Over 75% of consumers use social media in some form, so if you're not using it you may be missing out on a big opportunity. Getting involved doesn't have to be complicated. Here are three things you can do to get in the game.

Blogs are easy to create and easy to maintain - with tools like wordpress or blogspot, you don't even need to consult a webmaster. The key is to create high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience. Keep it consistent and keep it real. Other than that, just have fun with it! Some suggestions for blog posts include:

Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world (along with Google). To get started, simply create a Facebook page where you can post updates, link to your blog articles, and receive feedback from your customers. As you post relevant content and interact with customers on your Facebook page, your fan base and your revenue will grow.

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a video must be worth 1,000 pictures (and 1,000,000 words)! Plus videos get priority in search engine results and allow you to show a little personality. Start with a company overview or a product demonstration and build your video library from there.

Are you aware of the importance of viral success? If the term doesn’t mean anything to you, you’d better get on top of learning about your marketing or you’re never going to make it in the world of dog-eat-dog Internet business. Viral marketing is a term that refers to the way that a marketing campaign is picked up and spread around the world, or at least around the Internet, creating success for a business. Like a virus, word about the business spreads. Viral success is a critical component of business success in today’s world, so you should know the strategies for it if you’re hoping to succeed.

· Laughter

· Love

· Hate

· Anger

· Excitement

· Compassion

· Deep Interest

· Feeling That Someone is an Idiot (not an emotion but this works)

Stop trying to please everyone with safe content and try get people excited, agitated, or laughing. Get people’s blood pumping and get those Diggs.

Social bookmarking. Of course! What better way to spread the word about your work than through sites that are specifically designed for users to spread the word about what they like. Make the most of social bookmarking by getting your content on the best, most appropriate, sites on a regular basis through a targeted social bookmarking campaign. If enough people pick up on your content through these tools, you can see viral success just from this alone.

The idea is very simple. Take advantage of the popularity of a celebrity, fad, newsworthy story, or other highly searched keyword. For example, writing an article about Britney Spears has a higher chance of viral success than an article about dog farts. The below tools will help you find out what the most popular searches are for that day, week, month, and year.

· What is popular today from Google Content - http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness

· Google Trends - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

· Ask.com Top Searches - http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

· Lycos 50 -http://50.lycos.com/

Many webmasters make the mistake of not trying to take advantage of past successful content launches. If you created an article that was hugely successful then you should try making sequels of that article. You can post a Part II, Part III, etc. with useful tips, tools, or further in depth coverage of the same topic. Some ideas for additional things to add to a topic are:

· Online related resources

· Useful tools

· Real world examples

· Video follow-ups

· Discussions about the comments you received regarding that topic

· Extras or goodies

· Post about other articles on the net with opposite views from you and argue the topic

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has your view

· Interview someone with experience on the topic who has an opposing view and argue your case

If your target market is male, half naked women will really get you far. Sex is known to sell everything from beer, cigarettes, guns, cars, and everything in between. Although sex has nothing to do with any of these things, it peaks the male viewer’s attention enough to listen to or click through to whatever you are promoting. I don’t use this tactic, but I know that it works.

Offer people something valuable for free to get people to come to your site. For example, there are plenty of people who are hungry for useful information on specific topics such as “How to Drive Traffic to Your Site” or “How to Start an eBay Business”. When people are desperate for information, it is easy to get them to download a free ebook. If one person reads your ebook and it is helpful to them, they will tell everyone about it. You will soon have a huge number of people coming to your site to download your free ebook. Of course there will also be people who send other people to your ebook. How will those people know about your web site? They will know your url because your will plaster your url all over that ebook so that people who get your ebook from someone else will visit your site. Essentially, it is one huge advertisement for your site…unless your ebook is a piece of junk. Make sure to write valuable content that actually is helpful to readers, or nobody will send it to anyone else or add a link to your site.

Video is one of the hottest things on the web today so you should be incorporating it into your site. If you create a video that evokes strong emotions, people will share it and share it faaaaaaaaaaaaaast. That’s the essence of viral success. You will know quickly if your video clip is a success. Make sure that you have plenty of CPU and bandwidth available on your server…or it will crash and crash hard.

What sites should you submit your videos to?

Don’t have content for content’s sake. There’s been a big push recently to get as much content as possible on websites so that search engines see keywords in that content. But as users get savvier about the web, they are getting increasingly interested in the quality of content. It’s easy for them to just click away if your content isn’t good, so make sure that you’re not sacrificing the content just to get the right tags and quantity of content on the site. No one is going to spread the word about content that is bad.

People these days love to text one another so give them something short and easy to remember to text to others. Brand yourself with a great phrase that reminds people of who you are and what you do; your own slogan if you will. Make it text-worthy and brief and you’ll see your name cropping up in conversation.

According to a study done by MarketingSherpa, the top viral marketing strategy used by B2C companies in the US last year was email forwarding. I find this hard to believe, but I will explain to you what the process of viral email forwarding is:

You have received email forwarding campaigns before. I get them from my Mom, my Dad, My husband’s Grandmother and his Mother, as well as many of my friends. These are emails that have been forwarded from one person to another to another to another and so forth. Usually the ones from my family are emails that say things like “Don’t honk your car horn because there is a murderer out there who will shoot you if you honk your horn”. Do you get those too? I consider forwarded email junk and throw these emails away, that is why I am not the best person to explain email forwarding to you since I hate these campaigns. The great thing about email forwarding campaigns is that they can continue to accelerate as new groups of people are exposed to the campaign.

Every email that you send out should contain a signature. A signature is at the end of your emails and should look something like this:

You probably won’t get a ton of traffic from this but you never know when someone will see your signature and give you the big break that you have been hoping for. Every little bit helps.

