2 Ways To Combine A Business From Home And Social Networking

Most home business opportunities are developed around building relationships with your customers or business partners. While relationship building has always been an integral part of any successful business, on the Internet today you have excellent opportunities to get to know people and build relationships beyond what you could have done just a few years ago.

What we will do in this article is take a quick look at how you can use relationships to build your home business on a more solid foundation.

1. Social networking is very popular as is evidenced by some of the large social networks available online. We are talking about places like My Space, Facebook, eEntrepreneur and others.

You can also use social networking to build your home business, for example by combining blogging and social bookmarking to post blog articles to various social directories. You can quickly do this in directories such as Stumbleupon, Propeller, Digg, and literally thousands of others.

These social networks allow you to meet people with common interests. Blog articles allow you to create "search engine bait" as well as traffic from various social directories. The term "search engine bait" simply refers to the keywords and key phrases that you use, or which spontaneously occur in your article, which people are likely to search for when researching something related to the theme of your article.

All of this adds up to create a powerful way to make new contacts and build up your home business on the Internet.

2. Discussion forums are a great way to meet people with common interests, and although they are not commonly referred to as social networking sites they serve a similar function. You can join forums as they relate to the theme of your home business and get to know the members there.

As a matter of fact joint ventures are formed every day in discussion forums. The key to making discussion forums work and building your home business is to become a part of the discussion as opposed to being viewed as a spammer or a person who is just trying to sell something.

This really isn't that hard to do if you like people. You can learn a lot from discussion forums about what is going on on the Internet, and in the home business arena too!

If you like people you will enjoy the banter that passes back and forth on the different threads of a forum. A forum is a great place for you to passively promote your home business through your signature file. There is a skill to this and it is worth noticing what some of the top members in these forums do with their signature file.

In summary these are two ways to utilize the business potential of social networking to boost your home business. The Internet makes this possible as long as you are willing to work getting to know people and building relationships.