Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies #4 – Utilizing Social Media, Pt.1

In my last article, Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies #3, I concentrated on linking strategies – blogroll, internal, and comment linking.  In today’s article, I’ll be giving you the deep dark secrets of social media and how you can utilize it to drive tremendous traffic to your website and increase your brand awareness.

Undoubtedly you have been inundated with articles, emails, and other communications regarding this ‘thing’ called “Social Media” and how it will revolutionize your business.  I bet you’ve wondered if all of this could be true.  Well, social media will be both a boon to your business and the bane of your existence!

Just a year or two ago, people were promoting Search Engine Optimization as the magic pill that would drive traffic to your website by instantly getting you high page rank on SERPs** for the major search engines.  Social Media is now being touted as a similar magic pill.  In a way, it IS, its just a rather large pill that’s often hard to swallow!

Let’s start at the beginning … What IS social media?  A few years ago, BYT* a site became very popular, MySpace, and it grew massive.  With this site you could create your own web page, post music, blog, post pictures, and add video.  Along the way you “friended” other MySpacers’ pages, they friended you until you were “friends” to 3 or 4,000 people.  At the time, this was touted as Web 2.0 – the ability for visitors to a website it INTERACT with that website (and its owner) by leaving comments.

In truth, MySpace was the beginning of social media.  Why?  Because as technology sped forward the level of interactivity increased from simple public email posting (leaving comments on a “wall”) to responding with audio, video and more while shortening the time between the sending and the posting.  Thus, Facebook leapt forward and Twitter was born.  And a site called YouTube spun “social media” into a whirlwind of activity.

Websites, themselves, became much less a passive method of communication to an interactive / reactive method of communication.  And you can thank Amazon.com for this.  You see, nearly a decade ago (WOW!) Amazon started to seek out ways to increase sales and began development of a system to analyze your purchases and make recommendations for other items you may be interested in.  Then Amazon gave its visitors the ability to leave reviews of products on their site.  combining the two technologies has given Amazon.com the most advanced ability to INTERACT with its customers and vice versa.

This brief history is just the long-winded way of telling you that social media is about “being social” about interacting with websites and creating not just PASSIVE CONTENT but ACTIVE CONTENT.

Come back next week for Part 2 of Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies #4 – Utilizing Social Media where’ll we’ll start revealing the process for social media success.

* BYT = Before YouTube

** SERPs = Search Engine Results Pages