on the web. Like Job-a-Matic, Beyond is free and you can set your own prices to determine how much you make. Beyond offers resume posting in addition to job searching. Unlike Job-a-Matic, your job board with Beyond will not be at your domain, although you can customize it to meet your needs.
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As an online entrepreneur you will always be faced with more tasks that you need to get done than you can manage. There will always be new ideas and opportunities that are tempting to pull you away from other things you are working on. Prioritizing your work is extremely important to achieve efficiency with your time and to get the most accomplished. Whether you are working full-time or part-time with your online ventures, you will need to recognize what tasks on your to-do list are most important and urgent.
Here are some tips for getting more out of your time by prioritizing your work:
1. Have a strategy
How are you going to make money online? Do you want to provide services or build assets? There are so many different paths you to take towards making money online that you need to have a sound strategy that will keep you moving in the right direction. An effective strategy will help to keep you focused and avoid distractions from activities that don’t fit with what you are ultimately trying to accomplish.
2. Recognize what makes you money
I think most online entrepreneurs, and definitely bloggers, face the challenge of identifying what work will actually produce an income. If you are going to make money through freelance blogging for example, writing posts for other blogs is what will produce your income. Using social media, reading other blogs, and participating at community sites will all help the cause, but none of these things will directly put money in your pocket. As a result, your income-generating work should take priority.
This becomes a bit more difficult when you are taking the approach of building an asset. If you are building a blog you may not directly make money today from some activities, but if they improve your asset they could make money for you in the long run.
The important thing here is that you recognize the significance of activities according to how much money they can produce for you. Make sure that you are dedicating the majority of your time to things that will make you successful.
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