Business owners are quick to create social media pages to promote their companies. After all, it’s free to create profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The problem is that few see returns on their social efforts because they aren’t being strategic and setting goals for measurement.

To remedy that, I want to share 10 steps to creating a more effective social marketing strategy:

1. Evaluate your mission statement and business objectives.
2. Determine which channels best suit your audience and marketing mix.
3. Listen to the conversation on those channels and find areas of mutual interests.
4. Set goals to define what success looks like. For instance, how do you define a conversion?
5. Engage your audience through authentic conversation about mutual interests.
6. Create content your audience will find helpful or entertaining to build trust and brand awareness.
7. Measure results through analytics (quantitative) and note the quality of conversations (qualitative).
8. Evaluate what works and what doesn’t. What facilitates clicks and two way conversations?
9. Adjust your strategy and execution. Build on what works and eliminate what doesn’t.
10. Repeat steps 1 through 9 and re-evaluate your strategy on a regular basis.

At each step, try to allow authenticity and transparency. Build trust in your company by being yourself.

Social media moves fast. Your strategy must be flexible. Keep in mind that what works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you. Social media doesn’t provide off-the-shelf solutions. Do you have questions specific to social media marketing for your business? Drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.

Verbiage is bad. It's any text that uses too many words or overly technical terms. As your copy editor, I prevent verbiage from taking over Web pages, how-to videos, blog posts, articles, reviews and any other rich content modality. The final result isn't verbiage. It shouldn't be wordy. It can't be technical. Your text must be clear and concise. Clean and precise, too. My goal is plain language that doesn't sound plain.

Want to keep verbiage from nixing rich content readability? Write it. Read it aloud. Phone a friend. Revise it. And repeat. That's how online copy editors cut the misleading mazes to create direct phrases.

Do you sell custom shoes? Custom handbags? Or maybe pet food? Want to make buying these things fun?

Product customization means a customer can see what the custom product will look like before placing an order. This not only enhances the buying process to increase conversions, it's engaging, fun and likely leads to more confident purchases and less returns because it wasn't what the customer was expecting.

The recent rise in the number of user-powered customization has been astounding. Most Internet users take advantage of customizing their online profiles, whether it's their Twitter background or choosing the colors of their Yahoo! page; likewise, some startups are taking product customization to new levels.

Take a look at Laudi Vidni. The highly interactive Flash functionality makes customizing a handbag personal and fun...just don't let my girlfriend find out how fun it is. With the steep price for today's handbags, why not create something uniquely yours? Imagine doing that on the fly—completely online.

Our team was thrilled to design and develop Chocomize.com, a custom chocolate factory where users can play like Willy Wonka. Their success has vaulted them to features in O: The Oprah Magazine and on Mashable.com. We built their Creation Station to be fun, easy and addictive. The results have been positive.

If you have an idea for a product customization site, I'd love to hear about it. Let's talk: (888) 764-0394.

One way to create backlinks using rich content is article marketing.

Articles are topic-driven content pieces, usually 300 to 500 words in length. They provide a way to educate, inform or enlighten potential clients or customers—without selling to them. They can build thought leadership for you and your business within your niche market or industry. Plus the author area at the bottom of each article submission can create a beneficial link back to your website.

To write a good article that can be distributed to as many article submission sites as possible, its content must be original. To make sure the article is read by potential customers or future clients, it must provide a valuable answer, stance, definition or how-to of something essential to your niche or industry. Instead of topical information, your knowledge, advice and ideas must be useful to them.

Instead of a sales pitch, share your passion, ideas or industry views.

The worst thing you can do is meet a potential customer with a sales pitch. You haven't even said, "Hello." And you haven't demonstrated your expertise. Those kinds of things build trust, first, and then you gain a better chance to sell. With any article you write—especially if you want to meet article submission guidelines—its content must be self-promotion free, or it won't be distributed.

If you are an IT specialist, for instance, don't write how your IT solution is different from any other on the market today, write about IT trends, emerging practices and your undying passion for IT innovation. If you sell light bulbs, don't name your LED bulbs as the best, but help potential customers choose a better bulb with a buying guide article or simply explain how LED bulbs are better.

If you need help writing articles for distribution, I'm here to help.

Web marketing is no longer about promoting your products or services down a one-way channel. You can pay for clicks, encourage reviews and build brand value through various techniques, but the real lifeblood of long-term success comes from the ability to join the conversation and—while doing so—be yourself.

How do I promote my product? How do I create a story that doesn't sound like an oversell?

I provide the same answer for these types of questions. Be original, and make sure that originality you take on is natural, sustainable and, most importantly, believable. When you look at the businesses that inspire you, what do they all possess? Unique insights. A distinctive voice. Something truly remarkable.

In the world where "unique" is cliché, you must make sure what you express is deliverable.

