"Can someone explain what social marketing is and how it works?"

I see this question popping up a lot with newbies lately. They are just starting their new way with internet marketing and they are confused. They need to learn a lot of new staff and master it if they want their new business to succeed.

Social Marketing is a free tool that everyone can use to promote themselves or their new business. Social marketing is using the social media sites and social bookmarking to help you market your internet home business


Step 1 -
Join a Social Media Site. It doesn't really matter which site you join, you need to learn how to walk before you run. There are many site for example: StumbleUpon, Mixx and Digg.

Join one, and create your profile, your name, your bio, you links, if you have a website or a blog, some site have contact information like massanger, ICQ and Yahoo, then add a photo, if you use social media to market your business, a picture of yourself is the best, since you are promoting yourself.

Step 2 -
Installing tool bars and buttons.
Some of the social media site use a toolbar, some use buttons and some use both.
You will find the tool bar and buttons in the tool section of every site.

Installing a tool bar will place it on your browser, as for the button, all you have to do is drag it to you favorites (links) tool bar and drop it.

Both the tool bar and the buttons allows you to bookmark the link without leaving the website.

Now you can start working.

Step 3 -
Bookmarking. Each time you are on a site that you like (or dislike) you can bookmark it, you can use the tool on your own site too, on blogs, other friends in your community, pictures you like and videos - any link you wish to bookmark you can do it, just click on the button you created on your browser and a new page will open.

On this new page you will see the link you submitted, then you need to insert the title for this link (picture, article, website, etc e.g What Social Marketing Is And How It Works?), the description of this link (This is a post about social marketing) and Tags (keywords for the link e.g social, marketing).

You can also leave a comment on this link (I like this article, it is very informative, I learned a lot from it).

Now you are ready for your next step.

Step 4 -
Socialize. Meet friends, find friend with the same interests as yours and ad them to your list.
Browse your friends' bookmarks and vote for them too, thumb up (or vote up) if you like it and thumb down (or vote down) if you don't.

If you have friend that promoting a product or a website, you can help them by voting to their link and adding a comment.

If you wish to promote a product or your own website and business, just one thumb up is not enough, ask your friends to help you and send them an invitation to vote for your links.

This is not a one way street, you will have to return the favor, if you want your friends voting for you, you will have to vote for them.

Step 5 -
Repeat. Now that you know how social marketing works you need to do it again in more then one site.

There are sites like OnlyWire, that will help you with your bookmarks and submit to 22 sites with one click to save you time.

Last thing - Be careful it is very addictive.

Labels: internet marketing, social bookmarking, social marketing