Building relationships with business partners and/or customers forms an important part of legitimate Internet Businesses from home. Although this has always been an integral part of building a successful business, with the Internet it has become so much easier to develop relationships with people all over the world and through which you can ultimately also create ways to earn extra income.

What we will do in this article is take a quick look at how you can use relationships to build your legitimate Internet businesses on a more solid foundation and possibly even create more ways to earn extra income.

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 businesses from home, 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.

You can meet people with similar interests on these social networks. 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 legitimate Internet businesses.

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 businesses from home and get to know the members there. As a matter of fact joint ventures are formed every day in discussion forums thus creating ways to earn extra income.

The key to making discussion forums work and building your businesses from home 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.

It should not be hard to do if you get along well with 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.

You can use your signature file in forums as a great way to promote Businesses Ideas. It is important to take note of what the top marketers in forums do with their signature files and learn what you can from them to enhance this skill.

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