Social sites such as FaceBook, Friendster & Myspace are good sources of traffic if you know how to tap and leverage on the huge communities found on these social sites. Social sites are great for networking with like minded people with similar interests. If you execute your traffic campaign well, you can be sure of consistent and targeted groups of visitors for your site.

However, you have to take note that while social sites are good for traffic, you have to play by their rules or you will get your accounts suspended or even deleted.

Here is how you can leverage on social networks to drive traffic to your site. For making things simpler, I will use Friendster as an example.

Sign up an free email account with either Google,  Yahoo or Hotmail. I would prefer to have a separate email account for each account that I have created in Friendster and I would advise you do do the same. There are many reasons why you should used a separate email address for each Friendster’s account. One of them is to protect your privacy and identify. Another reason is that you may have many different sites each targeting different groups of people. By separating your email accounts, it would be easier to track your traffic and marketing campaigns.

Register a new Friendster’s account using your new email account. Set up your profile page and change your account settings to allow anyone to view your profile and pictures. Depending on your preferences, you can adjust account settings to your liking. When setting up your profile, if let’s say your site is targeting dog owners, write about your love for dogs and include information that dog owners can relate to. Also put up your website “Title” and URL in your profile to advertise your site. Please spare more time on creating a good and personal profile. Also if possible, add pictures of dogs into your gallery. Create a shout. Write something like “Check out my dog site at www.mydomain.com”. This is a good way to advertise your site to your future network.

Once you finshed with the profile and account settings, it’s time to add friends from your personal network. This is to ensure that the new friends that you are going to add will not be turn off by the lack of friends in your social network.When your profile have a few friends showing, it’s time to add new friends. Go to the search page and search for people whom you are targeting. You can customize your search options in many ways. For example, under the keyword section, select “interest” in the drop down list. After that, type “dog” in the box below and then click on the search button.

Next, you will see a list of people with interest in “dog” shown on your right screen. You can then choose to add them as friends or send them a message requesting them to add you as a friend. While not all will add you as a friend, you will find a number of people who are willing to do so. Sometimes, some of them will even email you back ask whether they know you. Just politely reply them in your own words and ask them to add you.Most people will check out your profile after they have seen your request or message and this is why your profile page is so important.

While you are adding new friends into your network, you can join interest groups to enlarge your social circle and also create awareness for your site. The best way is to find similar interest groups and join them. Once you are accepted into the group, you can start approaching members in the group and add them as friends. By joining groups, you are actually leveraging on their networks to know more friends. Also, members from the same group are more likely to accept your requests to add you as a friend.

Once you are ready, create a dog interest group and invite all your friends from your network to join. Inside the group, you can use the bulletin board as a means to constantly update your group members on latest news on your site. Another method is to use the bulletin function on your profile page to broadcast periodic updates to your network.Please take note this feature is different from the one inside the group.

Now that you have set up the foundations to drive traffic to your site, you can just spend a couple of hours each week to maintain your network. You have to periodically update your friends and group members on news of your web site. Build rapport with your network and establish trust.  Once you are ready, you can move on to creating profiles in other social sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, etc.

While this method has its flaws, it remains a good and definite method to drive targeted traffic to your site. Definitely not all will visit your site often but most of them will do so anyway if your site is good. After that, it’s up to your imagination on how to monetize.