On checking out the popular social networking sites, I noticed that a number of the most successful internet marketers have a high presence. These sites, however, are not meant for promoting your own business or affiliates. The general idea, is to interact with others, getting to know them, exchanging ideas and knowledge and then when it seems appropriate, sharing information on opportunities that might help them.

There are new social networking sites being added daily. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are presently the most popular. The 'new kid on the block' is BetterNetworker. It is my prediction that its popularity will grow very quickly and by this time next year it will be receiving a large piece of the pie.

TWITTER -- This is a free micro-blogging service. It allows it's users to send and read other users updates. A message is called a 'tweet' and is restricted to only 140 characters. You get to put your copywriting skills to the test here. You can only use text on Twitter. You can't upload pictures or videos.

FACEBOOK -- Facebook is privately owned and operated by Facebook Inc. It is also free to join. With Facebook, you can join networks that are organized by city, workplace, school or region to enable you to connect and interact with others. You can add 'friends' and post messages on their 'wall'. You can also upload pictures and short video. Facebook actually attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June, 2008.

MY SPACE -- Once again, another free site with an interactive network of friends, blogs, groups, personal profiles, music, video and photos. My space is international, as are the other social networking sites mentioned here. Back in June of 2006 it was the most popular networking site in the U.S. However, in April, 2008 it was taken over in popularity by Facebook. However, it still attracts approximately 230,000 new users per day.

BETTERNETWORKER -- The latest social networking site that appears to be headed for major success was created by Mike Dillard. His partner in this endeavour is Perry Belcher. These are two very successful internet marketing gurus. Their site is dedicated to providing great content amongst its users. To date, I have been very impressed with the quality of the posts on BetterNetworker. They also police their site to ensure that spammers are identified and thrown out.

Just a word of caution....you can spend many useless hours navigating through these social media sites and getting sidetracked with trivia. It is definitely not a 'quick fix' to adding hundreds of people to your mailing list. However, if done right it can produce great results. A good friend of mine, who has developed quite an impressive following on Twitter, recently sent out a 'tweet' about a new opportunity. His followers went to the recommended site and a week later my friend had earned over $40,000.00 in affiliate commissions. This only happened because he had built a large group of followers, who liked, respected and trusted him.

Social networking has become an integral part of doing business on the internet for a great percentage of the top producers involved in network marketing. They would not be spending the time to do this if it wasn't lucrative for them. Yes, if this is done properly it can certainly reap rich rewards.