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Organic is used a lot on the internet. So let me explain how I am applying it to social media marketing.

How do you learn social media marketing? That was a question I asked myself a few months ago. It was a new animal to tackle. I had blogged and used SEO, now it was time to learn something new. But was it?

I joined StumbleUpon in 2004 when the marketer’s on the site could be counted on one hand. Did I market my sites? Not really. I just thumbed up sites and pages I liked. It was simple and natural. No ulterior motives. That combined with the fact that StumbleUpon is a bit addictive helped me become a top Stumbler for months at a time.

After a while, I scolded myself though. “This is not getting work done.” So I went back to doing work online instead of playing. Back to the SEO that I knew and that made me a lot of money when combined with affiliate programs. I took that route for a couple of years until I popped my head back up to realize that I was falling behind.

During that period of burying my head in the sand, blogs exploded, videos exploded and social networks exploded. And I didn’t know much about any of them. When I got to the social media marketing part of my self-created curriculum, I forgot about my past StumbleUpon experience.

What did I do instead? I started looking for hot stories. I subscribed to the feeds of blogs that were consistently showing up on the hot pages of social networks. I would open 4 tabs at the same type. In each tab, a different flavor of meme trackers. This was all to teach me what a good story was. I had some success with this method. But I was adding nothing and my comments were worthless, for the most part, because most of the stories didn’t really interest me.

I had become a machine, processing stories and comparing then to hot stories I had seen before. A little calculator was going in my head figuring out the odds of a story becoming hot and me being the one to find it. Stop!!!

And then I started thinking. If all of the following are covered:

• You write about a topic you enjoy.
• You research a topic you are passionate about.
• You read blogs on that topic.

Then there is no need to worry about how you use social media. Just learn the mechanics and use it. Just use it. After reading post after post on how to use social media, I was back to that point where I first tried StumbleUpon, was finding new sites I had never imagined before and wasn’t thinking about how it was effecting the traffic to my sites. Drop your ulterior motives and like things for the sake of liking them. That and maybe read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” every now and then and you should be alright. Articles on the topic can help, but for the most part, they are just telling you what you already know. The medium is different. The people, the same.

Time is money. It may be something we all agree on, but what does it really mean.

Fixed costs are nice. One of my fixed costs is hosting. When I make $4000 in a month, my hosting is $125. If I triple that, it will still cost me the same and the ROI triples.

On the other hand, PPC advertising moves with the income. If I make more through PPC this month, chances are I spent more too. Yes, I can increase ROI. But for the most part, I have to spend more money to make more. And it doesn’t help that the amount of money I spend on ads is limited by my credit.

Now there are a few campaigns that I currently have running that have not been tweaked for months. But for the most part, I have to babysit. Not much now. But if I were to increase my Adwords spending to the point it replaced all the other sources of income, I would have no time to do anything else and I would be stuck in the same rat race I am trying to remove myself from.

I ran into a similar problem with the direction my blogging was going. A post a day may be recommended for a lot of bloggers. It isn’t going to work for me any more. Don’t get me wrong, I most likely write a post or more a day, but not on every blog. And this blog, which is mainly a journal of my journey makes no real money. And I like it that way for now. I am not looking for money here yet.

Building links is like hosting and social media marketing is like PPC advertising. Both have their place, but my time is limited, so I had to work out a balance.

A link I get to a site today will most likely be there tomorrow, next month, and next year and since I know a little SEO, the traffic results of that link may be less volume than I would expect from a Stumble but the quality of that traffic will be much greater.

Don’t get me wrong. You can’t just build some links and then go take a nap for the rest of the year. But here is what I know. I made $25,000 in the last 12 months from the results of links that were already there. Not John Chow money but it beats being a 24/7 internet hustler.

And all links are not created the same. Some take more time to build. A directory links takes a minute. If you want to release software to promote a site, it’s going to take some time but that time will come back to you once the ball is rolling.

I am writing this post to beat something into my head. I have a weird relationship with money. I spend in the range of $100 in Adwords a day and have to pry my wallet open to buy software and hire people to speed up the link building process. Money spent there will free up time and possibly lower the need for so much advertising. It is basically a fixed cost. Spend the money and see the results for months or even years. You cannot say that for PPC advertising.

This has also forced a weird relationship with time. If I am doing my own grunt work because I refuse to hire someone than I am basically paying myself what I would pay the other guy to do it for me. So if I refuse to pay $10/hour, that is what I am paying myself. If I buy software that speeds up a process, than I am effectively raising my hourly rate. If a job that took 3 hours now only needs my guidance for 20 minutes, I just gave myself a 900% raise for that time period.

It’s a way to look at things and a way to start putting money and time in balance. Hopefully it works.

Dealing with Incomplete Information

I learned in a De Bono thinking course that for some things, you will just never have complete information. So there is some point where you have to stop learning and researching and you have to move on to doing. You could research for the rest of your life and never come up with the complete answer.

Right now, without the book in front of me, I can’t exactly remember how you discover that point. But I am calling it now.