Message boards and chat rooms attract individuals in need of advice. Take advantage of this. Just make sure not to blatantly market your services. This might infuriate people and you could get flamed or kicked out among other things. The way to network in this situation is to be as helpful and knowledgeable as you possibly can. If you are in a graphic design message board and someone is baffled about how to use layers in Photoshop, you could explain the process. You could maybe mention that you use Photoshop daily when running your design business. THEN at the bottom of the page use a signature.

There are Question and Answer sites all over the Internet. By offering answers on these questions, your name (and url) will get around quickly. Some Question / Answer sites are:

Placing a ‘Send Article to Friends’ button on your articles is always a good idea. Webmasters don’t use these types of buttons as often as they used to because of social bookmarking sites. However, if you have room on your article pages, I suggest that you place both social bookmarking and ‘send article to friend’ buttons. On the front page of your site you should place an ‘Invite Friends’ button. If you have room to place it elsewhere, I suggest that you do that too.

You want original content on your site so that you don’t get busted by Google for duplicate content. However, you still want to get your site’s url out on the net. My suggestion to you is to write great content for your own site and never send these articles out to article banks. My suggestion is to keep those great articles on your own site and write mini-articles to send out to article banks. At the bottom of the article, you can write the url to the full article. If this isn’t allowed, then you should write the full url in your signature. Make sure to utilize the signature with information about your site and list your urls. Think of viral marketing as putting your name on the lips of the people that you want to talk about you. Basically, give them something worth talking about – in the form of good content – and give them a way to do it – through a social bookmarking site – and you’ll see viral success.

Facebook is known as a social networking tool for young people. Even more so than MySpace (which has gained recognition in the business world because of its MySpace music channels and other marketing opportunities), Facebook is considered the playground for people who are looking to trade conversation and keep up with friends. As such, Facebook often gets overlooked by people in the business world who find it to be a waste of their time to gossip with their acquaintances about the latest going on in the world. But despite its use by youngsters as a place for gossip, Facebook can be a great tool for driving traffic to your own site and possible generating additional revenue for yourself.

American Chronicle published an article which looks at eight reasons that businesses should consider using Facebook. There are some good points made here including that Facebook users are active users who are on the site every day, meaning that they’re looking for new information and that new information might as well be content on your site that they can drive traffic towards. Another good point is that the nature of Facebook lends itself well to traffic-driving – it’s a naturally viral hotbed where people are sharing information about their likes and dislikes which means that if they like your content, they’ll let other Facebook users know.

And a point not made in the article but which bears some attention is the fact that Facebook is indeed used by a large number of young people. This is important because it is young people who make up a large percentage of consumers interested in purchasing products and services through the web. Those who have part-time jobs or access to parents’ money spend it on the hottest new things. And if you can reach these people and convince them that what you have is that hottest new thing, they’re going to rush traffic to your site to check it out. Now, of course no one is suggesting that you head to Facebook to con kids into buying your stuff. But all good marketing plans look at their target market and if yours can include youngsters, why not spread the word through a social networking site through Facebook?

Another important thing to know about Facebook is that it offers the ability to import your RSS feed to the site. You should always import your RSS feed to your social networking sites because this increases the number of people who are going to subscribe to it. And of course people who are subscribing to your feed are learning about your new content as its available on the site, driving traffic there not just once but every time that you add fresh content. The point should be made that you can’t make good use of Facebook for traffic if you aren’t regularly updating your site content and making sure that it’s of good quality. But if you’re creating stuff that people are going to want to read, Facebook is one of the many ways that you can let people know that it’s available to them.

If you don’t yet know what social bookmarking is, you’re missing out on a powerful tool for networking with others online. Think this doesn’t apply to you? Social bookmarking is more than just a way to make some Internet friends and pass some time. It’s the way that websites are getting noticed today which means that it’s the way that your online business or blog makes money. No matter how big or small your website is, social bookmarking can increase the traffic to that site and get people interested in whatever it is that you’re doing. And if you don’t know how to do it, you’re going to get left behind because in the world of Web 2.0, social bookmarking is the common language that everyone is speaking.

But let’s get down to the basics. Social bookmarking takes place inside of particular websites. You join them as a user under whatever name you’d like and you can create a profile there. It sounds a little bit like MySpace or Facebook which is why many people think that they’re just a fun social tool. But true social bookmarking sites are different because they let each user archive information about their favorite web pages. You can create lists of information about where to find your favorite books, read your favorite blogs, or find your favorite locations on a city map.

Other users on the site can access this information, searching it through various methods including topics and tags which you create. So, you might create a whole series of information that you tag with “music” and then users of the social bookmarking site can sort your information by that tag and find all of what you’ve posted under it. This might still sound like a thing for high school kids to do when they’re bored, but it’s actually a powerful tool for directing traffic to certain sites.

What happens is that certain users on any social bookmarking site gain a lot of credibility on the site. This is usually because they post frequently, update their bookmarks regularly and provide people with content that is of interest. People on the site start paying attention to the suggestions made by this powerful user. And they lead their friends and other contacts to what this user is doing, increasing the power of that person’s suggestion. Because of this, you can use social bookmarking skills to gain credibility on the site and then direct people to the things that you want them to site – like your website or blog.

When it comes down to it, social bookmarking is the voice of the masses. This is one of the key characteristics of the Web 2.0 world in which users are generating and directing the content on Internet sites. Anyone with a profile on a social bookmarking site can have some input into what sites people are visiting on the World Wide Web. At a very basic level, social bookmarking can direct you to some interesting and useful information. But at a more complex level, it can be a tool that you use on a regular basis to improve your business and influence the people who use that site.