Create A Social Network

Everyone wants to create a social network, isn't it? Something like the next MySpace, Facebook or Twitter. As these sites make tremendous amount of money for being a platform that allows people to communicate with each other.

It might seem simple to create sites like these but in reality it's much more complicated. There are a lot of programming involved in it. You absolutely need to hire someone if you are not an expert yourself.

Depending on your project, it might cost you anywhere from 4-5 figures. Yes, it could be that expensive and trust me web developers take more than that sometimes. It is a big risk.

I am not discouraging you to take that risk but just letting you know the facts. Of course it's doable.

But remember there are a lot of people create a social network but only few of them make it. It's because there is nothing new in it, the same old concept.

But I actually courage you to build a website if you have got a new concept. Let's go back to the history.

Hi5 was so popular during the year 2003-2005, everyone had a Hi5 account. It is a simple platform that allows users to connect with their friends and share pictures.



Myspace came after, people liked it because it was a different concept than hi5.

It became really popular and the number of its users increased. For a certain period of time, everyone had a Myspace account.

Facebook came after all of them. It became extremely popular and suddenly a big number of Hi5 and MySpace users switched to Facebook. It was much simple to use and much more attractive.

Some people even predicted that no one can beat Facebook but Twitter came much after and is one of their major competition.

Twitter has a completely different concept than all of them. It's just short updates about what you are doing.

Twitter has much less feature than Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 but they still became popular. The only reason is it's new, it's fresh and nobody has come up with that idea before.

Be creative if you want to build something like Facebook, YouTube and etc. For example, YouTube was the first video sharing website when it came out. Somebody had an idea about it and made it happen.

Make something unique from everybody else and the success will be yours.

You don't necessarily need to create a social network to make crazy money. You can create something like YouTube, Flicker and Songza. There is so much you can do.

Doesn't matter what you are building, you need at least 3-4 web developers to work on it constantly and monitor it afterward. There will many minor technical issues that needs to be taken care of.

Don't forget, the real work will start after the launching of your website. You need to constantly work on it.

Marketing would be one of the big aspect. Without good marketing, you cannot be successful. So marketing plays a major rules.

You need a good marketing plan for the site to receive users and trust me MSN and Facebook contacts won't be enough in this case. You need many more people than that.

One other think why most websites get shut down is the server cost. It will be one of your major cost. You can't use a shared hosting for your website. You need a dedicated hosting and it costs anywhere more than 200$/month.

So there are a lot of advantages and disadvantages of creating a user-generated content website.

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