If you’re a business owner, an online entrepreneur, or you’ve just been let go of because of the global economic crisis and you are wondering whether or not to spend your time pimping your resume to employment agencies or starting your own business, then here are ten very good reasons why you should consider starting your own community site:

1) Social Networking Is A Growing Trend!

While millions of people all over the world are sharing photos on social networking sites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com, posting messages on Twitter, or just observing and waiting to see where all of this is going, many businesses and enterprising individuals are staking their claim to untapped niche markets by starting to plant seeds for their future in the form of community sites based around a particular area of interest. One recent example I have seen of this, is a social networking site for beading enthusiasts called www.BeadHuddle.com. This social network is completely focused around the craft of beading, and growing very rapidly with those who have a passion for beads.

Here’s a promotional video that the owners of the beading site created and posted on YouTube that explains the benefits of becoming a member of their online beading community:

Think about the business you are in, or a hobby or interest you feel passionate about. Could you turn this into an online social network?

2) A Social Networking Site Is A Great Place To Develop Your Entrepreneurial Skills

Someone once said that an entrepreneur is a person who creates events so they can sell tickets to those who like to attend events. A community or social networking site is an event that more and more people are becoming involved in. One way to create an exciting event is to simply introduce people who share a similar passion or interest to one another. This is exactly what a community site allows you to do.

3) A Social Networking Site Can Be Scaled Down Or Up

An individual, business, church, club, association or local community can choose to set up a social networking site to allow just the members of its community to join and interact with each other online … or open the site to allow anyone to join and grow it on a global scale.

4) A Social Community Site Can Inject New Life Into An Organization

By adding a new dimension of interactivity online, many organizations, businesses and special interest communities can become more dynamic and lively, and offer a great and exciting new way for its members to interact on a social level.

5) A Social Networking Site Offers A Whole Lot More Than Just A Member’s Forum

In a social network site, members can share articles, videos, pictures, create groups, post announcements and events to selected members of their group, run classifieds, auctions, directories, chat live or send instant messages to one another, as well as post messages and engage in discussions in a forum.

6) A Community Site Can Turn Into A Profitable Online Business

If you have ever tried to run your own website or a blog, then you know that most of the site’s content has to either come from your own labor, or from someone you will probably have to pay money to outsource the work to. In a community site, provided you set it up properly and get it going following certain simple guidelines, your members will create most of the site’s content for you, leaving you free to manage and promote the site. Once you have built a significant community membership, there are many options you could look into as a way of “monetizing” your site and turning it into a profitable online business.

7) A Community Site Can Help A Business Create Their Own Database Of Potential Customers

Let’s say you own a health-related business. Can you imagine being the owner of a growing community site dedicated exclusively to a niche topic in this industry? How hard would it be to access, inform and educate members of your community about your products and services and promote the benefits of your business to them?

8) A Community Site Can Help You Discover New Business Opportunities

If you have ever been a member of an online forum, or a networking group, you will probably agree that many people generally frequent forums and discussion groups as a way to find solutions to specific problems or challenges they may be experiencing. By simply keeping your eyes open and studying forum threads in your own community site, you will begin to recognize new opportunities for creating new products, services and solutions to address common problems that your members are experiencing.

9) A Community Site Can Turn Your Site Into An Online Authority Hub

Imagine having hundreds, even thousands of new members in a niche-specific community site (e.g. a site for owners of rare, tropical aquarium fish) regularly posting fresh, new content that is completely relevant to the topic of your site, and having search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others slurping it up and serving up pages of your site to its visitors, or blog owners publishing your links on their sites via RSS feeds. By leveraging the efforts of your community members, you can quickly begin to turn you site into an authority hub for whatever topic you choose to build a social networking community around.

10) A Community Site Can Become A Growing Asset For You

Imagine owning an online community site which, after a couple of years, has become a “hub”, or authority site for your particular niche, because you have cultivated and helped it grow to 30,000+ active members, all focused around a specific area of interest. I don’t know about you, but in my experience, there are many companies, advertisers and competing business owners in your field that would view your site as an enviable asset which they would probably like to own or derive a greater benefit from.

So … are you starting to see the bigger picture now? The Social Networking phenomenon is now growing beyond sites like Facebook,com, MySpace.com and the other larger and more well known sites. More and more enterprising individuals and business owners are beginning to see the benefit of setting up their own community sites, and discovering much to their surprise, that owning your own social networking site doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, or even require much technical skill to run.

If owning your own social networking site interests you and you would like to know more but don’t know where to begin, then the best resource I recommend you start with, is a FREE report entitled “How To Profit With Your Own Social Networking Site”, which you can download at no cost by going here:

Free Report – How To Profit With Your Own Social Networking Site

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