Social media can be fun and even addictive. It can also be a nuisance and a big waste of time. Many people who have a savvy social media strategy can drive tons of traffic to their websites, and that’s great. Most of what you can get out of social media also comes for free, if you don’t consider the amount of time you spend on it or don’t buy ad space.

So, by all means, use social media to share your blog posts, your successes and your best photos. But please do so only after you have done all the other things listed in the rest of this book.

If you don’t, you risk one of your posts being shared by someone popular, having it go viral, and driving a huge spike of traffic to one of your pages, at least for a few days. When that happens and you haven’t put the strategies I have explained in the previous sections into place:

• You have no system to capture the email addresses of the visitors.
• You have no way of collecting their expressions of interest.
• You are not explaining concisely what you can do to solve their problems.

And so, those people will navigate to your page and maybe skim the headlines. Some might even read it all and share it, driving even more traffic (and ramping up your hosting costs in the process). But then they’re gone, you don’t know who they were, and you have no way of getting their attention again or turning them into leads.

So, I advise against making social media the linchpin of your marketing strategy. At least until you have put in place a system to turn visitors into leads, and leads into customers. Avoid working like crazy to get followers (and don’t ever buy followers!), but concentrate on interacting with key people in your business. Follow them, comment on and share their posts. In other words, network, don’t spam. Make connections.

Before you know it, you will have an efficient marketing plan in place that produces the results you’ve been waiting for.