Social media websites, or the websites used for social marketing, can be broken down into a number of different categories each with a number of different individual websites under them. To name a few here (more are included later):

Blog creation websites - Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad
Content sharing websites - Scribd, Hub Pages, Squidoo, Hurox
Photo and Video sharing websites - Photobucket, YouTube, Flickr, Google Video
Social networking - Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut
Social bookmarking - Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Social Bookmarking Services like socialmarker.com
Wikis - Wikipedia

All of these websites allow social interaction in different ways such as content sharing, commenting, networking, etc. Many people are choosing to use these websites to interact with each other online and so they become a powerful tool for marketing .

If you have a look at most of the first page results on Google, or even the first few pages of results, you will notice that many of these are links to social media websites.

Wikipedia, for example, often ranks first on Google for search terms. Squidoo, Ezinearticles and other Web 2.0 websites are also right up there near the top and if you learn how to use these services then those links could be you. This is what we are going to be teaching you in the remainder of this e-book - how to use these services to improve your internet marketing.

If you want to get listed high on Google for a specific term and you want it done quickly, then use one of the social media services to get that position. In particular, use social marketing services that already have a good page rank.

Another point to bear in mind when considering the power of social marketing is that social media websites get almost as many, or more, page views per day than Google does; and this amount is doubling every six months!

Google is not the only place you can get website visitors from and if you learn how to use social media websites correctly then it could actually be a very small part of your traffic total.

Imagine if you were using a number of different social marketing websites and those social marketing websites were all sending visitors to your web page. Think about what that would mean in terms of traffic for you. This is truly exciting!

Social media websites not only help you get one listing on the first page of Google, and use their websites directly for more traffic, but you can actually get multiple top listings with social media websites.

Let's say you have written a wiki page, you have a Squidoo or HubPage, a blog and a MySpace page. Used correctly, you could find that each one of these (and many other web 2.0 sites) gives you a high listing.

The fact is that generally the whole point behind having a website is to make conversions, right? Well here social media is very powerful again.

You see social media is based on relationships and relationships sell. If a person trusts you, if they have interacted with you on a social level, they are that much more likely to buy your product, sign up to your newsletter, or do whatever else you ask of them.

Many advertisers and businesses have understood the power of word of mouth advertising because it is built on relationship and trust, but unfortunately word of mouth advertising is limited. After all, how many people can you speak to in one day and how many of these people are really interested in converting?

Social media takes word of mouth advertising a giant leap higher in terms of results. You are still using the power of relationships and trust but now you can build these relationships with anyone who is interested in what you have to offer AND you can build as many of them as there are people interested online by getting those fantastic search engine rankings.

Another advantage in terms of conversion for using social media websites to do your marketing is that people who use social media websites are more likely to buy more online, and they are also more likely to spend more of their disposable income online. This means that if you are selling goods online you are more likely to sell and increase your revenue if you promote your website via this method.

If you are not currently using social media websites to attract traffic to your website or to sell your business online then you are missing out on an incredible opportunity and we encourage you to jump in as soon as possible or you could lose that important fast starter advantage.