This week we’ve been talking about reasons your website sucks.

Reason #5: You are too timid about promoting your website online.

Networking online is fast, efficient and powerful, and yet many companies are not sure they should network online.  Are you one of them? Let’s take a look at another popular social network website, Facebook.

Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while he was at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin.  Facebook become popular within months across dorm rooms at Harvard, and soon at Stanford
and Yale.

When Mark was joined by two other fellow Harvard students–Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes–Facebook grew to become a national student network phenomenon. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

You still needed to be enrolled in one of the participating universities to be on Facebook until 2006 when anyone 13 or older could join. By January 2009 Facebook had moved ahead of MySpace in popularity.

While many businesses questioned whether MySpace was right for them, there was less hesitance for many businesses considering membership on Facebook.  A noticeable difference between the two may account for how they’ve been received by businesses.  MySpace allows to members to customize their pages with HTML and Cascading style Sheets, whereas Facebook mainly allows plain text and now photos, as well as a free classified ads in the Marketplace.

One glance at my grandkids pages on MySpace convinced me that I didn’t want to list my business there (To call their pages and those of their friends “garish” is being polite.) But Facebook has a more professional and controlled appearance. Besides, the History Channel has a Facebook page.I also like the fact that Facebook now has the capability of  linking to my articles from Ezine articles, my blog posts, and my radio episodes from BlogTalkRadio.

You are right to be thoughtful about what personal information you share on any website, but people want to know who you are before they trust you with their money and their projects. Networking websites give you the option of keeping some information private or limiting who views it. That can be useful when you build a big following.

Regardless of which social networking site you select, keep in mind that you’re there to make contacts, offer information, and be a resource.  By building relationships you create friendships and connections who sometimes turn into fans. That will grow your business in ways that old fashioned advertising never could.

Reason #4 your website sucks: You are keeping it a secret.

Your website may boast a great design, but if you aren’t drawing visitors you are missing the main purpose: earning profits for your company.

In the last few years there has been an explosion of ways to network with potential customers and colleagues and get the word out about your business.  Research show, however, that you can increase your profits better by building relationships rather than hitting people over the head with hard advertising. That’s where social network marketing comes in.

Not too long ago you would have had to spend big advertising dollars to reach your potential customers. Now, thanks to social networking websites where potential customers willingly complete profiles and indicate their interests, your job of reaching them is much easier, very affordable and more effective. One such site is MySpace.

If you haven’t heard of MySpace.com, either you don’t have kids, don’t know any kids, or have been living on another planet for over a decade.

MySpace is a social networking website started in 2000 by Tom Anderson (graduate of UC Berkeley and UCLA) and Chris DeWolfe (graduate of USC) . It was bought in 2005 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

My Space is an interactive network of user profiles, photos, an internal email system and blogs. Although the founders claim to have started the site as a place for 18 to 25 year olds to socialize and hang out, its phenomenal popularity with teenagers and preteens has brought it under heavy scrutiny from the media and watchdog groups. These groups worry that unsupervised youngsters who display their personal information and suggestive photos online will fall victim to the more than 50,000 sexual predators believed to troll online sites and chat rooms.

By contrast, MySpace has been a godsend for fledgling musicians and independent filmakers because they can upload their original songs and films where they begin to develop a following. Here they can get visibility, popularity and sometimes, gigs.

As of today Alexa reports that MySpace is the 11th most popular English website in the world. My 25 year old daughter and my college students swear that they use MySpace just to stay in touch with friends they already know. But is MySpace appropriate for business and educational use also?

While some business owners believe that MySpace is a good place for them to network and meet potential customers, many businesses and schools are blocking access to My Space from their employees and students because of the tremendous strain it has put on bandwidth and professionalism.

Many believe that MySpace pages have been damaging to students who, already the object of teasing in their local school, can now be humiliated worldwide. In other situations, jobseekers’ chances of landing their preferred jobs have been hurt by the personal information they’ve shared.

 MySpace was recently at the center of the first cyberbullying trial when a Missouri mother perpetrated a hoax directed at a 13-year old girl pretending to be a teen boy. When the fictitious boy dumped the girl and told her the world would be better without her, she committed suicide.

Think twice before you decide to test the “six degrees of separation” theory on MySpace. While as an adult you may not be as likely to fall victim to sexual predators as preteens, you must consider whether the types of clients you seek will really find you on MySpace.

What do you think? Are you on MySpace? Has it helped grow your business?

Tomorrow we’ll look at another reason your website sucks.