It brings people the level of comfort knowing who they are dealing with. You need to know the people first instead of starting your selling pitch and expecting them to buy your products immediately. If you want your online business to get popular globally, you need to first make it popular locally. First off, make it a point to attend few events in your area locally.

Here are some tips that I learnt from learning and sharing with online community.

• Get comfortable: If this is your first time walking in the group of strangers, know that everybody else is feeling the same. Anxiety level is high for pretty much everyone who is attending the event for the first time, and they have the sole purpose the same as yours – social networking. So, hold yourself strong and be confident. Make yourself personable and easy to approach.
• Talk casually: Keep in mind that you have one or other thing in common with someone else at the event. So, start by asking them a question about their business. Make it an interesting conversation for them. They will feel more at ease talking about what they care about. Find a common ground at that time, and talk about your business as well.
• Come prepared: Make sure to carry your business cards with you. Prepare a brief outline of what you want to say or discuss. Keep a small notepad and pen so that you are ready whenever you run into someone important and you wish to write their contacts down.
• Follow up: If you run into someone interesting and you brought back their contact information, make it a point to contact them later on. Not doing so may end up effecting your business negatively giving an impression of you not standing upto your promises.
• Have Fun: If you are not enjoying what you are doing, you won’t get good results. This is true in business and in general. So, enjoy networking. Go out, have fun and show your best to your potential customers or partners.

If you follow some other networking techniques, feel free to share. Happy Networking!

What are Hubpages?

Hubpages is a collection of articles or hubs, as they call them, and help you earn revenue as well. After registering and becoming a member you can write your own hub and promote them as you want. If you mention your main website in your hub or profile, you would want to promote your hub which will indirectly promote your website. Marketing your website using hubpages is a natural optimization of your website in search engines. Make sure not to spam your hubs or others. Spam is taken very seriously, and you may end up having your account banned.

How to use Hubpages?

You can become a member of hubpages by registering and confirming your email. Once you become a member, you are all set to start hubbing. It would be convenient for other hubbers to know more about you if you summarize the contents of your hub in your summary.

It will give them the idea about what your niche is and why they should keep coming back to read your hubs. Hubpages can be browsed by hub ratings such as “What is Hot”,”What is New”,”What is best rated”. There is a topics tab that can be used to browse through popular categories and subcategories. If your hub appears in What’s Hot category, you will end up driving lots of traffic.

What can you find at hubpages?

Hubpages has lot of traffic and people form varied interests and hobbies. You can find discussions on politics, Legitimate Online Jobs, Dating for Married Women, How to write hubs etc.

Why use Hubpages?

Hubpages can be very motivating. It helps to:

• Promote your website – Hubpages are an excellent way to get relevant traffic to your website. You can place direct link to your website. It also helps your website in making it search engine optimized, because of hubpages’ own great web presence. You can promote your hubs using social bookmarking and media marketing websites like delicious, digg and stumbleupon. The best of all, you can track your daily visitors by plugging in your Google Analytics code.
• Make Money – Yup, that’s true. Hubpages lets you add your Adsense code. If any ads are clicked in your hub, you will paid commission for that click amount. You can also use affiliate accounts like eBay and Amazon. If you wish to use eBay and Amazon ID, you are required to have commission Junction account. You need to apply and activate for these accounts before you start using them.

You may or may not like Hubpages but you definitely would not want to ignore  this social networking platform if you are planning on making money. Click here to check out hubpages!

** Hubpages Update:

Hubpages has started HubPages Earnings Program that can be used to make money. Login to your account and click on “Earnings” to apply for HubPages Earnings Program.