The whole idea of Social Networking has nothing to do with trying to sell, anyone that thinks they can use social netowrking purely thinking in terms of selling will come unstuck.

It’s a beautiful concept when done right and can have rewards for both marketer and customer but the whole social networking fails for so many is simply because they ”think” of it as a platform for making money, if you think that way especially in terms of social networking, you have #1, missed the whole point of SN and #2 are better off sticking to tradditional marketing strategies as you will never wake to see the light.

In order for SN to work as a business model, you have to throw out the window any kind of “business thinking”, simple when you think about it.

Become part of a community, help that community and you will have some kind of ”business model” to begin working on but as long as you DO NOT see your potential customers as ”CUSTOMERS”, customers are what you see queing in a shop on a high street, customers are what you find on Amazon .. etc.
In social networking your “customers” are and never customers, they are your friends just as thought they were your neighbours, if you live that thought then you just might have a the beginnings of a plan to make money in social networking.

Happy New Year

Ray

May we all make lenses that are worthy of this honor, that help so many who land on it, and get as much traffic that converts to sales as this one does!

The address of one is http://www.squidoo.com/hawaiiancruises

At least with Squidoo, they don’t discourage marketing on their site unlike MySpace.

I believe the present time is a good time to take a stake in cyber space with a Squidoo lens.

Sincerely,
Wayne Hairston

I can see that lens has climbed up the ranks quickly.

I’ve added it to my own lensroll for a little extra juice.

Isn’t it incredibly easy to set up pages on Squidoo? There’s so much you can do with them, and more features are coming. Plus, Squidoo is quickly becoming an authority site in the search engines eyes so to have yourself well positioned there makes great business sense!

We’ll chat soon!

Laura Childs

http://www.squidoo.com/preventbullying

We just set these up, so they aren’t awash with content, yet…

Sorry for the late reply…

eBay pays web publishers (affiliates) on a sliding scale.

The last time I checked they paid up to 40% on successful eBay.com bids (40% of the seller’s fee). Sometimes this only amounts to less than $1 (on low priced items), but I’ve had many sales of products that sold for $200 and I made $10 +-. Plus eBay pays a performance bonus (not sure how they calculate that, but it’s a nice surprise if you’ve done well for them over the month).

And, if that’s not enough, you also get paid for every new successful account created on eBay (starting at $12/account).

The rates they pay out varies across countries (i.e. ebay UK has a different scale for eBay.com for instance) as well.

I’m lovin’ being an eBay affiliate these days. Whether through my niche stores (see build ebay stores, through code snippets (see ebay code widget) or my Squidoo pages that have an eBay module.

It all adds up to a nice little income…

Chat soon, Laura

Just today she released a new Squidoo challenge, as well as a supplementary insider’s report, to compliment her (and the challenge winner’s) marketing findings on getting the most out of Squidoo.

Kudos on a really, REALLY well written piece. I wish I had this kind of content in my inbox more often.

Keep leading wisely!

Yoshi Kundagawa

Helped me a lot, I must say.

We’re just into a social marketing research program at office and I happen to be in this ‘task force’ as such to understand all about social marketing.

Thank you.

It’s very well written and helpful. I hadn’t even considered that there were ‘advanced’ tips in there until I got your email though. So I went back and read it again and you’re right! More than a few of the techniques she shares I haven’t been employing on my own squidoo lenses. I’m going to start following more closely how she set up her Squidoo in my next edit. Thanks for the reminder. Drop me an email when you have time, it’s been so long since we’ve chatted!

Lynn