Social marketing is a relatively new, often misunderstood form of online marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who incorporate it into their marketing plans.I work with clients and customers who, while being very new to social marketing, are seeing results in the following areas:

1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords

2. More rankings of additional keywords or "long tail" keyword phrases

3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own accord

4. More link popularity from social media sites

5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting and interaction

More and more web site owners are taking advantage of the exponential growth in video sharing sites and syndicating video for link popularity and direct traffic.

There are now at least 50 very solid video sharing sites with high traffic numbers and rankings across all the major search engines. Many more video sites are online and ramping up to be players as well.

As I predicted when YouTube took off, video sites are fast replacing article directories as the "darlings" of syndication for link building and targeted traffic generation.