You've taken the leap to entrepreneurship, and you're ready to tell the world about it. There are a lot of media available to get that accomplished – some of the paid, some of them free. But the most important medium has nothing to do with advertising. It has everything to do with establishing trust in you and your enterprise by making valuable information available to the readers of various social media sites. This is done through postings of blogs and articles to social media sites or blog sites.

Get ready to spend a lot of time on this activity. Not only are there hundreds of sites to choose from, you will also need to develop valuable content on an ongoing basis. The more you post, the more often your name or the name of your enterprise will pop up – along with your website link! Marketing on the Internet is the same as traditional marketing – it's a numbers game. Overnight successes can happen, but they are the exception.

There is another reason why this will be a worthwhile activity: It can give you valuable market research information. Your readers can feed their opinions to your articles – good or bad – back to you instantly. And sometimes they may share information that will help improve your product or service. So, do not get discouraged if you spend a lot of time and do not get instant results. It's a cumulative process.

To avoid early burn-out, start slowly by deciding on two or three sites to communicate to. You need to establish an account on each site before you can post. Then click on the categories that pertain to your business and "lurk" for a while until you get the feel on how people communicate on each site.

Some popular social networking sites are: Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Skyrock, Hi5, Ning, Elgg.

Flickr is a photo sharing site, and YouTube is a video sharing site. Some popular blogging sites are: Blogger, LiveJournal, Open Diary, TypePad, WordPress. In addition, there are hundreds of sites that are specialized to particular business interest. Researching which ones certain to your business will pay big dividends because the traffic you get will be high-quality.