Front Porch Folks Networking Neighborhood provides benefits from three unique features:

1. We've gathered all the things you need to do into one place - you can network more effectively through whatever venues you are already using, including Ryze, LinkedIn, Merchant Circle, FastPitch Networking, MySpace, FaceBook, and more. You can leverage social bookmarking, no matter what systems you are already using (nothing unethical here either!). And you can bring in Blogging, Twitter, Article Marketing, and other forms of online marketing that rely on the promotion of writing. All in an easy to use interface. Other systems simply do not encourage this, or make it easy to do this!

2. Our original system for teaching you to market - The Orchard Ladder. This isn't just an article database, or a set of manuals, or even a set of lessons. It is a combination of written instructions, videos, and forms, designed to take you through personalizing your own marketing plan, and then working your marketing step by step. Discover where your strengths are, what things benefit your business, and then how to use them effectively. Special tools, and success tips, resource lists, and even free software are included with the instructions, so you'll always be able to do what we instruct you to do. When you complete one step, you can move to the next, and our friendly staff will always be available if you have questions. No hypie stuff that doesn't work, just the good stuff that we use ourselves.

3. The people. No other online networking venue encourages the gathering of so many friendly, hardworking, ethical small business owners in one place. We aren't here for chit-chat, or fluff, and we aren't here to feed off one another. We are here to leverage the community to grow our businesses, and to help one another for mutual benefit. If you aren't a nice person, you can't do this successfully. So we tend to attract a lot of very nice people! You'd like living next door to a lot of your neighbors here.

Of course, we have the usual networking venue features in addition to that:

• Networking Forums
• Personal Blogs (in WordPress)
• A Business to Business Directory for your listing
• Featured Members
• Personal Guestbooks
• The ability to add image, video, or audio files to your listing
• The ability to add a download to your listing - so you can drop a promo here if you want
• An article database that you can contribute to
• The ability to submit a press release
• An organization you can volunteer for, to gain greater exposure
• Discounts on marketing related services
• A progressive and responsive organization that responds to your needs

Big business doesn't really know the needs of very small businesses - they don't even DEFINE them the same way. If you are a sole proprietor or have less than 5 employees, they don't consider you to even be in the small business category, so they aren't producing resources or tools that fit your business.

Front Porch Folks is ALL about the little businesses with big dreams. We offer real help, for a very small price, just for the smallest of businesses.