We see SEO and SEM firms, social media marketing firms, firms that specialize in link building, firms that specialize in article syndication, and many other subsets of Internet marketing. To business customers who don’t know a lot about marketing on the Internet, this can lead to confusion and a real difficulty finding the right service provider.

To make matters even more complicating, every SEO firm has a different approach. This was bound to happen. There is so much new technology on the Web that naturally some firms are going to emphasize certain strategies over others. I use the SEO and social media marketing strategies that I’ve developed over the years and found most effective.

Some of these strategies include:

1. Creating profiles on the 10 major social media sites
2. Regularly using four or five social bookmarking sites
3. Investigating niche social media sites
4. Cultivating community on social media sites

To keep up with the new technologies, a social media expert is constantly trying out new tools, exploring new platforms, and also utilizing older networks they’ve learned how to mine for traffic. We are looking for what works the best in terms of viral marketing and exposure for a site.

Social media marketing is organic; it evolves over time. To give you an example, I have been submitting posts to StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, for about two years. Only recently, however, have I begun to reap the benefits of my submissions. Now, when I submit a post to StumbleUpon, I am almost guaranteed to get traffic—and lots of it. For a couple days last week, I was receiving over 1,500 unique visitors to my site per day.

So how did I do it? Patience and dedication. You learn the best places to submit links for your specific content. You learn how to make viral content. You learn how to properly “tag” your submissions with labels that people can easily find. You also learn the importance of community cultivation. This means communicating with people on social media sites about their projects as well as yours, and sharing similar interests with them.

“Sharing” is the keyword in social media. Collectively, we act as filters. We direct people to the best content; the content that will interest them. We help each other find things.

Identify the niches on the Internet where your business topics are discussed. You can find these niches by running a keyword search on any social media site. Create a profile or many profiles, and start to engage people in your area of interest. Join groups, add comments, and write reviews of other people’s links and blog posts.

Your social media campaign will not happen over night. That is the truth. The good news is that once social media begins to work for you and your business, traffic will exceed your expectations. These services have been created to produce viral effects. Your submissions are at the whims of large numbers of people. You need to assimilate yourself into the social media environment before you can direct traffic to your sites, and promote your own content.

Learn how to create a social media Squidoo lens for your business