1. Overall Goals - Are you looking to increase SEO, brand recognition, targeted traffic, conversions, etc.?
2. Finding Followers - Where can you go online to find the majority of your targeted demographic?
3. Available Manpower - Are you a one man (or woman) show? Or do you have people you can outsource to? Maybe you work for a company who has staff on hand to assist?

In a perfect world, you would clone yourself since you know exactly what you would like to happen within your social media campaign. However, we are far from a perfect world, so in reality, we are limited by time and resources.Depending on your resources, you may need to determine which methods to focus on first then build into your overall marketing plan.

Seek out Targeted Networks
You are ultimately after targeted traffic. There is no point in joining networks that have no interest in your niche or business. This traffic will more than likely never convert into a lead or even a sale. In other words you will be wasting your time.

You will need to research various sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. to determine which site(s) have the audience more suited for your business or service. Choosing targeted networks to be a part of will increase your relevancy and provide you with a funnel of highly targeted traffic interested in what you have to offer.

Guest Blogging
Is one way to get started in the social media world, it might not be a bad idea to approach more established social media sites in regards to guest blogging for them. Guest blogging is basically offering to write a blog post that gets posted on their site. In return you usually get to post a small plug or snippet about you or your site at the end of the blog post. If you look closely at my blogs I have a few guest bloggers.

Guest blogging accomplishes a few things.

1. It establishes credibility for yourself on a large scale/established site
2. You get a nice link back to your site.

Utilizing the various social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, delicious and Newsvine; you can not only create backlinks, but create a buzz about your site if you have linkworthy content. If your submission is linkworthy, chances it may be picked up by other bloggers and drive even more traffic to your site. Unfortunately, most social bookmarking traffic is not the highest converting depending on your approach, angle, and product or service offered.

Create & Execute a Plan

While there are certainly more available options than what I listed above, it is up to you to decide what methods are best suited for your business or service. After looking over potential social media options, I suggest creating a plan or map of potential sites and audiences to target.

Review your plan once it is completed and revise it if necessary. Be sure to eliminate any site(s) that do not suit your targeted audience. This will allow you to focus more effort towards sites containing people with interests related to your product or service which will increase the chance of a lead. With your plan in place, it is time to execute it. Do your best to monitor traffic using Google Analytics or Veretracking. If you see a particular social media site driving more targeted traffic to your site, look at increasing your activity on this social media site while scaling back on social media sites not performing as well.

These basic social media marketing strategies should give you a great foundation to build your social media campaign on. Remember to track your progress and focus on targeting networks relevant to your niche, removing or reducing efforts on lower performing social media sites.

Cindy McAsey
888.272.6701
Barefoot in the Garden

KEYWORDS: Marketing Strategies, Social Media, Cindy McAsey