The video below discusses the basics of a social marketing strategy. These are careful, pre-conceived considerations to take into account before designing your campaign plan.

Anyone who indulges in marketing should have a plan to follow first. Use a social media marketing strategy to determine and track your actions and updates.

Introducing new products require different actions than creating a social marketing strategy to widen your customer base.

Who do you want to reach?

Your target audience will dictate which social marketing websites you will use to create a social media strategy as well as the best content to interest them in your offers, products or services.

Which Mode of Content Will You Use?

Audio, video, photos, links, articles (i.e. content or testimonials) are a few different ways to add an engaging message to solicit interest and engagement as a result of Web 2.0 marketing.

Which Social Sites Will You Use?

Whether you’re marketing through Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Squidoo, or any other Web 2.0 property, plan your content to match the style of site you’ll be using. Do this is the same way you would plan any advertising and marketing campaigns. Be sure to document your process so that you can revisit those sites and content regulary – to either respond to potential customers, to check the effectiveness of the campaign, or to update the content.

Watch the video:

Then, download and read this brief overview (Social Media Traffic -pdf) of gaining traffic from a few top Social Media websites.

New technologies such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds have been just a few of the technologies helping to shape and direct Web 2.0 and the communities of users.

The main difference between the old internet and Web 2.0 is that the old net had been driven and controlled by site owners and corporations. Web 2.0, on the othe hand, is largely driven by, created, and contributed to, by the millions of users of the internet.

This is the difference that makes today’s internet more user friendly, profitable, and accessible for everyone – not just the geeks or the corporations with a budget. It has been a power shift.

Once websites were built and controlled by only a few and were certainly not ‘interactive’. Today anybody with an idea, a few dollars, determination and a little know-how can build a Web 2.0 site that is completely interactive – proceeding then to turn it into a money-making enterprise, if that is the objective.

The technology exists. It is easy to use. It is accessible and relatively cheap.

Adapt or Die A Slow Death

Many websites – that began as static websites – are now adding interactive features, blogs, and forums; ensuring their past success endures into the future of Internet commerce. You could say they are designing their own social markeing strategy as they go.

On the other hand, websites who have done nothing to change with the times and users’ expectations, are falling further and further behind – in the search engines, in people’s minds, in effectiveness of the creator’s purpose, and in usage.

We have now entered an era where people expect to ask questions and get answers from corporate websites, community websites, and privately owned websites on just about every topic. Users expect websites to be interactive and informative. Yes, the Internet has always been a platform for information but Web 2.0 is a platform for participation in that information.

Let’s look at just a few of Web 2.0’s innovations and how they have changed the way we use the internet today:

Blogs – Content and Interaction

The term ‘blog’ is derived from the blending of two words ‘web’ and ‘log’.

Early in the history of the Web anyone could build personal web pages, but not many did as the technology was cumbersome. Those personal webpages were static pages.

Then along came technological advances in blogging software. Those with personal websites could not only post about themselves, their interests, add their photos and videos, but they could also allow visitors to comment or ask questions about the content. It was a huge advancement and took off across the web like a wild fire.

Due to those technological advances – website creation accessible to a wider range of people – blogging is today very big business.

People visit and post to blogs all over the Internet about any and every subject that they are interested in. Owners of those blogs – with a wide reach and large audience – have figured out that they can make their blogs profitable – and have learned to make a living at it.

Social Bookmarking – Sharing The Best of the Web With All

Social bookmarking was originally a by-product of blogging, based on a similar technology, but has taken off into an industry in it’s own right.

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg and many others, allow their users to upload or save their personal favorite website URLs so that everybody else in the world can see, use and visit those saved sites.

When a user has created an online bookmark, a backlink is created to that site. When enough people click on or save the link themselves, that site gains in rank by the popular search engines.

It is a form of user driven advertisement that, when done correctly, can be more successful than most paid advertising could ever be.

WIKI – Sharing The Knowledge of All and With All

A ‘Wiki’ is a piece of server installed software that allows visitors to freely create and edit web page content via their own browsers. Wikis support hyperlinks and have a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages easily.

The best example of Wiki technology in use is Wikipedia. Remembering that in the old web days, only the owner of a website had control over the content. Wikis were another way of interactive Web 2.0.

RSS Feed: Sharing Content through Site Syndication

The acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is yet another Web 2.0 feature that allows the web to be driven by people. Blogs, in the back end, are driven by and create RSS feeds.

