In the last post we discussed, a little bit, about Social Media Marketing.

In this post, I want to further explain what Social Media Marketing can do for your Websites.

I first started learning about Social Media Marketing about a year ago, although I was very aware of Social Media sites and what they could do for a site in regards to Traffic. I have owned a couple of Social Networking Communities over the years and I’ve learned quite a bit about Social Media sites during the course of that time, as I used a few to promote my own communities. No, I did not spam - I actually followed their rules, as much as I could

I even watched the traffic flow from my own Social Networking sites into another site I owned from just a few links.

There are a lot of great Social Media sites out there that can bring you a ton of traffic if used correctly. Although I’m still learning about some of them - most of them are pretty straight forward.

Obviously, the best site would be YouTube.com… the reason being - this site brings in so much traffic, it’s almost impossible NOT to get a nice little chunk for yourselves.

To be quite honest, I’ve never even used YouTube.com for my own benefits - but I’ve helped a few others get started with the site and it helped them tremendously. I do plan to use the site in the next month as I’m planning to create a couple of Video Tutorials to, hopefully, bring in some extra Traffic to this site.

I mostly use Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, Technorati and various other sites (PlugIM, MarkTD, etc), but there’s a ton of Social Media sites out there…

…AND that can also be quite a task having to sign up for all of these sites and have the ability to bookmark, submit, etc. all of these sites in one shot.

A lot of people use OnlyWire.com to take care of the bookmarking (and submitting, etc), as it gives you the ability to store all of your Usernames and Passwords and even submit links all within the site… ONE TIP, THOUGH: REMEMBER THE PASSWORD IT GIVES YOU. I messed up and now I cannot figure out my password and they, for some ODD reason, do not have a Password Retrieval system in place. Why? I have no clue but it’s very annoying… and you won’t be able to contact them either. That’s why I use Web2Submitter (free with a membership to Social Power Linking) to keep track of the most important sites. I also tend to keep track of each username and password by placing them into a file I keep offline. Why I didn’t do this for OnlyWire? I do not know… !

I just mentioned Social Power Linking - and I want to tell you that the BuzzGroup is also a very useful system they have to help you create a Buzz with your link submissions. Some may say it’s cheating - I say it’s the same thing everyone else is doing!

Social Media Marketing is the “new wave” of getting traffic to your site and it can be one of the cheapest ways of getting a Flood of traffic very quickly, if used correctly.

So how do you get started with Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

First off - make sure the title of the page, as well as the description, is enticing to the potential reader. Something catchy that will grab their immediate attention and make them want to click the link. This is called “Link bait” and it has worked for many, MANY website owners, Bloggers and even Affiliates.

Second off - make sure your content is worthwhile. This is one of the biggest problems with so many sites, landing pages and even Blogs that I see on a daily basis. If you’re not giving the readers what they want - you’re going to have a major bounce rate problem (the user leaves from the original page viewed). Take, for example, sites such as Shoemoney.com … Jeremy gives his readers a TON of information and keeps them coming back. Once the reader has seen his site once, they’re more than likely to come back again…

Third — DO NOT SPAM your own links. Make sure you play by the rules and be realistic. For example, if you use StumbleUpon - make sure you stumble other sites that you believe are useful and/or valuable.

Try to give feedback to other Digg users and users of other sites. They will appreciate people who have taken their time to visit their sites and will usually return the favor, if you’ve followed the above.

Make SMM a daily habit. Take time out of your day, each and every day, to make sure you’re getting your site out there and you’re getting some traffic coming in.

Next — start signing up for Social Media Sites!

I found the following list from Prelovac.com, this is a very thorough list and thanks to Prelovac.com - it will save you a ton of time!

As you can see, the list is huge and it will take quite some time to sign up for each and every one… so try to sign up for the most important (in your opinion) sites that will help you gain some more Traffic in the near future.

Social Media Marketing is just another way to increase traffic to your website(s). In the next post, we’ll be discussing Pay Per Click Advertising and going over the basics - then we’ll dig deeper into more Advanced stuff.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Hopefully it will be useful to a few of you!