At a recent Social Media-themed breakfast event for New Hampshire’s Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, one speaker (Leslie Poston, co-author of Twitter for Dummies) told the assembled audience there were 537 different social networking sites online. 537! And that doesn’t even count all the networks on Ning and other services like it, which allow you to build your own social network using their templates, or custom-made communities like “Greenopolis,” or “Equestrian Life.”

So when it comes to deciding which social media platforms make the most sense to use, the options can be overwhelming – if you let them. However, with a little focus, guidance, and strategic thinking, you can just as easily simplify your choices.

What follows draws from our 6-week “Social Media Kick Start” Virtual Boot Camp, which expands on these topics with self-paced learning modules.

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I often get asked the question, “How do I get more followers on Twitter?” Many of my clients want to pay a sum of money for the latest scheme to get them 10,000 new followers in 24 hours or some such nonsense as that. As in all marketing strategies, it’s not the number that counts. Rather, it’s the quality in the numbers that really matters. So, 10,000 followers who are not members of your target market are fairly useless to you. Of much greater value would be a smaller list of 1000 followers who are all members of your target market.

All in all, online social networking is not that vastly different from face-to-face networking. Some basic networking principles still apply, regardless of the platform:

To be interesting, you have to be interested (in others). Try to be a resource and give first before asking for anything.

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Social media optimization is a way for organizations and individuals to generate publicity through social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn, online communities like Facebook, and automated tools like TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. The term “social media optimization” was originally coined by SEO consultant extraordinaire, Rohit Bhargava, the senior vice president of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and author of the Influential Marketing Blog. (Bhargava’s work was so groundbreaking, Jeremiah Owyang, another social media optimization expert, even dovetailed a few of his own rules to the original work.)

Social media optimization is basically a way to promote your blog, website, or even your company’s brand, through social media, without being obnoxious or overtly commercial. Sure, you can blanket sites like Twitter with “Want to lose weight? Download my free report, ‘19 Ways to Lose Weight Fast’” repeatedly, or brag about your latest affiliate paycheck, but that’s not going to get you any followers. At least none worth talking to.

Bhargava terms these people”Twankers” (people who use Twitter for one-way broadcasts about their own greatness) and “Twidiots” (people who only tweet insignificant things like their latest press release or what they had for breakfast). If you’re just having one-way conversations and telling people about the minor, mundane details of your company, you’re not providing any value, and your SMO efforts will be wasted.

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With today’s website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they’re from, what kind of browser they’re using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won’t tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your ability to find the soft underbelly of their subconscious desire. After all, if someone is happy with what they’ve already got, they don’t need you, but if they were truly one hundred percent happy, they wouldn’t bother coming to your website. Therefore every visitor that comes to your site is a potential client whether they know it or not.

The Setup’s The Thing

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One of the excuses we hear most often from struggling online marketers is that they don’t make more sales because they don’t have a list. We even hear that excuse from marketers who have been online three, or even five years.

My question to them is always, “What are you waiting for?” “Why not start a massive list-building effort today?”

When I look at how I built my database, I used only a few primary methods. Here are the most effective ones that I used:

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One of the excuses we hear most often from struggling online marketers is that they don’t make more sales because they don’t have a list. We even hear that excuse from marketers who have been online three, or even five years.

My question to them is always, “What are you waiting for?” “Why not start a massive list-building effort today?”

When I look at how I built my database, I used only a few primary methods. Here are the most effective ones that I used:

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There is a common misconception that a website automatically catapults a business to global stardom. This could be true – with a lot of time and money spent on it – but in isolation, a website is next to useless. No doubt all you SEO experts out there will think I’m teaching grandma to suck eggs but there are literally thousands of people starting out who just don’t realise what it takes.

The truth is, a website on its own is akin to opening a new shop at the bottom of a dark, gated alleyway – with no signage or advertising. Passers-by will do exactly that, pass by, never knowing what wonderful products you are selling. Without the brightly lit signs, local press, opening launches, special offer flyers and other advertising, nobody will ever know your shop is there!

It’s the same with a website, unless people know it’s there, they will never visit it.

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You know how often I get asked about how effective social networking is for someone’s business, from my clients or when I’m out networking from random business owners?? Hundreds a month.

It’s amazing. It’s amazing how many of us are on the social sites but also how many are not!

I think if you’re an entrepreneur, no matter whether you do business locally or globally, you should be doing some amount of social networking as ONE source of lead generation in your business.

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Social networking using Twitter seems to be the most popular way to connect today, from celebrity Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to Oprah to reach one million friends first (Ashton won) to a U.S. State Department official contacting the co-founder of Twitter to delay upgrading the Twitter system so as not to interrupt election dialogue in Iran. More and more news agencies are using Twitter to keep their audience up-to-date, and local businesses are also jumping on the Twitter bandwagon as an immediate way to connect with their customers, as well.

How can you make the best use of Twitter in your business? It all starts with having followers in your target market. No doubt you’ve been inundated with email offers of things like “10,000 Twitter followers in 60 seconds for only $19.95!” Trust me — 1000 followers that are members of your target market are much more useful to the growth of your business via social networking than 10,000 followers that come from anywhere.

How do you find members of your target market on Twitter? Here are my top 7 strategies:

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Recently I was asked to imagine that I was starting all over again, and as a newbie, how I would fill my business in 60 days. Things have changed tremendously since I began my online business in 2005, mostly for the better. Most of the steps, however remain the same. Best of all, the strategies I recommend to fill your business are the same ones that can be applied to any business, and then applied again and again to other online ventures. Here are 8 secrets to filling the prospect funnel in your business in 60 days:

1. Success mind set.

Don’t gloss over this strategy — it may be the most important of all. If you truly want to succeed in your business and are passionate about what you do, nothing will hold you back. This often means that you have to step out in faith that you’ll succeed, and most importantly, believe in yourself as a success. Sure, you may stumble, or even fall, but you must be willing to pick yourself back up and persevere — even without a safety net hanging under you.

2. Target market.

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With the world wide web of social media and the constant reminder that this is not a fade but a reality, we are all faced with questions on how do I use these Social Media sites successfully and at what point to get others to help.

I was watching the News last night and they were talking about the Lakers big win and how unruly people went out of control and started destroying things in plain view for all the news cameras and security cameras to see. Then they followed up with asking people to go to their twitter account and comment on what they think about these events. As you can see this type of social media is very popular and being used now in ways we never thought possible. When the television starts telling you to use twitter you know we are on to something big here.

I am not going to give any real meat here on social networking but wanted to touch on one aspect here which involves the URL which is most commonly used for the micro blogging sites like “spnbabble” and “twitter“. When postings to sites like this since the character limit is 140 then the need to shorten URLs comes into play as some URLs are so long that it can take up the majority of your message. So sites like MyOpenID start appearing all over the web allowing us to use our own tiny URL to help manage this shortening of URLs.

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One type of Internet marketing that you must be taking advantage of is social media. The truth is your Internet business will not survive unless you are involved in various forms of social media. The only exception to that would be is if you do paid advertising such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Marketing.

Perhaps you do not understand the various ways you can utilize these many types of social media to brand yourself and expand your business. Here are 7 types of Internet social media you should be doing everyday.

1. Blogging

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