I have learned a lot of things online. The process usually goes like this:

1. Do what I know to make money and keep that steady.
2. Always learn a new direction. And dive straight in. Focus on it until it’s second nature.
3. Once I feel comfortable with the new direction, add it to my list of tools and use it. Sometimes I have to check it to make sure it is getting used. I didn’t learn it for fun.
4. Find something else I need to learn based on what I know I am weak at.

My Investigation of Blogging

For last few months, I have investigated the social aspect of blogging. My mission was to cast my net wide and see what was other there, interact and discover some of the rules of etiquette and get a general feel for how all of this works. In other words, get a definition of what blogging is.

During that time, I would keep my affiliate thing at the level it was. This I prepared ahead for. I cut time in that area of my work. I wrote a tracking system and macros so I could click and button and see results. Once a week, I would adjust my PPC campaigns and add new ones. You see, moving ahead not only gave me more to work with. It gave me a reason to cut the fat.

During this time, the feeds in my reader ballooned to over 1000. I was casting a really wide net. I would also randomly jump on any topic I could comment on because I have a lot of general knowledge rattling around in my head.

Along the way, I got really wrapped up in a few head trips, like a MyBlogLog contest, the top 100 Make Money Online list, and Entrecard. Great. Fine and dandy. But they were sidetracking me from what I really was doing.

Now it is time to clean up Google Reader and start tagging feeds, to take a little randomness out of the process. It is also time to stop being sidetracked by the latest and greatest when I know the direction I am going. The randomness allowed me to navigate and categorize. I had incomplete information to even start the research. If I had targeted too early, I would have missed big chunks of information that could have been important.

Now that I have a broad picture, I will look for targeted details when I need them. Less surfing and browsing. More directly going to what I need.

Does this mean I am quitting blogging? Not by a long shot. Does this mean I won’t be commenting as much? Nope. All it means is it’s time to tighten up the ship a bit. From the research done with this blog, I should be able to get Digital Products Review off the ground quite nicely, which will be the test. If it goes well, move on. If not, time to reevaluate things.

I have met some friends and have their blogs tagged to check daily. My reader still has 700 feeds in it. I only deleted the ones that hadn’t been updated in a month for now. I check it all the time to find the newest posts in my huge neighborhood. And for research, I search those feeds first.

Will I still learn along the way? Damn straight. But that is not the focus now. Now I will use what I learned.

Moving Ahead

Because there will be other blogs which, for now, will be going into a central WordPress MU installation, which will allow me to keep all my blogs data in one location even though the blogs are distributed across various domains. I will have a post on the general idea before the end of the week. It needs it’s own post because it involves more than just installing MU.

So where am I going in future studies. Let me just tell you the blogs that I am currently digesting post by post:

• Dosh Dosh
• Andy Beard
• Court’s Internet Marketing School
• How to Make Money Online for beginners

And now the weaknesses I will be hitting:

• Social Media Marketing – I’m an SEO at heart but buzz can do wonders too. Which brings up a point that I have to beat into my head. If someone else can get effective results with an internet technology, I can too. I learned this first with Adwords which I attacked and lost money on twice in a row. After each time, I said so much shit about how Adwords sucked and was worthless, similar to the words you hear about SMM when SEO’s talk about it. Now, it is ATM that gives me $2 for every $1 I put in. It’s hard to know the learning curve going in and not one person really helped me get it. They could lead the way, but I still had to find things out for myself. Sometimes it takes a few runs. And sometimes it takes going out of my comfort zone long enough to realize I am just talking shit so I won’t have to.
• SEO – Anyone who says they are an SEO at heart is a little arrogant. I need to brush up. Actually, I need to use it more often and stop talking about it. But if I address it through reading constantly about it, it will get stuck in my head. And if I put the software I use in my taskbar, it’s a big freakin’ reminder. The concept is very simple. It’s how far you take it that works ranking miracles.

Things I may possibly be playing with as an amateur, keeping in a holding pattern until those above have hit a steady state:

• Video – I need to know a little about this. I am a book person. I can read the complete course while you are in taking the first lecture. If I had a chance to go to college or do it online, I would pick online because I can go at my own pace which is "See you later, I’m reading". But not everyone is like this and I need to step up. My starting point will be screencast tutorials.

A New Leaf

The newest tool in my pack is hiring freelancers. I had got some graphics done and now I have a plugin for WordPress halfway finished. Paying someone $100 to do something that would take me two weeks is more than cost effective.

Questions I ask myself now with all my activities:

• Do I like doing this?
• Am I efficient at doing this?
• Is this something that requires me?
• How much would it cost to get done?
• How long would it take me to do it?

The End Result

Doing less of what I don’t want to do and doing more of what I want to do. I like blogging. I like writing. I like the blogoshere. I like interacting with other people there. Everything else is just a tool to make that full time. Look for my post of WordPress MU and the rough outline of building a blogging network where most of the rest is automated. I don’t want to cut out bottlenecks. I want to ask, "What’s a bottleneck?"