Website visitors can subscribe to, read, or use these RSS feeds in a variety of ways. They may use a client based reader (aka aggregator) or service to access the feeds for new content, or a web-based reader or service to view the content on any computer or mobile device connected to the internet.

An RSS feed from one website can also be aggregated into other websites. An example of this may be a news related website that aggregates content from a variety of other sites, or a personal blog that aggregates offers from eBay (to gain affiliate commissions per sale)

Podcasts and Webcasts: Sharing Knowledge by Audio and/or Video

As high speed connections become more widespread, podcasts and webcasts are gaining in popularity.

You can find and tune into podcasts or webcasts on almost any subject imaginable today. Plus pod and webcasts are easily integrted into blogs for more widespread usage. Many are making use of this technology to sell products and to promote their own websites.

While people do still read to grow and learn, a large percentage of us are better at retaining that knowledge through visual and audio training. Hence the popularity of this type of knowledge share.

Today’s Web 2.0 (2009)

Back in 2001, there was a happening referred to as the dot com bust. People who had a great deal of technical know-how built websites, promoted them and made millions.

The internet was a one-way street. Those with the technical know-how to build websites posted what they wanted their readers to know and offered what they wanted to sell and nothing more. The Internet was relatively new and people bought into this one-way communication, not knowing there was a better way.

Fortunes were made and just as quickly lost. There are those who blame the dot com bust on nothing more than a technological break through, but it was really a societal uprising and coming of age.

As the advances in technology made building websites easier, more and more people built websites and learned how to monetize them. They sent out millions and millions of unsolicited marketing emails (spam) daily – and unfortunately for us, found it profitable.

SPAM got so bad that the Congress of the United States actually passed the CAN SPAM act in late 2001 and it became law in early 2002. Less than ethical parties still manage to find a way to skirt the law anyway. And since so many recipients click and buy from that spam, the unethical marketers are still making millions from sending off this garbage.

The Can-SPAM act states that marketers are required to get permission from a recipient before they can send out mass emails. Many companies couldn’t survive the extra restriction. Those who could, and those running reputable businesses and offers, began building opt-in lists. Opt-in lists are a big part (maybe the biggest part) of all successful Internet marketing operations that are alive and well today.

Website Promotion in A Web 2.0 World

Let’s begin with a blog and add an opt-in list. The blog attracts the visitor, the opt-in list ensures the visitor returns to view new content and offers. You can, of course, have a blog without an opt-in list, but it is of far greater advantage to have both.

Successful blogs are dedicated to specific topics. These topics are as varied as the people who own and keep them.

As an example, consider a travel blog which posts the details of trips a writer has taken, invites questions by those planning or have made a similar trip, and provide information about products and services for which they earn an affiliate commission.

That travel blog isn’t going to make much money without website traffic though, so the owner employs the promotion of and syndication features of the RSS feeds running in the back end of the blog. They also might employ the just of social bookmarking sites to gain rank, readers, and popularity in the search engines.

The moral to this example is that many of those who have created very successful and profitable blogs make use of such Web 2.0 advancements as RSS feeds, podcasts and webcasts, social marketing and more to enhance and promote their content and income generating offers.

Strategy for Creating A Blog for Income Purposes

Many choices and decisions must be made before starting a blog for income. The first and most obvious choice is the topic.

If you are already an active Internet marketer in a niche market then topic selection is easy. But if you are just beginning your foray into internet marketing, the choice can be a lot more difficult.

Research is a necessity. It is important to choose a market that is viable. Not all niche markets are worthy of your time, investment or attention. Click here for a free introductory course on niche marketing.

Once your topic has been selected the next step is decide on a domain name, register it and to build the blog. You can register a domain name for less than $12/year on a variety of registrars. I personally have been using godaddy.com for the past 10 years and have never had a problem, on hundreds of domains over the years.

As for your hosting service, you’ll want to choose wisely. There are many web hosting companies out there and many of them offer blog building capabilities, but many are less than reputable with customer service, updates, add on costs, and so on. Start at Instant Installer for today’s best website host for point and click blog creation.

Once your blog website is up and running, then it is important to get the search engine spiders to visit the site so that it can become indexed and appear in user searches. This is the place where social bookmarking and RSS feeds comes into play.

There is software out there that makes it very, very easy to list your site with many social bookmarking sites and RSS feed aggregators at once – quickly and easily. See the listing of recommended and selected tools for these types of time saving promotion tools.

You’ll also want to spend time visiting the many Web 2.0 posts on this website – SocialMarketingStrategy.com – to learn some more advanced Web 2.0 promotion tips for your blog or existing website.