Keep IT Simple

My friend once emailed me asking what business is the best to start online. I said that the opportunities are boundless. We can come up with selling physical items like handicrafts and having the internet as our marketplace. We can have a web portal of information and generate revenue from online advertisements. We can have outsourcing for local talents in third world countries so we can have less expensive labor while actually being able to help countries with problems on unemployment.

The only question would be “How will we get known?”

And so I told my friend that we first need to build a bigger base of friends in our social networking sites. I told him to invite all his addresses in his email and once a big network is established, then promotion of the business website can be possible without spamming strangers.

I came across a website the other day. The website is called http://www.linkedin.com and this is a social networking website. Of course when we say social networking, the thing that easily comes to mind is Myspace, Friendster or Facebook where I have an account with each one of them.

The distinct difference with LinkedIn, as I figured, is that it is being specifically designed for professional to be in a business contact networking site. And yes, one can actually access his web mail from LinkedIn and invite all the addresses from the web mail’s address book (I’m sure this is also possible with some other social networking sites).

While signing up, I noticed immediately that in the walkthrough, some of the information collected included whether I was interested in finding consulting, selling products, looking for job or employee, finding business partners among others.

Let’s look at a comparison with an older job website Monter.com. In Monster.com, a user is simply given a space to post resume in the hope that someone will stumble upon it. But with LinkedIn, the user and his friends within the network can share the resume and other relevant exposed information to the right people needing them.

According to one IT news I read, LinkedIn is growing by about 700,000 new sign ups per month. And this website has only been launched in 2003.

A Boca Raton, Florida based discount brokerage company TradeKing allows customers to blog and set up profiles in networking sites. Whether this is done in LinkedIn or in some other website, the point is that business networking sites like LinkedIn promotes more business environments in social networking sites instead of the typical types which generally are a time killing venue for many users particularly the younger ones.

Coupled with the tremendous growth and popularity of Open Source, business oriented social networking websites can help individuals build mini multinational companies with very small start up capital. Particularly among the young people who don’t have much money but have advance IT skills, LinkedIn can be a launch pad business stardom! Remember, there are millions of users in the internet today, all potential markets.