Proffesional networks- A unique business idea

Professional networks are rarely seen as business opportunities. Apart from the IT industry where there are millions of online forums, other cadres have no forums where they can take issues that only peers would understand . Creating a professional network could be a lucrative venture. In this article, i give a basic structure of an online professional network, what services it could offer, and how the owner can make money from it.

Validity of the idea
People want to belong; just recently, a group of young Kenyan labtechs created a telegram group and named it the Kenya union of medical laboratory scientific officers. In a day they had enrolled 400 members, a qurater of which were willing to part with 1000 KES, as a  registration fee.

 Millions of experts in different fields are today suffocating of a burning desire to belong; a desire to be a member of a respectable network that fervently debates the challenges of the contemporary work situations.  You can easily create an online community that answers to this need. All you need is to be an authority in your discipline, or have people with this authority. You got to be passionate about what you do? And you need to be able to give advice with confidence.

What to offer
What you will be offering in your professional network group is solutions to small problems that people face in the course of their work. You don't have to have this answers, just allow for peer to peer interactions and members will share their experiences.

Every hour, millions of professionals search the web for solutions to little problems that they encounter daily in the routine of their work. The  sites that  have stood up as reliable sources of help for different professionals overtime have a mammoth traffic and following.

How to create the online network 
A professional network service could be operated by having a password protected area of a blog or website; only subscribed members have the password. Subscription could be free or paid for. If it is free, the owner(s) of the site will make money by exposing adverts to members and charging the advertisers. If it is paid for, then there may be a small membership fee. Membership fees are usually nominal, for example 2 USD a month.A site could have more than 3000 members! How much is that in a month?

So how do you go about creating a professional networking service otherwise known as a membership site? All you need to do is create a website or mobile application. Get the nerdy tech guys to do this for you. But basically; Creating a website involves three basic steps:
  • first you need to decide on a domain name, a domain name is the unique identifier of your website. 
  • Second you need to buy hosting. Hosting in the computer industry means holding a website’s content in an external special computer called a server. Information held in a server connected to the internet is accessible 24 hours 365 days a year. Any website you see is information stored in a server that is connected to the internet and is accessible from any part of the world provided internet connectivity is available. There are several companies that offer domain registration services and hosting services as one package, plus a dozen more support features like free training.One such company is namecheap.com
  • Once you register a domain name, and once you buy hosting, you will have a space on the internet; your own unique site The next thing you need to do is upload a content management system (CMS) to your new blank site. Content management systems are web applications designed to make it easy for non-technical users to manage a website.
I have presented to you there idea, you may need a seasoned web designer and programmer  to help you set up this. Any  IT savvy guy in your family could easily set this up for you in an hour.
My parting short is that professional networks is a business opportunity with  remarkable potential.

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