Are you a Facebook fanatic or a Myspace maniac? Here's how to make a bit of cash out of social networking...
The average Facebook user will spend over six hours on the social network every month. When you consider that there are 25 million Facebook members in the UK alone, that’s an awful lot of time that could be better spent.... making money.
Because, believe it or not, you can actually make money using social networking sites nowadays. Here's how:
It pays to talk
Social networks make money by taking your content and monetizing it by adding adverts. It’s a cracking business model for sites like Facebook and Myspace as they’re effectively providing a blank website; setting you to work providing photos, music and videos that will draw in readers to the site, and then pinching the advertising revenue that your content earns!
But many smaller start-up sites will pay members to comment on profiles, upload photos and pretty much do anything else that they would normally do on a social network. Yuwie is one such site and claims that some members are earning between £200 and £250 a month. But we haven't tried it ourselves so we're not sure how accurate this claim is - if any lovemoney.com readers do sign up, please come back and share your experience using the comments box below.
Similarly, 'social utility' site MyLot pays out for blog posts and discussion comments whilst the ‘social networking for grown ups’ site, Gather, allows you to earn points for participating in group activities and sharing videos and photos. These points can then be redeemed for cash or exchanged for Tesco and Starbucks coupons.
Referrals
Many smaller social networks will also pay you a flat fee for referring new members to the site. MyLot and Yuwie will shell out for every person you sign up and will also forward you a percentage of the advertising revenue that your referred user attracts. So whilst it’s still a good idea to canvass your friends for potential members, if you can get them posting and chatting on the network then you’ll earn more.
It’s also worth checking how many levels a sites referrals programme runs for. This means that when the people you’ve introduced to the site start getting their own referrals, you’ll keep earning!
Host your own advertising
As I mentioned above, advertising is the real money spinner for the social networking entrepreneur. Most sites will use pay-per-click advertising – where a client will pay a set fee every time their ad is clicked on. This also gives the owner of a social network a way of tracking how profitable each profile is – the more clicks on ads on your homepage, the more money goes into your pocket!
Many social networks host these adverts through the Google application AdSense, but there’s nothing stopping you signing up for your own personal account and hosting adverts on your own webpage. It’s free to use, and if you’ve got a popular website you could see a hefty chunk of cash come your way every month. Google even tailors the ads to your webpage’s content and they can be altered to suit the style of your site.
Even if you don’t have your own webpage you can still make money from AdSense. Senserely allows you to write blogs, reviews or just general waffle and have your AdSense feed displayed next to your content.
Tagfoot also allows you to input your AdSense code, and places personalised ads next to blogs, videos and photos that you upload. But they’ll take a share of any per-click revenues that your ads bring in.
Social networking bargains
There’s not just money to made social networking, you can also save a few pounds by getting social online! Sites like Groupola, Groupon, Keynoir and Living Social offer cut price flash sales on adventure days or group activities in your local town or city. You can get between 50 and 90% off the high street price - but that's not all.
The deals only last one day and these sites need a critical mass of people to sign up to each deal. So they will reward you if you can convince your friends to buy too. Groupon, for example, will give you a £6 credit as a reward for each friend you sign up to a deal, while with Living Social, if you can get three friends to buy the deal after you’ve picked it up, then you get yours free!
Twitter perks
Companies have also cottoned on to the power of social networking and the ability of the so-called ‘Twitter-verse’ to sell products and bolster trends. This could be good news if you fancy yourself as a social networking expert as companies are beginning to offer freebies to those online identities they deem to have a large enough influence over others.
In fact a whole company has sprung up that identifies influencers across the social web – the aptly named Klout. Earlier this year Klout teamed up with Virgin America to offer free flights to Twitter users with a great influence. They’d hoped that favourable tweets would help kick-start business on new routes between California and Toronto.
Of course, creating an influential online identity won’t happen overnight and if you want to start making big bucks from social networks you really have to throw yourself into it and start posting and commenting every day. Cross advertising profiles, sites and blogs on different networks will also help drive more traffic to your pages and see your per-click advertising revenue increase.
Finally, you can’t be a profitable social networker without a good internet connection – so take a look at our article on the best – and cheapest – broadband deals for a bit of expert insight.
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