My largest successes have come from social media in one form or another. Whether you own a website or a blog, social networking is without doubt the single most powerful way to gain attention in an information overload society.

One powerful post in a single popular web forum (a form of social interaction) can literally put you on the map.

Back in mid 1996 I started my main website SEO20/20 by writing a 15 page free report called “The Plan” which showed webmasters an easy step-by-step way to churn out small websites whose goal was to make $10 a day each. I launched this free E-book by making several posts in some popular (high traffic) forums.

Let’s take a little trip back in time so I can go over exactly what I did to bring SEO20/20 to the top within 30 days…

I registered SEO20/20 on May 11th 2006:

Then I posted my free report (The Plan) in a few popular forums like The Warrior Forum, Digital Point Forum and V7n (just to name a few)… and yes … forums are social media. FaceBook, MySpace, Digg and Technorati are not the only players… Social media has been around since the early days of the Internet in the form of web forums.

Okay… back to the story … So I post a few entries in 3 or 4 forums (that’s all I did)… I got involved in conversations and offerd my E-book (The Plan) as a solution, included my free book in forum signatures, etc.

After a few days something amazing happened…

Ok… I registered SEO20/20 on May 11th, 2006… created a free 15 page E-book on cranking out mini-sites and all of a sudden, a few days later, my traffic skyrocketed. Look at the first spike on the graph.

To make a long story short, I hit the top 5000 of Alexa within 30 days making posts in 4 forums:

None of this traffic came from search engines at all. This was all social media.

You need to be aware of the fact that this boom happened because I poured my heart and soul into a 15 page report that I never intended to sell. I intended the report to be free because I knew that it would generate a buzz but I never expected it to generate THAT MUCH buzz.

I am doing it again… I am developing more free material that will cover the social networks and how to use them to achieve traffic for your website or blog. The cool thing about creating SEO20/20 and gaining all that buzz is the fact that I spent less than 10 hours of actual work to achieve the result. 8 hours writing my report and 2 hours participating in forums… That was it.

Fast forward through time to the present and I have made over $500k selling my E-book, The Master Plan “The Next generation of SEO” by pumping up my SEO20/20 website through social media channels and SEO of course.

This is a skill that does pay the bills. I have created a free report that covers a specific strategy that is unlike anything you have ever seen. It is mind bending but in a good way. It will end the confusion and give you a specific action plan.

Read the free report now (25 page PDF): The Social Marketing Blueprint Formula

The moral of this story is…

Dig around in social media sites, forums, blogs, networks to discover common problems and then write a free solution that would shock people because they can’t believe you would give it away for free. Make it good, make it noteworthy and you’ll gain traffic because of the “social effect” (people telling people) … Some call it viral marketing, I call it providing good service.

Build it and they will come :-)