I wanted to talk about the biggest myth in social networking. That it is free! Yes, it is definitely free for those who put the time into social networking, but the idea of social networking being completely free is just simply not true.

That is not to say you can not get a free account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and WordPress. You can definitely do that and more. There are a lot of great tools out there to help you achieve your goals for free. The only challenge is that at some point you will need to go beyond the free for some of things that you need.

Real Quick! This is not to get into the incessant debating about whether Facebook should be free or paid. I could care less about that. What I am talking about is whether you have the tools to get the job done or you have the desire to work that much harder and work without those tools.

Let’s put it this way! The Great Pyramids of Giza were built to exacting precision with rudimentary tools that most construction workers today working on a skyscraper would be shudder to think of. However, they did it! They achieved their goal. A long lasting memorial to eternity.

Now, if the Pyramids were built today it would be finished in a year instead of the twenty years it took to build each one in ancient times.

The same holds true today for social networking. You can definitely go out and set up an account on Craigslist to get some quick cash, add a few social networks to publicize your work, and then create a blog on WordPress.com or Blogger to start driving traffic to your products and services. Building a list by using Mailchimp along the way.

Or you could do everything that I mentioned above and enhance it by paying for a multi-city or national ad on Craigslist for $25, upgrading your account on LinkedIn to meet additional valuable partners and prospects, buy a domain and hosting for a WordPress.org site, and then use Aweber to power your mailing list.

What is the difference? The speed of money and the time you put into it. As entrepreneurs we can do anything we want. We can run the business, do the taxes, buy the inventory, fulfill customer demands, do the marketing, and then fulfill all the administrative tasks that need to be done on a daily basis.

Or we could do part of the work listed above and use a cadre of professionals smarter than us at various tasks to accomplish everything faster and more efficiently than we could ever do by ourselves.

I am not telling you outsource for the purpose of outsourcing. Or spend money, because it can be printed like yesterday’s news by the government. Instead, I am saying look at what you want and need to spend time on. I choose to write this blog everyday, because I want to. There are other tasks in social networking that I outsource, because they are tedious and bore me.

Learn what works and does not work for you in social networking.