Due to the popularity of sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, people have been searching on how to build a social network. The highly popular sites are custom jobs but there are free social network software like MySpace and YouTube.

Before going on with the free social networking scripts, let us determine first the social network requirements. We usually need a blogging component, some profile page a la MySpace, and a forum of sort for community discussion. We should look for these capabilities in a social networking script.

An old hand, and therefore proven and tested to be stable, at social networks is the free script elgg. It started out as university project to get the professors and students connected. It is now one of the most popular social network script.

A recent newcomer is BuddyPress, based on the popular multi-blogging platform Wordpress-MU. Coming from the creators of WordPress, BuddyPress will soon be up there with the rest of the free scripts in popularity.

Finally, if we have some web development talents, we can always tweak and customize a Drupal installation into a social network. Drupal is an extremely versatile and powerful Content Management System (CMS).

Actually, the most difficult part of building an online social network is finding our niche and getting members to join.

NOTE: This is a guest post by Mack of The Marketing Effect.

Everyone is talking about Twitter these days and you might have heard about people who are making money with this free service. This is true. You really can make money online with Twitter.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter is, as they call it, “…a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. This is what makes it different from other social websites and a gold mine for people who want to promote their business, website or want to make money online.

Many of you are probably wondering “How can this service make me money?” Well, as I said, you can promote your businesses and bring in more clients, promote your money making website, or generate leads to affiliate links directly and make money that way.

The secret to a successful money-making endeavor is getting followers who will read you’re tweets. The usual way to do this is by following other people and hope they will return the favor. Another  way to gain followers is by adding a “Follow Me On Twitter” button on your website. However, if you don’t have the time but have the money, there are paid services out there that promise a large volume of followers for a fee.

Important Note: Not all accounts are real. What I mean by this is … a lotsof other people have made accounts that have been automated by robots or third party services like http://tweetlater.com or http://twitterfeed.com .

On the other hand, these are good services you can use to automate some of your tweeting. Like for example: Twitterfeed.com will make a tweet with the link to every new post on your blog. And TweetLater.com will allow you to send direct messages to people who have started following you, allowing you to build a relationship with those people. Building relationships is the most important aspect of social media marketing. It does not have to be something very personal but just enough to make people trust you and take note of what you tweet.

In the end I would like to point out that Twitter is a great service, it is free and most of all it can make you a lot of money if you use it correctly. Cheers to all and happy tweeting.

A while back, we’ve finally caved in and created a twitter account for one of our online endeavors. That’s how we learned of an ad company based in the U.K. that offers cash in exchange for allowing them to insert some sponsored tweets among ours, Be-A-Magpie.

We will let this image do most of the explaining of how their system works.

More questions? Check out their FAQ. Interested? Join here.

Web traffic is a measure of a website’s or blog’s popularity. It’s probably the main criteria for choosing a site to advertise on. Problems is, unless a webmaster or blogger provides us the traffic stats, which are private and accesible only to them, we don’t really really know for sure how many visitors their sites are getting per day.

The only online tool we know of that can give us an estimate of a site’s traffic is Alexa. However, it’s not really that accurate. Some Advertising services also provide a summary of sort of sites within their system, such as ProjectWonderful but we still need to log-in. Are there any online tools we can use for a cursory view of any site’s traffic stats?

After a series of Internal Server Errors, whose causes we can’t pinpoint at present, we finally have some good news to share. We checked RMO’s latest Alexa stats today and was pleasantly surprised that it is ranked at 99,350. Finally, after months of waiting.

RMO owes this rank to our EntreCard buddies, StumbleUpon (lots of thanks to the unknown visitors who stumbled a few of RMO’s post), and Google.

Visit RMO’s Alexa Page.

Since we are on the subject of good news, here’s another one for WordPress users. Brian Gardner, of the Revolution theme series fame, has offically launched his new open source theme site, Revolution2. Themes are free and support is paid.