Of course, your strategies may vary with the policy of each site. Some will allow you to do some limited promotion of your products and businesses and others won't. Some will allow you to bring in external content to help build your profile and others won't. Each have their own unique way to keep in touch with people, some through profiles only, and others through mobile status updates like Twitter. So, it can be a little daunting to give one technical way to use all social networking sites. However, the strategy is still the same for most:

Set up a profile with your website links, and develop an online, authentic, personality. Invite friends you already know to link to you, Look at their friends list and see if you have mutual friends you can invite to link in to you.

Join in the networking and keep your profile fresh with updates and new content like videos, pictures, and blog postings, Stay present and check in daily to answer inquires, add some status information, and see if you can make new friends.

Check out other people online to see what they're doing to build their presence and copy it, Join groups and use a signature line to link back to your website, Network with other people online, staying conscious of who the major players are to connect with them if you can.

Explore any applications or other features within the site for marketing and contact building, Always try to have a way to funnel your contacts back to a blog or website for those social networks that limit your marketing capability.

So, even though social networking is a big term, it's still all about making friends and influencing people. It's not that much different from real life except that you have to be a little bit more aware of the mechanics of how to do that with each specific site.

Social networking takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. The sooner you get started, the more time you have to develop a network that is primed to be marketed later.

The more time you spend on each site, the more you will begin to see clever strategies that others have developed to increase their influence as if by magic. And, like everything else in this book, always cross-link all your sites for a spider web effect, a vortex of traffic, to eventually pull them into areas where you can make sales.