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Some people have bragged about how much money they have received and how many prospects they signed up for their business opportunity as a result of marketing on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Black Planet.  Yet, what they don’t tell you is the specific details of the plan they used to get them.  They avoid telling you this because they hope to sell what they know in a future Ebook or don’t want you to compete with them.  The truth is it all depends upon two things: the product you are selling and how you market it.

As we all know, some products just don’t market well on social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Black Planet.  Some of these products may cost too much to consumers or be too cumbersome to obtain.  One’s profile page may be a headache to visit due to all the video, music, slow uploads, error codes, and long forms to fill out.  Sometimes sellers are terrible marketers and do the following to lose a potential sale such as: bombard friends’ sites with lots of ads, ask for friendship without bothering to compliment someone’s site, avoid developing a friendly relationship with their potential customer, don’t support other sellers, and won’t respond to emails when they are contacted.

Trying to sell your own products can be a problem especially if others are trying to do the same.  The social networking sites’ monitors know this and will disable your links if you are an affiliate marketer or put up warnings of possible viruses to dissuade people from visiting your site.  The watchdogs know that if they allow the marketers’ links all over the place on their profile pages, visitors won’t stay at the social networking site for long before they are clicking off the site onto the marketer’s personal sites.  Social networking site owners also hope that visitors will click on their Google ads so that the revenue stays with them.

If a marketer wants to be seen by others, everyday they will have to log in, make contact with their network, post blog entries, visit forums, or do other things to get noticed.  They usually have software to help them add friends or other clever ways to save time obtaining friendship manually.  Sometimes using friend adder software can backfire!  Often getting a marketer kicked off a social networking site.

There are people on social networking sites looking for legitimate friendships but when too many people are marketing their wares to them, they can get angry and report sellers to the website’s monitors.  Sometimes other marketers may be jealous of an individual’s large network and report him or her to be spiteful.

The more contact you make with those in your network the better!  A friendly “how are you” email helps.  A link to your website in your forum signature is great.  Speaking of forums, they can get tricky if a business owner is not posting relevant information.  Also, if the website watchdogs see too many postings they have a way of slowing you down by sending a warning email, commenting on your posts by making spam accusations, or sudden errors come up in the midst of all your posting.  There are marketers who also use software to post to forums as well.

Classified ads can be helpful for marketing, but once again depending on the product a business owner is selling it can be useless; since many people visiting the site are more interested in socializing then checking the classified ads.  Most people will still visit a major newspaper or a related website based on their need for the things they want.

Marketing a business on a social networking site is a great learning experience, but can be a big time waster if a marketer isn’t seeing any results after following the advice of the experts.  When you see that the free ways to promote your business are not working (such as clicking on everyone’s profile page and sending them an email about your product), just like door-to-door selling keep moving or try another method to market your business.