What started off a few years ago as a small community over the internet has today, grown by leaps and bounds and now encompasses a range of people belonging to all ages, races, countries, and professions. In fact, such is the popularity of social networking sites that the BIG social networking sites such as MySpace (367%), MSN Spaces (286%), and many others have grown by over 200-300% each in the last year or so alone!

Understanding Social Networking
Social networking is the latest trend in the virtual space nowadays. Considered as a great way to establish identity and create brand awareness, social networking is a fantastic internet advertising tool. Though social networking is about finding newer ways to distribute and share and exchange opinions, information, resources, amongst other things, with other people using Internet as the medium of choice, it is also a fun and considerably successful way to start and build your business.

Imagine the advantages of using such a dynamic and vibrant method to promote your business or better still, how about starting your own social networking site as a business! Yes, going purely on facts alone, almost anyone who is internet savvy, visits these websites nowadays. Yes, its true; but that being said, it's also true that starting your own social networking site requires some preparation.

Why Social Networking Site
A social networking site is useful if it can succeed (which it should) in solving the 'connecting' problem people face in real life. Since long, networking has been considered a skill that can be extremely beneficial in an individual's career. However, not every one can develop this skill. Office politics or interacting with other professionals and maintain relationships with them can forward your career with very little investment besides the gift of gab. Here's a fact. The global social networking market is considered to be at least twice the size and faster growing market than the American market. Even as we speak, Facebook is ready to roll out several foreign language version, and the ad revenue they aim to generate would make the initial investment seems like negligible based on the expected estimated growth over the next few years. It's definitely the right time to create your own social networking website, bring the global population on a common platform, and reap benefits as the advertisers make a beeline for your business.

Getting Started With Social Networking
In order to start a profitable social networking site, the first thing necessary is a good script. While most of the competent and reliable social networking scripts are paid, two scripts - PHPizabi and Dolphin are free. While some require you to purchase them outright for use, others come with an annual subscription charge. Remember, since you'll buy the script try to make the best choice for the money.

After you have ticked off the script from your list of 'to do' the next important task to accomplish is to bring traffic or people to your website. A difficult task indeed, but hardly impossible! Once you have your friends, acquaintances, and their friends registered on your social networking site, you'll need to further promote your website so that more and more people get to know the website address.

So the next step is promoting your website. While there are many ways to advertise and promote your website, the best way and cheapest as well is viral marketing. Send as many mails as you can, but don't spam! Link exchange, banner advertising, and other means of advertising are the other options. Finally, don't forget networking is about adding value to the lives of people across the world.