Who else wants tons of free traffic, free backlinks, new subscribers… and more money? All of this (and more) can be yours when you start using social media sites to drive targeted traffic to your site and onto your mailing list!

Now before we jump into the details, let’s define “social media.” Basically, social media sites are those where like-minded individuals (niche groups) can meet, network and share information. The most popular types of social media sites include:

1) Social networking sites. These are sites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Friendster.com and LinkedIn.com. Here, people with common interests can network, get on each other’s “friends” lists, keep their friends updated using bulletins (internal emails) and blog posts, etc.

2) Social bookmarking sites. These are sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com, Propeller.com and similar. The idea behind these sites is that users can share interesting web pages with other members.

Members rate and review pages – the more good ratings and reviews, the more these pages are seen by other people… and that means these sorts of sites work hand-in-hand with viral content.

3) Social “Content Sites.” These content sites include YouTube and other video-sharing sites, Squidoo and other user-generated pages, Yahoo! Answers and other community question/answer platforms, and similar.

Like the other social media sites, these content sites integrate social networking. However, the content sites are primarily known for their content – and for the love that Google gives them. (That means if you optimize your pages for long-tail keywords, you can snag top rankings in Google.)

If you want to start using social media sites to drive traffic to your site and subscribers onto your newsletter list, remember this: These sites don’t operate in a vacuum. The more you use them together, the more powerful the strategy becomes and the more traffic you’ll see.

For example, let’s suppose you create a video to post on YouTube. You should then:

* Use Digg, StumbleUpon.com and similar to bookmark the video.

* Post the video on your social networking sites (like MySpace) and alert your friends list.

* Post the video on your other content sites like Squidoo and HubPages.

* And blog about it on all of your social media sites.

In other words, your accounts on all these different sites give you plenty of opportunities to link your social profiles and pages together as well as sending links back to your own site.

Now that you know a bit about how these sites work and how you can use them to drive traffic to your own site, you’re probably wondering how, exactly, you can leverage them for links, traffic and sales. You’ll discover plenty of tips to do just that in Part 2 of this article series.

Until then, check out Social List Building to discover what the gurus know about building their lists using YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Squidoo and other social media sites!