A lot has changed over the past few years! Many forms of advertising have either waned or died on the vine, so to speak.

With the advent of Tivo and other "time-shifting" devices, many people no longer watch commercials. You can simply fast-forward through them. Plus, television advertising is not very targeted nor is it affordable.

Radio seems to be dying, too. Over the past couple of years, radio ad revenue has fallen by over 30 percent. What makes it worse is that you have to either buy airtime on a news channel or a partisan-leaning station (i.e., right wing or left wing), effectively doubling your expense if you want to reach the majority of listeners.

Yellow Pages advertising hasn't really rebounded from the last recession (2001). I know. I sold them for a while. Or, more correctly, I didn't sell them :)

Those YP ads suffer from high cost, untargeted traffic, and — most of the time — a long lag from the time you pay until the time your ad hits your potential customers' doorsteps. I say "most of the time" because you could get lucky and get your ad in on the last day and maybe a month later your ad hits the streets. But then you have to worry about poor placement because waiting until the last minute really cuts down on your options for ad placement — all the good spots have already been taken.

Advertising and promotion on the web has really made some significant changes, too. No longer are banner ads effective (I'm not sure they ever really were, but with thousands of impressions, you were bound to get 5 or 6 "clicks" right?).

There are some self-promotion activities that you can initiate. Article marketing still stands as one of the better methods, but its efficacy is waning, too. No longer is it really easy to drive traffic to your website through well-written and -distributed articles. Nowadays, we write articles for two primary reasons: To build our brands and "authority" within our niche or industry and for the backlinks!

Getting listed in hundreds of directories isn't very worthwhile any more, either. Again, we do this for the backlink.

Google's AdWords program (and Yahoo and Bing to lesser extents) can be costly and the results experienced just a couple of years ago are no longer not so easily generated.

Today, social media is the place to a) build your brand and authority, b) get valuable and quickly-indexed backlinks, and c) (MOST IMPORTANTLY) drive highly-targeted traffic to your website.

Of course, learning the social media strategies and tactics that makes it so effective as a promotional and marketing tool can be difficult. It certainly is time-consuming. Imagine trying to write a blog post a day (or more) and then bookmarking that post to dozens and dozens of social media outlets. It could be more than a full-time job!

Keeping up with twitter, Facebook comments and fans, as well as promoting your brand/products in niche forums, etc. — it can all be very daunting.

However, if you develop a system, you can extract maximum benefit from social media for little cost (cost in terms of time, as social media is mostly free).

Of course, you can certainly hire a social media manager to do all of this — and more — for you.

In coming articles, I will be sharing with you the social media strategies, tactics, and techniques you will need to know about in order to get the most out of your efforts. Stay tuned for more :)

About

I am an SEO and social media expert with 4 key focus areas: SEO, social media, internet marketing coaching, and keynote speaking. I am also an author.