Something which I hear more and more is people asking 'How do I generate traffic to my website?'. This is a very good question and perhaps one of the things people always struggle with. What I would say to you if you are struggling to think of ways to generate traffic to your website is your not the only one, there are lots of people out there in the same boat who are great at building websites and getting them looking nice but then that's about as far as it goes. After the website has been built people will commonly stop there and this is where they make their mistake, it is completely pointless having a fantastic looking website if no one is there to see it. You need traffic to your website to make it profitable.

Whilst there are many many ways to generate traffic to websites such as article marketing, PPC marketing, social bookmarking, forum marketing, mailing list marketing and many more, social networking sites can be a great way of getting traffic to your new website or products. You are probably familiar with the main social networking sites such as facebook.com, myspace.com and twitter.com, these sites are extremely propular amongst the world of internet marketers and I bet that many of you even have account there yourself for your personal use, especially on facebook or myspace. The great thing about social networking sites is the amount of traffic they recieve, they get literally millions of page views per day simply because of the amount of people who visit and use them. This is an opportunity not to be missed, you must must must get yourself into social networking, take advantage of the massive amount of traffic there is to be had and use it to your advantage.

So how do you use a social networking site to bring you traffic? It's not actually as difficult as you first may think. You need to get yourself over to some of the popular social networking sites like facebook, myspace & twitter etc and signup for a free account, there are also other ones you can signup for which I will list below. Then go ahead and get your profile setup, add in your likes/dislikes, interests and list all of your websites and generally make an effort getting the profile to look good. Just as a side note if you do already have accounts on any of the social networking sites, particuarly facebook and myspace, I would recommend not using your own personal account but set a separate one up instead for your business purposes. In addition make sure that you try and stick with one main niche in your profile, don't have a social networking account on twitter which talks about fishing, food, internet marketing etc, make sure you only stick to one area like internet marketing for example or your latest products. People will be using targeted searches and you need to target your profile content to match this.

Once you have created your profile and added the details into it, go ahead and search for people who you may want to be friends with, people who have similar interests to you, people who may be interested in your sites or products. You can do this by undertaking a search on the site for certain terms or groups which relate to your main interest, you can also use friends from your mailing list and build a group of followers. You then need to go ahead and make sure you keep your account updated, post updates to it, post news and information related to your websites and products, keep people interested in what you have to say. The more you keep your social networking accounts updated then the more people will visit your page and tell other people about your page, once these people tell 2 people they tell 2 people etc etc, before you know it you will have a  big group of followers and this is when it becomes viral.

Try it for yourself, post reguarly and build a list of followers and see how it goes.

A list of popular sites:

• Facebook.com
• MySpace.com
• Twitter.com
• Bebo
• Friendster
• Flickr
• Ryze
• Hi5
• Ning
• My Yahoo
• Ecademy
• Orkut