John Dilbeck Recommends

It’s been awhile since I’ve found something I want to recommend in this blog.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t stand by what I’ve said in other places, it just means that I’m segmenting this blog for special recommendations, such as Site Build It!, which continues to be my top recommendation for building an online business.

Today, I want to talk about a very hot topic: social networking.

I know you’ve heard of sites like MySpace and Facebook. You may even have an account on one or both of them - I do.

There are many other social networking sites, and I participate, to a greater or lesser extent, on a few of them.

However, with millions of users, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. Almost as bad is the fact that the great majority of users have interests that just don’t correlate with yours, so finding like-minded people to network with can be a challenge.

So, for about six months or so, I’ve been looking for a good platform to build my own social networks. They will be much smaller, but they will be very targeted to a specific subject. As a result, as they grow and more members participate, they should rank well in the search engines for their specific topic, and they should attract more members over time who would like to participate and network there.

Of course, these sites will never have millions of members, maybe not even hundreds of members. That’s not the point. They will be tightly-focused on their subject and that has to make them easier to promote.

It also reduces wasted time and energy dealing with people and topics that don’t share your primary focus.

What site am I talking about?

It’s not much of a secret since I already told you in the title, is it?

I recommend Ning.com for building social networking sites.

I first learned of Ning.com when my friend, Pat Thompson, invited me to join her The Tea Room. This is a small, but interesting group of people. I’m sure more people will be attracted to Pat and her community as time goes by.

After experiencing what I could do in The Tea Room, I did some searching to see what else I could find on Ning.com.

I found that Chris Tinney had created the Home Based Business Community, and it already had 233 members, many of whom I know well and quite a few names I recognized. I haven’t had the time to get really active there, but it’s on my list of things to do. I’ve been a member of a couple of his forums and have learned a great deal from the discussions I’ve read and participated in. I like his new home based business community better than a forum because I can customize my own profile page, create groups, blog, and have more opportunities to present myself as I want. This applies to all the other communities on Ning.com.

I joined a couple more communities and liked what I was seeing, so I decided to look into creating my own communities for my special interests.

Surprisingly, you can build an entire community on Ning.com for free. If it grows successful enough that you need more storage and bandwidth, it’s not very expensive to expand.

And, if you want to cover the costs of your community, for about $20 per month, you can have Ning.com remove their advertising and run your own. Primarily, this would probably be Google Adsense ads, but it would also mean you could show Yahoo ads, Chikita, and many others, should you want. There’s no reason you can’t turn your community into a profit center when it starts attracting enough members and visitors.

Ning.com offers all the standard features you would want in a social networking site: customizable personal profiles, individual blogs, a forum, the ability to create groups on sub-topics, uploading photos, syndicating RSS feeds from other sites, generation of RSS feeds from many parts of your community, and more.

It does not offer some of the things I would like, such as sticky threads in the forum, but that’s a minor quibble compared to what it does offer.

So, about two weeks ago, I started building my own communities.

In some, there is already active participation by multiple members; in others, I’m there all alone. But, it’s only been two weeks. It can take months or years to attract people to niche sites, and I’m in this for the long haul.

Another reason for choosing Ning.com instead of installing my own open source scripts is that I’ve learned how popular sites attract spammers, hackers, and other problems. I’ve shut down several communities and an article directory because I just don’t have the time and energy to manage everything, including security and updating the scripts all the time.

With Ning.com, you have a choice. You can run on their current script, or you can purchase the source code (for a very reasonable fee) and modify it as much as you want. I’ll go with the former and let them manage the script while I concentrate on building the community and adding appropriate content as I find the time.

So, there are many options at Ning.com.

Managing a new community is relatively easy and straightforward. It takes some work to become comfortable with all the tools, but you don’t have to use everything it offers.

For example, Ning.com provides the ability to upload and show photos, videos, and sound. On my communities, I encourage uploading photos, but don’t offer videos and sound - at least, not now.

It’s your community, you can set the features and rules for your site.

The first community I started is the Murphy NC 28906 Community, and it is getting off to a pretty good start. I’ve been promoting Murphy for several years and enjoy helping spread the word about our wonderful community and the people who live and work here.

I built a portal for the community using PHP-Nuke a couple of years ago, but had to take it down due to hackers and problems with using the script. That was my first attempt at building a social networking site, and the current site built on the Ning.com platform is doing much better, even in its initial introduction period.

I forgot to mention that Ning.com offers a complete friend system and private messaging, in addition to commenting on a member’s profile page and discussing things in the forums.

The forums offer the ability to create new sections and sub-sections if your community needs those features.

The second site I’ve introduced is about CafePress Shops, where people can come together and talk about selling their designs at CafePress.com and talk about issues related to marketing, traffic building, and everything else that is part of selling online.

I have three other sites in the works, but I’m not ready to announce them, yet.

Unlike me, you may not want to create multiple communities. Perhaps you’re looking for a community based on your particular interests. It’s much easier, and takes less time, to join an existing community, rather than building your own. So, you can search on Google using “ning.com (your specific subject)” and maybe find an existing community.

If, on the other hand, you really want to build a social networking community with lots of features and an easy-to-use interface, I think you should look into Ning.com. I’m happy I did.

Act on your dream,

JD