Are you ready to get serious about using social media to market your small business, but feeling overwhelmed by all the social media bells and whistles out there?

Maybe you’ve tried a few things – some Twitter marketing here, Facebook strategy there, but you’re not getting the results you’d like, and all this social media stuff is taking waaaaay too much time anyway.  Plus, holy cow, there’s always some new tactic, strategy, or entirely new social media platform coming down the pike that you’re told you need to get on board with right.this.instant.

I get it.

In fact, recently when I was giving a Hootsuite demonstration to a client, we asked ourselves what the next new thing in social media will be that all of us will just have to learn, commiserating that once we learn that shiny new thing, there will be another right after that.  And then another.  Even if we’ve barely got a handle on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus as it is.  It’s enough to drive a girl around the bend, I tell you.

I have been there, and it ain’t pretty.

I’ve attended countless webinars and read scads of blogs on Facebook and Twitter marketing, using Pinterest for small business, blogging, SEO, content marketing, sales funnels, conversions, email marketing and multiple other small business marketing topics.

And the sense of overwhelm was, well, crushing.

That’s why when Laura Roeder revamped her business back in the summer and launched Social Media Marketer, a comprehensive suite of easy to understand and implement video-based social media training courses geared to the small business owner or solopreneur, I signed up pronto.  Because everything I needed was now in one beautifully user-friendly place.

And, as an added bonus, new courses are added to Social Media Marketer regularly, so I never have to worry about the next shiny new social media/online marketing thing, because I know if it’s something that gets small business results, Laura and crew will no doubt be covering it inside SMM. Plus, anytime I need a refresher on any aspect of using social media and other online tools to market my small business to get better bottom line results, you guessed it – it’s inside SMM.  What a stress reliever.

What Made Me Go for It

I’ve been following Laura online for over two years, read her blog weekly, and have attended plenty of her free training webinars in the past, so I knew her advice was solid.

I’d also taken her massively comprehensive and actionable Zero to Facebook course a few months prior to the launch of Social Media Marketer, so I was familiar with Laura and crew’s laid back but effective teaching style, and the easy to follow, do-this-don’t-do-that nature of what was likely inside Social Media Marketer.  That made it easier for me to sign on the dotted line, and I wasn’t disappointed once I ventured in.

If you want a reliable, predictable way to bring in new clients using social media marketing, and you value down-to-earth, straightforward, no fluff training that’s actionable, then Social Media Marketer is a training course worth investing in.  And if you’re feeling apprehensive about parting with your hard-earned dollars, think of it like this:  your business is worth investing in, you are worth investing in.  Once I adopted that mindset, signing up for this course was a no-brainer for me.

What’s Inside Social Media Marketer

Social Media Marketer is entirely online, so once you sign up, you’ll have access to all the course materials right away.  You’ll be able to go through everything at your own pace – take a course a week, a course a month, or go crazy and do them all back-to-back in a month’s time if you’re just nutty like that. There’s even a handy beginners course on social media marketing to get your feet wet if this is your first time. Very useful, that.

Courses include:

Your Backstage Pass to Twitter

Zero to Facebook

Zero to WordPress

Zero to Social SEO

Social Media Traffic School

Pinterest Marketing

Blogging for Business

Your Profitable Website

Advanced Business Systems

Advanced Monitoring and Metrics

Plus courses on Google Plus, LinkedIn and lots more.

You also get:

• Handy checklists for each course, PDF transcripts, and strategy guides created specifically for small business

• A starter series of emails over the first 7 days you’re a member to get you instantly up-to-speed with what’s inside Social Media Marketer and how to use it most effectively

• Social Media Marketer Digest every other Monday  – updates on what small businesses need to do to stay current with social media, full of actionable take-aways.

• Weekly Founder Friday Subscription – more personal emails from founder Laura Roeder with advice and guidance she’s put into practice to grow her own uber-successful small business.

• Expert guidance from topic experts in the SMM community on online marketing, branding, launching, WordPress and more, there to guide you in figuring out how social media applies to your unique business.

In a nutshell, the program is full of practical, simple to implement social media marketing strategies that will get you bottom line results in your business if you apply what you learn. 

The Investment

So what do you have to pay for all that goodness?

$95 per month.  But, and this is big, it’s not one of those courses you sign up for and get stuck paying for for the next 6 months like some other online training courses out there. You can sign up for a month, 6 months, 12 months, or any time period you want, and quit at any time, with no hassle.

In fact, I signed up in July, stayed on for 3 months, then cancelled in October because I was between clients and trying to cut a few expenses.  Now that I’m booked to capacity again for the next 6 months, I’ll be signing up again once the holidays are out of the way, because I want to head into 2013 with all the tools I need to have a killer year in my business.  : )

How I Used Social Media Marketer

Once I signed up and got inside, I got so excited by all the material that I started consuming everything willy-nilly with no rhyme or reason.

I knew this approach wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I came up with a plan:  I’d do one course per month, focusing only on that one course for the month, implementing all I learned with a laser-like focus for 30 solid days.

I made August “Twitter month,” taking the Your Backstage Pass to Twitter course and implementing each piece of actionable advice.  The result?  I took my Twitter following from around 600 followers to just over 1000, turned Twitter into the #1 traffic driver to my website, and lined up a guest post at a blog that also serves my audience, all from my month of Twitter activity following the Social Media Marketer plan of action.

I highly recommend the one course per month approach to keep the overwhelm at bay and give yourself time to really learn and absorb the material, and most importantly, to apply it.

And on the “I’ve been blogging on WordPress for four years, so I’m not going to learn anything new in the SMM Zero to WordPress course” front, au contraire.

There was something fairly technical I was struggling to do on my blog that I couldn’t figure out on my own (something to with my blog’s navigation and creating hidden download pages, as I recall), and boom – when I went searching inside the Zero to WordPress course, sure enough, there was the answer to my problem.  All fixed now, thank you very much.

All that said, I have two very minor quibbles:

• I felt like the Pinterest course could have been a little more robust (although what’s here will definitely get Pinterest newbies up to speed quickly).
• The forums weren’t very active.  To be fair, I was last inside SMM back in October and it’s now December, so that may have changed.  In fact, there was an email from the SMM team directly addressing this issue while I was still a member promising to do what it took to make the forums more active.

For anyone who wants to up their small business social media marketing game and get real results, I recommend Social Media Marketer without reservation.