Okay, so you have decided to start your own social networking website. And it seems to be a pretty nice idea actually; why not? Everybody is visiting social networking websites nowadays! Well, this true; to be honest, this is very true. However, things might not be exactly as easy as you might have imagined them to be!

First of all you need to find a good script. With the exception of PHPizabi and Dolphin, the majority of the other competent social networking scripts are commercial and you will have to buy them and/or pay an annual subscription fee. At this point you might be thinking "great, where's the problem?". Well, there is no problem actually; however, since you will probably pay for your script, you should better make a good choice from the beginning(unless you have unlimited money and time to try each and every script available of course!).

Once you have your script installed, the greatest problem you are going to face will be to actually get people to know the address of your website. It's pretty hard actually to even get the group of people you are targeting to know about the existence of your website. This is a very lengthy and difficult task. The hardest stage will be the point where the registered people on your website will be you, your good friends as well as the good friends of your good friends. Then what? Well, that's pretty much as far as the reaction chain will go (from my personal experience at least) and after that point you will have to do many things to promote your websites. Sending lots of emails will help, make sure you do not do it in a spammish way. Exchanging links with other websites will also help, go for it. Finally, what will help the most is ranking good on search engines as well as getting people to spread the word about your website (this last one is a must).

That's pretty much what i had to say in the first article of my upcoming series about social networking websites. Have a nice time and work hard :)