This is a guest post by Alex, who runs a site called The Business Nomad providing internet marketing techniques and other marketing advice.

Whether you are blogging, running a website or even an online busines; you know – selling stuff, or offering a service or whatever; you have almost certainly considered adding social media to your armoury of internet marketing techniques.

Thing is though, I don’t think you neccessarily should. In fact I think it might be a bad idea for your site. Here’s why:

How do you get started?

Good question, if you don’t already know any of the social media platforms pretty well, you’ve got a big learning curve to contend with. There is a lot to learn, and you really need to invest the time to learn it.

What are you giving up?

Managing a social media campaign is time consuming, so if you are going to put in the time, what else has to give? How important is that thing? There are lots of other ways to market yourself online…

Are you going to do it right?

This is what it all comes down to. To make social media work for you, you need to work for it. If you can’t fully commit you will just waste your time and become yet another business at the bottom of the social media pile.

Is it right for you?

Before you decide to dedicate the necessary efforts, you should really figure out whether social media is a good fit for your business. Remember when I asked what you were giving up?

Unless you have deep enough pockets to fund a fully fledged campaign in every type of marketing out there, you are going to have to pick one and run with it. Because no matter what your choice, it is better to do one thing well than several things poorly.

So if your business is very focussed on young, trendy people, then maybe social media is the best way for you to get traffic. But if you are trying to attract middle aged professionals, perhaps not.

Summary

There are plenty of ways to build an internet income, and plenty of ways to build your traffic and your brand. The reason I wrote this post is because I constantly see the relics of failed social media campaigns scattered around the web. It is important to plan how you can best spend your marketing resources to get the sort of traffic that you want to get.