Social media marketing is like a super nova rocketing through the marketing world. It’s literally sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, driven by a steady drumbeat of news about the latest Groupon or Facebook minting money faster than Donald Trump on steroids!  Meanwhile one of the best and most effective social media marketing tools, blogging, sits in the corner like the poor stepchild from the latest Masterpiece Theater.

Achieve Fame and Fortune with your Blog so you can:

• Dazzle your friends with your literary skills.

• Make millions and move into Mark Zuckerberg’s neighborhood.
• Get famous and have lunch with Ariana Huffington when she’s in town. Seriously:

1) Blogging builds your social credibility for your brand, company, products and services.

2) Blogging enables you to build a Following via subscribers to you Blog.

3) If you are Blogging on the best platform, WordPress your going to generate search engine rankings and high quality traffic.

4) Blogging lets you leverage your content strategy by publishing via other Platforms such as LinkedIn, Posterous, Tumblr.

5) You’ll be a better writer for it - the more you write the better you get

6) Blogging builds credibility for yourself as an expert in your chosen field.

7) Blogging ensures your up to date to a certain extent of your subject matter of choice - research drives knowledge.

8) Don’t get left out of the crowd! Yeah, the cool kids, posers and wannabees are migrating to Twitter and Facebook. But, the high value crowd is plodding along one word at a time - driving branding and credibility along the way!

9) Use your blog as a forum for others - invite guest bloggers to jump into the digital fray and write articles that resonate with your community.

10) Live/work/write social - blogging connects you with the digital community via comments about your blog.

My favorite Blogging Tools:

1) WordPress rocks - it’s free, has tens of thousands of plug ins that extend its functionality and hundreds of thousands of Open Source developers who can help you via customization.

2) My site runs on a Genesis Framework (very cool) Template ($89. bucks of blogging horsepower) -plug: save time and money and hook up with these fine folks.

3) Google Analytics: free, powerful and the industry standard. You can’t go wrong, just takes minutes to set up. Capture who’s visiting, from where and who isn’t.

4) SnagIt - the best low cost/high value image capture software used by pros, corporate geeks and entrepreneurs around the globe.

5) Google’s Keyword Research Tool - you don’t have to log in to your account for keyword research.

6) Tube Mogul is an essential SaaS tool (web based) for syndicating your video content - if you Video Blogging you will want to leverage this cool service.

7) ThinkMap’s Visual Thesaurus will help to fire up your creative juices faster than Denis Leary’s Twitter stream.

No words were harmed writing this Blog Post!