Anyone that knows me knows that I am a voracious networker and have been so since getting into the Internet marketing industry in late 2001. You don’t get 3000 Plaxo and 1500 LinkedIn connections by sitting on your fanny doing nothing! So, I decided to put together a list of some of the things I like to do to build my social networks and actual generate business and friendships from them.

1. Be Friendly, Out-going, Respond, and Retweet – Social media has forced people to network with each other, but I still don’t see much actual interaction. I mainly see people promoting themselves, which is fine, but doesn’t really build lasting bonds or generate business. Make sure to reply to your connection’s “status updates” and retweet stuff you find interesting. Reach out to your connections and try to find common ground for working together. Try to actually help your connections in some way by possibly connecting them with someone you know or a valuable resource…it goes a long way.

2. Use Ping.fm – I absolutely love Ping.fm for broadcasting my messages out on all my social networks at once. It makes it easy to update your “Status” everywhere in one motion. What I have noticed is an increase in the responses from my connections to the messages I’m broadcasting since using this wonderful tool.

3. TweetDeck – This is a great desktop based application that allows you to really keep on top of your Twitter account and what’s going on. This will allow you to interact and respond more actively, and overall manage your Twitter account better.

4. Invite – you can’t build your network unless you invite anyone and everyone you know to connect with you. Most social networks have an invite from address book feature….use it!

5. Start Your own Social Network – Use Ning.com to set-up your own social network, so you can start conquering the Internet and building your own social network. It’s really cool and easy.

These are but a few ideas for making you more productive with Social Networking. Let me know if you have any questions and I will help you out.

Hey all, I wanted to invite everyone in the Internet Marketing world to join our new Cost Per News Social Network powered by Ning. Our new social network will be bring together many affiliates and affiliate marketing professionals, into one community. The purpose of our new affiliate marketing social network will to help affiliates learn to be better, productive affiliate marketers. Please check it out and feel free to make any suggestions you may have. Tell all your friends about it. Click here to join the Cost Per News affiliate marketing social network! Thanks!

Affiliate Summit’s Social Network on Ning is growing more and more every day.

I subscribe to the general RSS feed of the network to keep up with who’s joining and what’s going on (yet another cool feature of Ning is the RSS implementation… I can keep an eye on the network without having to login every hour) and it seems like it’s really catching momentum.

Here’s the view from my feed reader:

I hope the network keeps rolling as it could be a very valuable place and facilitator of offline interaction as well come August.

If you have followed me for any length of time, you know that I’m a chronic social networker. I jump on things like Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, FriendFeed, Seesmic, etc and often call them the “next big thing.”

I know it’s annoying, but sometimes I do get it right (like with Twitter).

So, I’m particularly excited to see the new Affiliate Summit network being moved to Ning…

New Affiliate Summit Social Network | Affiliate Summit Blog: “Affiliate Summit has launched a new social network for conference attendees on Ning.

Based on a poll, as well as feedback on Twitter and directly to us, Ning was the clear favorite over the previous social network technology from Confabb.”

If you’ve never played with Ning, you really should. It beats forum software like phpBB etc hands down and offers a number of options for integration with things like your blog feed or Twitter or Flickr.

And I’m especially excited about the Summit’s move to Ning because the previous Confabb system was atrocious from a usability standpoint.

This time around for the ASE Boston show, I really think we can derive some benefits from this iteration of the social network.

Head over and sign up. You just might like it (and find it profitable).