Basically, social media marketing refers to the process of marketing through such social media sites as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. By using the web’s social aspect, you can interact and connect on a much more dynamic and personalized level than when utilizing traditional marketing.

You can have a social media marketing strategy simply by creating a Twitter account, setting up a company blog, or attaching “Tweet This” or “Digg This” tags to the end of each article. You can also have a full marketing campaign that encompasses Twitter, blogs, viral videos through YouTube, and social networking.

Social news

Tagging articles and blog entries for voting and easy submission on social news sites such as Digg is the simplest form of social media marketing. If you have ever encountered a Share This widget or a Digg vote counter or at the end of an article, then you have seen this kind of social media marketing in action.

Social networking

In this time when everything is becoming virtual, it has become important for us to have accounts on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. These social networks and other specialized ones might be the right place for you to advertise your products or services. For example, if you are a musician, you might want to create a profile on MySpace as well as Last.FM. You can also promote movies through Facebook and Flixster.

Blogs

Blogs, in many respects, can be an extension of traditional media like newspapers and magazines. Much as a review articles might be sent to a traditional media outlet, it can also be sent to blogs about the subject.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most ideal venues for social media marketing. While it has grown beyond its microblogging beginnings, you can think of Twitter like a company blog. The primary purpose of using Twitter is to get the word out, with a personal touch. In addition, using Twitter lets you interact with fans and customers more effectively.

YouTube

Many effective social media marketing center on YouTube. While making viral videos are often expensive and time-consuming, YouTube can become the centerpiece of a large-scale social media campaign. Considering its social nature, it can be a nice way to connect and interact with your customers and involve them in the marketing and the product or service.

SEO or PPC for search engine marketing? What are the strengths as well as weaknesses of both methods? Basically, SEO is accomplished by optimizing webpages and by increasing Link Popularity by paying for or acquiring links that point to your site. In turn, this gives your site improved search engine rankings for your chosen key terms.

On the other hand PPC or pay-per-click search engine advertising is accomplished when you purchase clicks from a search engine. This method allows you to get top search engine placement quickly by “bidding” or paying for key terms related to the product or service you are offering.

Search engine optimization

Natural SEO usually will give you higher return on investment compared to PPC. This is because searchers click natural search engine results more than the PPC ads, so you will get more traffic for less.

SEO is better than PPC in terms of return on investment because paying for or acquiring links that point to your site gives you lasting results; it gives your site top rankings from the search engines. In addition, these links significantly boost long-term traffic.

However, one of the major weaknesses of natural SEO is the time you need to come up with links and “tweak” your keywords and web pages to obtain the valuable high rankings you desire. It can take you about three months to finally reap the benefits of your SEO campaign.

The myth is that natural SEO is easy and inexpensive. If you want your site to have a high ranking for the key phrase “debt consolidation” or “life insurance”, then you will need to have a minimum budget of $50,000 to $100,000 every year.

PPC search engine advertising

One of the major benefits of the PPC search engine advertising is that it gives you an immediate boost of visitors, lead and sales. A PPC advertising campaign is your best bet if you want really fast results and a nice return on investment. It can give fast result within hours or days.

Additionally, PPC also lets you track your conversion rates (leads, opt-ins, and sales) and test your website quickly. In addition, this method also allows you to easily turn keywords (visitors) on and off.

As a short-term strategy PPC gives you clear advantage over the SEO method. But the disadvantage lies on the cost. Depending on the demand for your clicks and keywords, your PPC campaign can create tons of traffic and can sometimes cost thousands of dollars daily. Using various SEO strategies can lower costs. Over the long term, SEO will be more beneficial than PPC.

What should you do if you are promoting a website for a specific location such as Spain or France? If customers are searching for something located in Spain or France, host the site in this location. Many experts say that it really helps to host the site in the country of your target market. This is because your website will be exposed enough for Google and other major search engines to notice it. In addition, hosting the site in the country of the target market is also very logical.

However, I believe that it shouldn’t be that way.  Many of us host sites in the US for instance and are located in Europe. Nevertheless, it has proven useful to me in the past to host my sites in the country of my main market.

Of course, the domain name is also important if you have a .es(spain), .fr(france), .de(germany). Etc. This is also another factor that you must take into account. You could also host part of your website in different servers:

http://www.yourcompant.com/es
http://www.yourcompant.com/de
http://www.yourcompant.com/fr

and so on…