In my previous Post Challenges of Starting a new website Part 1.  I talked about my new website My Weekend Trip Planner and how difficult it is to get your website discovered.  It is very difficult to get that initial traffic to the sight especially because SEO is really hurt by the fact that the site is so new. It is important to build the traffic to your site at least initially through other sources then just search engine.  These ways can be things like word or mouth or paid advertisements.  One of the ways I have found that works the best is social media.  Social media is extremely important especially for discovering a website.  You need to use social media to create a buzz for example on My Weekend Trip Planner when I launched the site I changed my status on Facebook to announce the launch of my new site.  I also tweeted it.  I received 30 visits from that in 4 hours.  This is perfect example of you can use social media to tell people about your site hopefully they will then tell their friends and the result can be viral.  This will then increase the likely hood people liking to you and before you know have a powerful website.

When you have some word that you do not understand, what do you do? Do you verify what it is by quickly typing wikipedia.org and search for that word?

Wikipedia is a non-profit organization that brings knowledge of thousands together to make itself into a central station for anyone using the Internet.

Some things are regulated and limited to be done, such as editing too many times with a frequent manner.

It gives fairly good information and most of the college and high school students start researching materials on this info base.

Have you ever wondered how big a carbon footprint you leave when you throw away a Snickers wrapper?  Well I definitely haven’t and I honestly don’t care, but if you do there’s a tool out there for social entrepreneurs to take advantage of and make an impact.

Carbon Advice Group is a web community that allows individuals to create micro-sites and share new ways of reducing carbon foot-printing.

This site makes it easy for environmental activists to share information with friends, family, and coworkers while at the same time opening doors for them to further their knowledge by taking advantage of the micro-sites of other carbon footprint enthusiasts.

After entering “Social Entrepreneurship” into the Digg search engine, one of the most popular items I found was an article off the New York Times written last year about entrepreneurs making an impact on society.

The story of Michael Gainer really stuck out to me as a shining example of a young entrepreneur giving back to his community.  A 34-year old resident of Buffalo, Michael has turned Buffalo’s plans to destroy over 10,000 houses over the next 10 years into an environmentally friendly way of reusing old building materials.

Buffalo ReUse collects old and unused building materials and sells them to craftsmen that can use them such as carpenters and metalworkers, putting to use what would otherwise be wasted.  Gainer also goes out of his way to hire young people from the Buffalo area to fill marketing and graphic design positions in order to mentor them and develop young talent.

I lived in San Antonio, Texas from age 7-10, and this past summer I went back to an old friend’s wedding.  While visiting got to hang out with Sean, one of my close friends from my days in Texas.

In catching up with him, I found out that over the past two years he has developed his own computer repair service.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is not your average “I reset my neighbors wireless router” repair service.  This kid has clientele all over the city, gets away with charging $50/hour, and drives a 2007 Ford Mustang.

Sean uses both a personal website and Facebook Page to market his business.  He has over a dozen personal reviews on his own personal site attesting to his greatness.  This guy has no employees and doesn’t contract out any of his advertising because he does it all himself.

As a result of his hard work and successful marketing, Sean is working 10-20 hours a week and making around $35000/year while playing in a Christian rock band that’s about to get signed to a major record label.  Pretty impressive what a 21 year old with no college experience can do when he puts his mind to something.