I've been an online marketer since 2002, and three methods I use very effectively are article marketing, blogging and publishing a newsletter, which has a circulation of close to 18,000. The point of this piece was not to discuss which method of social media marketing is better, but to point out how effective microblogging can be.

Nothing more, nothing less.

I agree stuff needs to get promoted, but like I also said, I think its smarter to use a service like feedsmith that will harvest and tweet your WP articles for you rather than actively going and manually typing stuff into Twitter or a Twitter app. One of the most successful article's I've ever written got 90% of the volume of traffic led to it by a 15 second email to Lifehacker saying, "Hey, just wrote this, thought the Lifehacker readers might like it…" and 4 hours later it was published. Having contacts helps, but as much as I enjoy the small splurge of traffic when feedsmith grabs and tweets my blogs contents, I would much rather have a group of loyal readers coming back day in and day out from an RSS feed than a small surge. Likewise, an article I wrote 51 weeks ago (winter specific) that was fairly popular on SU saw a huge spike in traffic again this weekend, all from SU users, new and all over again.

Your concept is solid, but could be applied to whatever "hot" and new web 2.0 app is in with the cool kids right now.

They're also just great ways to communicate and engage with our Community.

@Mike while I agree with most of what you said, I respectfully disagree with the last point, ie, "Quality articles get read because they are quality."

With so much information on the web, it is hard to get noticed. And, no matter how good your stuff is, it's NOT going to get read unless you promote it somehow. While some of it will get found "eventually", if you make your living in some form as a writer (eg, selling ebooks), you have to promote to reap the rewards.

And, what you promote is the QUALITY content that professionals always strive to churn out. Readers don't buy from those who push crap, so your stuff had better be good — and you'd better get darn good at promoting it — to make a living online.

On another point, as a newbie to Twitter I can see what you mean by using Twitter "strictly" for promotional means. There has to be some type of balance there to keep subscribers interested.

And FYI, the first thing I did when I completed the report was submit it — along with a blog post — to Brian over at CopyBlogger.com. He not only published the post, but Twittered about it as well. That got the ball rolling!

Thanks for weighing in.

Twitter should have a personal touch first, business aspect 2nd imho. I use feedsmith to tweet my blog postings for me so I don't have to worry about manually tweeting that which I just spent time writing.

There is a purpose for Twitter, it's just not 100% clear yet, in my eyes, what it's for.

Your example of your article going viral could have happened from just about any social networking or bookmarket scenario though. Had you emailed a few people in your industry with similar blogs to let them know of the article you just published, the same results could have been gained and you'd be doing it with a much personal touch, it's worked very well for me. If a big-name digger dugg your article, it could have ended up on the front page of digg as a result. If it got Stumbled at the right time of day by the right person, same results.

The other interesting thing I saw in your article is The last thing I wanted to do was “promote” it after that. I don't write articles to get social media attention, I write articles that my reader base will read. If it goes through the social media networks after that, even better, but I never write with the intention of promoting. Quality articles get read because they are quality.