At the risk of hurting my own future revenue stream, in this post I’m going to give you the world’s fastest lesson in creating business success via social media.

Two key assumptions in this plan:  1) You want prospective customers to want to know more about your company.  2) Prospective customers will want to learn more about you and maybe hire you if they think you are smart, insightful and clever.  So you need a blog where you post your insights into your areas of expertise, key business trends and general thought provoking ideas or helpful advice.  And then you need to drive readers to your blog.

1) The Blog: There are several strong free blogging platforms including Blogger, TypePad and Vox. I use WordPress because it appears to have the most features, options and powerful tracking of statistics.  Give your blog whatever name you like (in most packages you can change it later if you like), and consider registering a domain for the blog with godaddy or register.  Then you can forward that domain to resolve to your blog.

What you write on your blog is up to you, but the important thing is that you post on a regular basis.  Twice a week is a good number.  I’ve heard some experts advise a total of 6 of any social media activities including blog posts, tweets, facebook postings etc.  This number is probably not too hard to achieve.  And when you blog, make sure you are not just promoting yourself or your business, but that you provide information and links to other resources.

2) Twitter: Twitter freaks a lot of people out because they can’t imagine why someone would want to “follow” them.  I had this fear myself, but what I learned is that the more I tweet, the more followers I get – not that I have a ton of followers yet, but I gain them regularly.  If you follow people, they will sometimes follow you as well.

Two essential tools for Twitter are TweetDeck, a client that allows you to post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time.  And Bit.ly which allows you to create shortened urls, and do it in such a way that you can track when people click on your shortened links (this allows you to go back and see how influential you’ve become!!).  FYI, there are competitive products to both TweetDeck and Bit.ly.

3) The Process:

— Write a blog post on your topic of choice.  It’s even better if your topic relates to something that people are talking about in the news and on the web, etc.  Make sure your post serves your business needs and relates to external resources.

— Use TweetDeck to create a short tweet that promotes your blog.  If you can find a hashtag that relates to your topic, use it in your tweet so that your blog post can be part of the Twitter discussion.

• to find a hashtag, go to WhatTheHashtag, a great resource for Twitter users.

• My Tweet for this post is structured to gain interest, send them to the blog and use a hashtag so my tweet may be found by people I don’t know.  It really takes some skill to write a 140 character tweet that achieves all of these goals.

–Make sure you post your tweet to facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter.  Most of us still have a whole lot more FB friends and LinkedIn Connections than Twitter followers.

–Finally – send a quick note to folk on your e-mail list who have not yet embraced Twitter, FB, etc.  I’m realizing now that this is an important channel to get your readership up.

Good luck, and let me know how you do.