Why Are Social Networking Skills So Valuable?
Here's the real secret to why social networking skills are a valuable employee skill: They create income for the person who has them. Companies are hoping to hire people who can also contribute to their bottom lines, but the Catch-22 there is that if you are really good at social networking, you will have your pick of projects and companies to create income, and you are not as easily impressed with a job offer.
Think about it...If you learn social networking skills and can attract a large network, how will you leverage that to create the life you want? Will you end up giving those skills to an employer or will you sit down and find a way to create a business and income for yourself? The answer is pretty obvious. Unless the job offer that is put before you is better than you currently can foresee in income opportunities going at it alone, you are going to stick with doing your own thing. It's far more enjoyable and lucrative to work for yourself than it is to work for someone else, and it has much more job security too. How Can You Create Income With Social Networking Skills?
At first, it won't be obvious. If you have been working for someone else your entire life, this whole social networking thing doesn't make much sense. After all, what point is it to spend all of your time online meeting new people and discussing industry topics when you already have a job that brings in income? Right? It's a waste of your precious “free time.” It means a lot of work for no return on the investment, as you already have someone willing to pay you for doing a job.
Now, however, we know that no job is secure in this economy. Creating a side business or other money-making opportunities is key to financial survival, even if that side business is as small as occasional lawn mowing for your neighbors. That takes a lot of work though, and it's pretty hot outside when it's time to mow the grass. That's why people prefer desk jobs to manual labor, and why even if you are only contacting people, you can still create income opportunities through those connections by virtue of doing business via the Internet and leveraging your skills to a wider audience.
Whatever you are doing for your company, whatever your skills, some of these will be transferable to making money online. Other skills, like advertising, you will learn as you go. Still, start with what you know and expand from there. On the next page, we'll discuss ways to create income for yourself that will automatically create buzz and excitement about your personal brand. At the point that someone wants to hire that brand for their company, you may find it's worth more to you as your own business. Then, you truly have options and you have a freedom that a job can't get you. Keep this in mind when you start to set up your profiles and to set up what direction you want to take to generate skills that might land you a job, but also be an opportunity to create a business that improves your own quality of life. Social Network Income Opportunities
Freelance for others – You can join places like Elance.com or Rentacoders.com and add your personal profile there. You can create links back to your social networking profiles to give potential customers a good view of who you are and what your qualifications might be. Advertise the freelance profiles on the social networks to get leads for customers too.
Join advertising networks – Twitter will allow links to advertisements, but Facebook has more stringent rules. There are pay-per-click and cost-per-action networks that will pay you some money for adding their advertisements to your updates and getting people to click on them. You do have to be a bit careful not to spam people, but it is a way to gain some income when you have a big enough network.
Get referral bonuses – If you find a way to make money online that others might want to take advantage of, see if they have a referral bonus program. By referring others to moneymaking opportunities, you can make money via sign-up bonuses or through multi-tiered programs that give you a commission off other people's sales activity. It's a very easy way to make money.
Create your own products – Maybe you have a flair for writing, art, coding, digital photography, or some other niche that will allow you to create online products that others can download for sale. Creating your own products give you an automatic “expert” status and creates residual income for the life of the product.
Offer a service – Maybe you are a great life coach or can help people with their debt problems. You can charge for that service, and some social networks even have applications that you can add to your account page to facilitate 1-800 numbers for such activity.
Link to your own commercial website – You can't actively spam people with your product offers, but you can advertise a link to your website content whenever it is relevant. If you have your own site, you can not only put up affiliate offers, your own products, advertising, and more on it, but it provides a way to gain a larger audience off-site of the social networks. This means that you can generate contact lists with actual email addresses that you can use in email marketing campaigns, as long as they give permission for you to contact them. This is not possible on a social network, but by enticing those contacts to head off of the social network onto your own site, you have far more control of the information and can use it to engage in Internet marketing in more creative ways. Should the social network ban your account for any reason, you only lose that account and not the actual contacts, which you now have stored in your own contact list off-site. It's just a matter of logging back in, creating a new account, and contacting the same people to join you via the new account to get up and running again in no time.
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