The following is a guest post by Tibi Puiu, a professional blogger and social media consultant, who can be found writing down at Lost Art of Blogging.

As marketers and bloggers, we should all be very opened minded and inclined to new things. Exploration is the keyword here. If you want to be successful, in any activity you might want to follow, it’s very very important you always look around you, analyze and experiment with your work and surroundings.

In the past the easiest way to get in contact with the latest trends and so on, was to follow as many conventional media institutions as possible, from newspapers, to radio, to TV; but now with the development of the internet the world has become a smaller place and by far the easiest way to stay at top of the game with the latest, in any field, is to be active in social media.

Social media has been around for a long time now, bridging the gab between consumers and establishments (websites), but it’s only been recently that it managed to explode on the mainstream. If you’re a bit unfamiliarized with social media and all it represents, I’d recommend you first start reading my introduction to social media. If you need a few reasons why you should start extensively using social media, then I’ll just lay them down for you bellow. You’ll get converted in no time.

1. Traffic. This is probably the main reason why you should start using social media. It’s widely known that social media has the power to bring obscene amounts of traffic to your blog or website, infinitely easier then waiting years to establish your website and spending thousands on SEO services. A first hand example is the notorious digg effect, which describes the period of time in which an article from a blog or website gets popular on digg. The traffic that digg can send is tremendous, powerful enough to shatter most servers (around 100k uniques). Try building this kind of traffic the old fashion way.

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Blogging itself is a trend and if you do blog then you have already followed this one. But there a lot more appearing and you have to make use of everything to bring traffic and increase your readership.

Social media is so used those days, that you definitely have to use it to bring more traffic. Unfortunately, it won’t bring quality traffic, but you need all you can get and if you have good skills, then you can also monetize and convert it like organic traffic, just the rates will be lower.

Latest trend now is Twitter and like all social media websites, all you need is a powerful profile and you’ll get a good audience. It’s advantage is that it can bring visitors that are really interesting in your blog and this means a high rate of conversion. It’s not as powerful as the others, but worth.

To follow the trends you only need to do a bit of social media research and see what’s on the buzz at the moment, to make sure you don’t miss it and lose valuable visitors.

Also, you might want to follow me on Twitter to get my latest updates.

There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that i’ve seen offer almost no useful informations and only general facts that can be found everywhere.

Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool to tell their secret and worse than that, a lot are lying just to get a strong readership and profit.

Those blogs mean time loss and a good blogger has to manage his time very good to increase productivity, so only subscribe and read the blogs that can really help you, don’t just get fooled by everyone.

Of course nobody will tell big secrets, but by reading a lot of useful informations you can make an idea of what you have to do and test, until you get somewhere good.

What do you think of those bloggers ?