What exactly do you think of when you hear the words social media, social networking or social bookmarking? If you're like many people you may cringe with fear at the sheer thought of having to learn all of this new stuff.
Learning how to market socially does not take a lot of time or effort to learn.
But like any other major skill, it may take some effort to perfect it.
No one is perfect at everything, including social media marketing.
Some of us are simply better at it than others and have practiced more.
This means that there is both room for you to get started and room to continue growing when it comes to social campaigns.
You have to get started somewhere.
The first place to do this is to open an account with your favorite social networking sites.
There are a dozen or so sites out there, but I think Squidoo or HubPages is a great place for beginners.
These two sites are pretty self explanatory and you can have a page up in a matter of 30 minutes or so.
Next on the social media list is a social bookmarking site.
Some of the more common are Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon.
These sites will allows you to add favorites, or bookmarks to your account.
These bookmarks, while usable for yourself, are also viewable by others.
Once you have your social network page online and published, simply bookmark it in your bookmarking account.
This is the basic principle behind all social media.
There are more advanced issues involved as you start getting more content and more bookmarks going, but this is the beginner model at its simplest.
Now all you have to do is repeat the process over and over again.
Bookmark pages you like, sites you like, toss in a couple of your own sites, and continue to create new content.
After a few days or a week of doing this, you will notice that you have likely started to get some traffic.
Make sure you edit or adjust your content based on reader input and feedback.
Now you're on your way to being social media marketer.