Social networking websites have now become a fact of every day life, and increasingly of every day business. Essentially these sites, as the name implies, provide another avenue of engaging your prospective customers and building your network of industry contacts. But what are your options if you are already at your capacity's limit dealing with existing networking and customer engagement avenues?

While probably not as productive as the kind of active engagement suggested, there are some passive ways you can raise your profile on those social networking sites such as:

• Add social bookmarking links to your site allowing your visitors to share links to interesting content on your website with their peers on their favourite social networking site.
• Create syndicated content (RSS) feeds of key frequently-updated pages so your visitors are made aware of updates on your website automatically.
• Display feeds of other industry-relevant content on your own website to raise the profile of your business as an industry watcher and the place to go to check the pulse of the market.
• Add the ability for your visitors to easily email content on your website to their friends and family at the time when they're viewing the information to spread the word and increase the user base.

More generally, whether you can afford the time for the active user engagement suggested or are pressed for time and rely on more passive means, in both cases your website needs to be a destination. There is no point in going through a lot of effort, time and even expense to direct traffic to your website if it is not equipped to convert this traffic to your desired business outcomes.

Generally, you can achieve this with interesting, relevant and frequently updated content, especially if your message is presented as a podcast, a video gallery or a flash presentation. Your website ought to enable you to accomplish this without difficulty or excessive cost to your business.