It's not always easy to tap into your true innovation, especially at first. You and I will work one-on-one to find and connect with your company's true story. To get there faster, be prepared to brainstorm with me. We'll work dilligently to develop the words and the story, and that'll reveal the heart of your business.

Everything begins as a story. Your early childhood. Your wedding day. Your business launch. When we relate to each other, we relate through the stories we tell.

Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks recently contributed to Johnny Holland Magazine about the value of story to find solutions to problems clients face. In "Using Stories for Design Ideas," Quesenbery and Brooks touched on an approach we use when designing your site: we often begin with your story.

Quite literally, this begins with a conversation. You tell your story to our sales team. After providing initial details, our SEO Specialist begins to assemble the words that will help shape your story. Then, perhaps starting with another conversation, you work one-on-one with me to write your story, page by page.

By the end of content production—and before you see the wireframe or front page mockup—it is your business, service or product stories that serve to ignite the creative process. The words themselves articulate the problem and the solution, and our Web designers commit to further solving your problem with visuals.

Your story continues through design and development milestones, although it now takes on the form of images and user-friendly features. As Quesenbery and Brooks suggested in their article, the story changes over time as more contributions are made during the website design or Web app development process.

As your website launches, we hope it is the story—as text, as design and as functionality—that helps you connect with your visitors and build lasting business success.

Backlinks—also named inbound links—are any external links to your website from online content, such as blogs, directories, distributed content or customer reviews.

When we blog about our client's website launch, for example, we link back to their home page. If we write about other pages on the site, such as a new web development technique for the contact form, we may link to that page, too. These text links are one way to create backlinks. Article marketing is another.

Backlinks are essential because they help search engines evaluate your website. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engine algorithms use the number of backlinks to determine a value for the page. The greater the number of quality, organically created backlinks, the easier your website can top search results.

What makes a quality backlink? The backlink comes from a website that's related by subject to you, your business or your business news. When creating backlinks for your site—when you ask others to mention you—make sure the external website is in good standing and its owner values backlink best practices.

Whether you build your own backlinks or hire us to provide monthly backlink creation, always aim for quality over quantity. Quality links ensure lasting results.

Web design is tricky. Unlike print design where creativity is impacted little by real-world requirements, Web design is highly technical. A designer must consider screen sizes, screen brightness and contrast, functionality, Web development methods, Google search algorithms...and the list goes on.

Balancing SEO best practices, Web development realities and preferred aesthetics is a juggling act all Web designers must master, and it isn’t easy sometimes selling this to clients.

While Flash-based design is cool and minimalism (i.e. white space) is clean, both of these things prevent potential visitors from finding you by removing live text from your site.

Web designers must also consider the dramatic increase in mobile browser use, which handheld device software continues to not support Flash-based video. While angled text is interesting, there’s no value at all to image-based text that can’t be updated dynamically or crawled by search engine spiders.

Like doctors for their patients, Web designers need to advocate for the websites they design. Saving it, as it were, from the good intentions and big ideas of their owners.

There’s more to Web design than aesthetics. If clients try to sacrifice SEO or Web development dynamics in the spirit of creativity, I’m going to say something. That’s my job as a usability-conscious designer, and it’s in the longterm best interest of the website I need to create for their businesses.

Until resistant clients join me in the 21st Century—and we can put Microsoft Explorer 7 behind us—it's hard to please everyone. When we transition into the post-IE7 world where HTML5 is commonplace and CSS3 is the norm, we can do all sorts of amazing things, such as use the font we want, online.

But until then, we need to work with what we’ve got. Once I get a client to be realistic about what can be done, there’s a lot Blackwave Creative can accomplish with what we can do.

Mashable—the Internet news blog—organizes and celebrates the first-ever Worldwide Social Media Day today. They've inspired 600+ meet ups in 93 countries. One of the Worldwide Social Media Day meet ups is here in Vancouver at LUX Restaurant & Bar on Granville Street, where folks will join "Sociable!" author @ShaneGibson as they all anxiously await the chance to finally get "swarm badges" from Foursquare.

It's kind of retro, er, groovy how social networking meet ups and location-based checkins now bring us out into the world, instead of bringing the world to us. Are we on the verge of a face-to-face renaissance?

Watch Pete Cashmore introduce the first-ever Social Media Day. See live streams from global meet ups.

It's hard to pay attention. I have trouble keeping my focus on the Web. Believe me, I've tried. I separated social media activities from content marketing. I only read my RSS feeds between 8 and 9 a.m. I even tried full-screen browsing, but nothing could overpower the strength of worldwide wanderlust. I'm not alone. Earlier this week Random Adam almost sold an iPhone 4 box to an awestruck buyer for $770. While the auction site pulled the ad, I can somewhat empathize with the bum willing to pay $770 for a box.

Pay attention or pay for cardboard. Sadly that's a common dilemma on the Web of Diggs and Stumbles.