Social media is one of those Internet marketing phrases that I never paid any attention too until recently. Kind of like phrases such as blogging, micro blogging, tweet, bookmarking a blog post, and so on.

Social media is here to stay so if you are not sure what it encompasses you will want to quickly get a grasp of it. In this article we will go over a few examples of social media and how you should incorporate them into your own online business.

1. The first one to talk about is blogging. A blog can be defined as "website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal while readers may comment on posts".

That is saying a lot. From an Internet business point of view search engines love blogs. So do readers if you provide interesting content on a regular basis.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and what I suggest you get set up with. Be sure and host your own blog.

2. Get a Twitter account. Once you are set up with them you can do micro blogging. These are short 140 character tweets to your list of followers. There is a skill to building a large list of followers, but once you get it set up you can pretty much automate the whole process.

3. Social bookmark your blog posts. Get set up with a service such as OnlyWire or Social Marker to submit your blog posts to online social directories.

Directories such as Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, and so on are a great source for more traffic. These also serve as search engine bait as you get the search engines to spider the directories and find their way back to your blog.

4. Set up your RSS Feed. Think of this as building an email list without worrying about spam. You can even set it up for people to receive updates via email using a service like Feed Burner. As you subscriber base grows you can get a lot of daily traffic from it when you add a blog article.

5. Join Facebook or other social networking sites. LinkedIn is a good one for business contacts. This is a good place to make online friends and can be a good source for prospects and customers for your online business.

6. Use an article converter for video marketing. A good one is Article Video Robot. With them you can convert an article into video and submit it to video sites such as You Tube, Yahoo. and Daily Motion. Video marketing is a must as Google owns You Tube and they are ranking videos in their search results more and more.

7. Join a handful of online discussion forums. The Warrior Forum is a must for any Internet business owners. Read Harvey Segal's excellent free report on how to do forum marketing at SuperTips.com

This is a handful of social media sources and tips on using them to make your Internet business more productive. You must get in the social media game or find your business left way behind in the future.