Upside Down Social Networking

by LaTease Rikard

There are many ways to make money from the internet. You can get paid to tweet, promote information, learn PPC & CPA marketing or even learn the finer points of email marketing. And don't forget you can also work at creating teams of distribution representatives for products that others own. Legitimately if you learn how to market any of these methods, you can make an awesome supplemental income or full time one from the comfort of your home.

I've done all of those methods to make a living from my pajamas. Working from home certainly has its perks! However, when you work from home for a long period of time, it can get lonely. I'm the kind of person who needs human interaction. It was okay to chat online with 'internet friends' but after awhile I began to feel like a hermit; like I had morphed into a caricature of a nerd. So, I abandoned Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Flickr for awhile and navigated out into the real world per se.

What I found was I did not spend as much time online any longer. My Facebook activity along with other social networking behavior didn't matter as much. You see, I had joined so many groups on Facebook that those groups and the activity they demanded, became my livelihood. My life began to revolve around updating, posting and checking for responses rather than living outside of the virtual box I had created. The time I spent with my photography was almost non-existent, as it became more important for me to be online promoting blog posts and getting notoriety for those posts. I didn't realize that if you write good content, and you have relative relationships within the confines of social networking, that good content will get shared without you asking for it.

My point is, I spent countless hours worrying about and trying to affect something that will grow on its own. I'm a great writer and photographer, and that stands for itself. People who know me and like me will read and view my creations anyway. I had to reevaluate my behavior. Basically, I had an 'ahh-hah' moment that resulted in an internal-online cleansing.

I still use Flickr, Picassa and Photobucket to showcase my photos, but I don't spend every waking moment promoting them. I also still Tweet, Facebook & have rediscovered the joys of online conversations on Google+. What I discovered, was people are always looking or reading my creations, they just don't say anything until it is necessary. I have had videos discovered by the Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers television show that I wasn't working at promoting. My photography was discovered by a travel brochure when I wasn't promoting them. Yes, good work stands out without shouting from every social network in the world. Social networks serve as an outlet to share the things you do. Many have taken sharing things to sharing products and services; that's okay too, but all things in moderation.

Thanks for reading, what are your thoughts?

© LaTease Rikard, All rights reserved.

LaTease actively discovers ways to to earn an income from real life networking with social networking. I give away lots of marketing information and publications just to help others. Find me on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/latease .

Submitted on November 19, 2011