Marketers and big companies are raking in millions of dollars on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Hi-5, Linked-in and FriendFeed, etc. Dell reported earning over $3 million from direct marketing on Twitter. What do these social sites have in common? Traffic and lots of it. What makes them so popular and how did they get all this traffic? HOW can you duplicate their success and high traffic stats without allocating hundreds and thousands of dollars for marketing? How can you achieve their ranking?

Internet marketing these days states that there should be a right blend of the traditional marketing forms and the latest social networking methodologies in order to obtain the best of both the marketing strategies. Though both the marketing forms are extremely different and unique in their own ways, there are a few advantages that social networking enjoys over the traditional marketing method. Lets see what these advantages are:

It is absolutely free: while some of the traditional marketing techniques like PPC, CPM etc, are paid services, there is no service in social media that is paid. It vows for completely free Internet marketing solutions. This is one of the primary reasons why social networking has moved a step ahead of other marketing fundas.

Targeting your market is much easier in the social media than it is in the traditional internet marketing practices. Moreover, social networking provides an opportunity to the marketers to get up and close to their target so much so that they can even communicate directly with them asking for their feedbacks and suggestions. Here are some ideas for incorporating social networking into your mix:

1. Creation of social networking profiles—Register and create profiles with the heavyweights like MySpace, Facebook, and the other usual suspects, but also do create profiles with business-oriented such as LinkedIn and industry-specific sites. Don’t forget to look for local and regional, too!

2. Participate in these communities—One of the best ways to get the most out of social networking is to become an active participant in these communities. Just make sure that your posts add something of value to the communities so that other members are inclined to take you seriously. Most of all, take care to observe the written (and unwritten) protocols of these sites, and don’t feed trolls by rising to their bait.

3. Include your URL in your signature—After you’ve established credibility with the other members of the community, include the URL of your site in your signature. It’s a great way to increase qualified traffic, especially professional traffic, to your site.

4. Start your own community on your site and update it often to give your readers a reason to check your site regularly. Consider adding a forum where customers can ask questions and get feedback from you. Your blog posts can range from informative to promotional to humorous and you can whet your audience’s appetite to check back often by introducing exclusive coupons and sales.

Optimize your blog posts—This is a major aspect of search engine marketing. Optimize each blog post to make it as easy to find in a search engine as possible, but always remember not to overdo it. Obvious and repetitive keyword stuffing will reduce linking opportunities and turn off your regular visitors.

Include social bookmarking tools—When a reader likes your content so much that they want to share it with other communities, make sharing as easy as possible by putting popular social bookmarking tools at the end of each post. These include digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Facebook, and others. Pay special attention to the newer, industry-specific bookmarking tools, too.

On a more practical ground, it is seen that it is always much more advantageous to have a unison of the two or more online marketing strategies in order to ensure that your website is receiving complete online marketing treatment and showing positive results too.