How to make money online through social networking

04:01 Unknown

You never had it so good. Access to a client list that runs into hundreds of millions, a reach that spreads across the world, hardly any infrastructure cost, and no need to impress anyone with a wall full of framed qualifications. Welcome to the virtual bazaar, a marketplace that encompasses the world while shrinking it to a small screen.

The biggest shopping mall, where everything is on sale, from technical advice to tattered childhood comics. A region where every boundary is blurred; no one cares about your age, no one is interested in your race or religion, and no one needs to know whether you live in the boondocks or a plush penthouse. The anonymity that the virtual world provides has been the biggest boost to equality for small entrepreneurs and job hunters across the globe.

It's a treasure trove full of opportunities for anyone with guts and gumption. If no publisher is interested in your writing, pen a blog or publish an e-book. If you can't afford to rent a shop, sell online. You will need less space than the local kirana store and reach a wider customer base than the brick-and-mortar mall near your house.

The World Wide Web has a solution for everything, and for everything, a customer. All you need to do in order to step into this vast land of fortune is to get a computer and a broadband connection. If you don't know where to start, do so by joining a popular network.

Let the numbers convince you: a staggering 150 million users on Facebook and 200 million on Twitter. Each and everyone is a potential customer for anything that you have to sell: your skills, your thoughts or even your junk.

We take you through a list of professions that you can venture into and introduce you to people who have leveraged the Net to earn a comfortable income. By no means is this a comprehensive list. In fact, it is not even an indicative one since the virtual world is continuously evolving and new opportunities are cropping up every day. After all, some of the biggest platforms that people use currently didn't even exist a decade ago—Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006.