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If you are a firm believer of the “Content is King” dictum, welcome to the new era of blogging where content will not always make you King! It will win you some friends and admirers, but not royal status anymore. Many self-respecting bloggers advocate writing killer content as the be-all and end-all of a good blogger worth his salt.

Power To The People
In this Web 2.0 age of social media demographic, this belief no longer holds water. What makes me make such a bold statement? Isn’t it such an “anti-blogging-social-behavior” thing to say? How can I justify my bold statement that content is no longer important?

I will not begin to bore you with writing about what social media is. Many of you will have a vague idea, if not the correct definition of social media. However, the term was so widely used, that it created a life of its own, and spawned different meanings to different people. For the purpose of this discussion, we shall use the definition of social media defined in Wikipedia.

Well, for a start, how many of you agree that all the articles that appear on the front page of Digg are there on the basis of awesome content? Got the gist? See where I’m coming from? Nowadays, just merely good content (notice I didn’t indicate great or killer content) coupled with the power of social media will get more traffic and links than great content that’s not marketed effectively through social media.

It is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website
To leverage the power of social media to market your blog, you can start with replacing “content is King” with “Having lots of Friends is King“. It’s like being in high school all over again. The popular kids get noticed. You don’t have to be good looking to be popular online. You don’t even have to be good at sports or be a cheerleader. All you need is active participation and engaging the virtual communities. Make friends on social media sites, the more the merrier. Get your online friends to vote your articles up the front page of those sites, and enjoy the spike of traffic coming your way!

Here are a few sites and some online tools to help you harness the power of social media. This list is in no particular order and by no means an exhaustive list:

1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website

2) Join Facebook
Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet

3) Register with Bebo
Bebo (www.bebo.com) is the next generation social networking site where members can stay in touch with their College friends, connect with friends, share photos, discover new interests and just hang out.

Notice the keywords associated with the above 3 social networks are “connect“, “friends” and “share“. Remember what I said earlier about making friends - the more the merrier!

4)MyBlogLog
Bloggers registered with MyBlogLog can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts

5) Share Your Photos Online
Posting photos related to your blog niche on photo sharing websites such as Flickr and PhotoBucket. Tag those photos with keywords and people searching for those images are likely to follow the link on the photo to your blog.

6) Upload Videos Online
You will be surprise some video clips shot by amateurs can attract more viewers than some successful professional media personnel. A video clip on You Tube can attract up to 40 million views. Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to drum up the buzz. Also link to the videos from your blog.

7) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
Social Bookmarking leverage the power of viral marketing and popular opinions, and has the ability to discover what is important before any bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites available.

There are two ways of doing this, you can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. This is a time consuming route and time is a precious commodity we can ill afford to spend on such mundane activity. The alternative is to sign up with AddThis.com, copy the HTML code to generate a “button” on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

Add a full RSS feed
RSS has been discussed and dissected so widely, it probably has become such a clich