Using these Social Media sites the right way can bring in large amounts of traffic very quickly to your sites. NOT using them correctly can KILL your business.

First of all, let me explain to you what the 3 most important types of Social Media Sites for your online business are.

1. Communities - These are sites that people go to on a regular basis and hang out. People set up profiles and make them personal by adding photos, writing blog entries on their own pages and making comments on their friends pages. Examples of communities are FaceBook and MySpace.

2. Libraries - These are sites that contain collections of information provided by their users. Examples of libraries are Digg and Technorati.

3. Notice-boards - These are sites where people go to and make recommendations to other sites or make posts to on a regular basis. Examples of these types of notice-boards are Twitter and blogs.

So what is the right way to use these sites?

The best way to use these types of sites is by signing up and creating a profile, read the TOS (Terms of Service) to find out what can and cant be done on the site, spend some time in the site watching what others are doing and then do the same.

The reason why you should do all of this is because if you just sign up and start posting content linking to your site, there is a very strong chance that the site members will see you as a spammer and ban you from the site.

So sign up and take a look around and get a feel for the site. Set up your profiles like the other members are and then do the same as others are doing.

For example, lets say you sign up to Facebook. What are the others doing? Well they are adding photos, "updating their status", posting comments on their friends "Walls"...

... Ah yes, friends "Walls". Before you can post on your friends "Walls", you have to first GET some friends.

FaceBook has a way when youre signing up, that you can import your email address list and find contacts that are part of the FaceBook community. You can then use this to invite people to be your friend. There is also a search function where you can search for friends by name.

After you have invited a friend and if they accept your invitation, then you will be able to communicate to them by posting messages on their wall as well as many other ways.

If you are using FaceBook to make business contacts, you may be thinking that inviting as many friends as possible all at once is the best way to grow your business. You can get a couple hundred people quickly and then you can start pitching to them.

This is NOT a good idea. Think about this for a moment... how would you react if you received a friend invite one day, accepted and then got bombarded with offers from this person right away?

You would probably be annoyed. You might block this person from being able to communicate with you in the future. You might even be really angry and contact FaceBook to complain. If FaceBook believes that you are spamming, then they will remove you from their site. And they have every right to.

So the trick is to spend a good amount of time in ALL of these sites, watch and then do what the other members are doing and then submit some great quality content to these sites slowly.

Now if youre anything like me, you have a lot of tasks to complete on your "to-do" list everyday that will make it difficult to spend all this time in these Social Media sites.