I'm an internet marketer, which means my business is based on the internet. In order to get customers to my business, I need to find people that are searching for my products. One of the most reliable ways to do this is through search engines, mainly Google. This is why my job is sometimes called 'search engine marketing' (SEM).

Part of SEM and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is making us of social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Google+, and the many other that are out there. Getting your content found, shared, liked, and discussed on these sites increases your 'authority' with the search engines, you get ranked higher, get more traffic, and more paying customers.

The concept is simple, but implementation is not without problems, and I've found that I struggle to use these sites effectively. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Upon signing up for Google Plus, my feed was instantly filled with a long list of information I didn't care about. Twitter encouraged me to follow people I had never heard of. There is definitely a learning curve when it comes to starting a social networking profile, linking all your accounts, customizing the looking and finding relevant people to network with.

Then, after all this is done, you still haven't accomplished much. You're just another face in the crowd, posting information, hoping that someone takes notice.

One mistake that many new networks make, and one that I find difficult to break out of, is only sharing their own content. As I've been reading and engaging on these sites, I have noticed that it becomes very obvious when a person is simply posting their own content, and isn't contributing much to the community.

Another aspect of social media I have problems with is simply keeping up with the speed of information. If I have only 20 people in my circles, follow 10 people on Twitter, and each of them posts just 1 item per day, that's a potential of 30 items that I need to read. After a few weeks on Twitter I am following almost 100 people and have many, many more in my Google+ Circles.

It's impossible to read everything.

After discovering that it's impossible to keep up with everything being shared with me, I felt the urge to 'turn it all off', and not share anything. What can I say, I'm an 'all or nothing' type personality.

But I know that social media and social networking are great ways to get traffic to my websites, a fantastic tool to leverage with regards to my knowledge of my own industry, and a crucial part of branding my business. I am still learning how to balance consuming information, sharing it, and getting my own ideas out there on the web.

Let me know your thoughts on the subject. Do you participate in social networking sites to leverage the internet for your business? What's your strategy?