Ning in the New Year!

January 9, 2008 | Author: Dave | Filed under: SEO and Marketing

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Social networking is one of the more potent bullets in the arsenal of a blogger or a home businessperson these days. For example, as you travel the blogosphere, you’ll see the widget from one of the more popular ones, MyBlogLog, peppering the sidebars of many blogs.

ning social networking

Marc Andreessen has introduced a new wrinkle into the world of social networks with Ning.

Ning is, quite simply, a free do-it-yourself resource to create your own full-featured social network, whether it be for your business, your blog or the legions of adoring fans you have. Signup is a very easy process, as is actually setting up your network. At signup, you choose your network name and subdomain name (in the format of http://<yourname>.ning.com), and then configure your network.

And configure your network you can! Everything from the background color of your “Ning Page” to the various fonts and font colors are selectable by you. Also, you can choose what features to incorporate into your personal network page, whether it be a personal forum, videos, music, etc, with a drag-and-drop interface. Click here for a ning screenshot.

The personal network page setup and configuration bears a striking resemblance, at least in functionality, to using Blogger to create a blog. And once set up, the page itself has quite a few “MySpace” similarities.

And yes, once you are set up (a process that takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, depending on how prepared you are), you can start using your social network on your site with one of several widgets, including one that imitates the look of the MyBlogLog widget that shows the avatars of the last visitors to your site.

To a non-blogger, however, the ability to send messages to every member of your network will be valuable, as will the private forum on your network page.

For most bloggers, it will still be more beneficial to use MyBlogLog or a similar social network for bloggers, in order to build traffic. However, if you are using the internet to make money with a website, it might provide one more channel through which to reach your customers.

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