What is Social Media Marketing?

Social News Websites:
The benefits of a social media website vary, but a proven method is creating viral content and promoting it through social media channels. Link Baits, otherwise known as content created for the purpose of getting people to link to it, are a great start. Successful link baits are not hard to accomplish - you just have to know how to do it. Creating high quality content and then getting it listed on social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to a number of benefits for any website.
There are two methods to this madness:

• Primary and Secondary Traffic: Primary traffic is the number of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is the referral traffic that come from websites that link to your content and ultimately send you visitors back to your website.
• High Quality Links: Social News websites, like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links - that have the possibility, with high quality editorial content, to bring you traffic and ultimately raise your ranking in search engines.

There is no secret to this. As SEO has taking a bashing over the past few years - many SEO firms and specialist battle back and forth on the importance of keywords, Meta tags, link purchasing -you name it, they have fought over it. In the end though, the secret isn't that hard to uncover, quality content, sewn together with valuable keywords and building inbound links, are the three components to placing your website in the top of search engine results.
When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, search engines begin to trust you. After gaining this trust, you continuously build upon it to either gain ranking or maintain it. And if you begin to optimize your website and begin link baiting - you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which in turn, bring you search engine visitors.
Continue this method of marketing and your website will undoubtedly increase its traffic. Many bloggers and Webmasters will see an article on Digg or del.icio.us and trust its usability and then reference through a citation link.
Even new websites that start with little traffic or trusted links - will find social link baiting to their advantage and can quickly establish a reputation and begin to build upon it. But just remember, it's the quality of the content that ultimately matters. Content is still king and always will be when it comes to online marketing. Optimizing it in a number of ways will quickly gain you the trust needed by search engines to rank highly, and ultimately deliver the traffic you need to your website.
The Naysayers Are Out There
They're out there. The Naysayers. The ones who adamantly agree that social media marketing is a waste of time and brings in useless traffic, leading to visitors quickly leaving after they clicked upon a website. Bounce rates are inevitable - even to your most loyal customers, they aren't always going to be interested. But don't mistake bounce rates for a lack of interest - if your entire website is relevant to the general interest of a social media website, there will always be a handful of users who will begin to track your website for future content.
Don't forget about the secondary traffic either, which I think is more important in the end. General websites or blogs with the same interest will link to your content because it helps add value for their users and readers alike. Most of the time, this is done naturally on a daily basis.
Primary traffic might come in larger volumes, but secondary traffic build links from other websites and ultimately delivers their traffic to your website. This help build your brand, establish your presence online, ultimately making it more valuable in the end.
Why you must consider Social Media Marketing?
You could ignore the power of social media marketing, who needs it? After all, you could stick with link exchanges, banner purchasing, editorial ads and search advertising. You certainly could, but why would you?
Social media marketing:

• Is natural. Not only do you get natural links back to your website, it is also is exposed to large groups of people in an unpredictable fashion.
• Successfully mastered social communities can be a great source of web traffic that helps boost your ranking and add to your already established search engine results.
• It's a low-cost/high return business model. If you do it yourself, costs are limited and the only time and expense you have involves hiring freelancers to do it. Ultimately, the benefits exceed the cost - it would take you thousands of dollars to purchase links, which some search engines penalize you for doing now, or are starting to. Social media gives you all of the above FREE!
• Social Media optimization and marketing normally won't interfere with any methods of getting traffic to your website. This new level of marketing will only add to your already established campaigns - and most of the time, exceed them.

So How Does This Make Me Money?
Directly? It won't - that is not how this method works. Your site needs to perpetuate itself and build upon its established exposure. The more supporters you have, the faster word spreads about your website. And social media websites deliver more traffic on a daily basis, compared to all other web communities. Because social media websites can be leverage for links and better search engine rakings, they ultimately increase your website's potential. For example, you will be able to price ads higher or generate revenue from any paid business model.