When I was first introduced to the world of SEO and social media it was through a friend who told me “I know a quick and easy way to make money online, all you have to do is buy this cool system and it will do.” all the work for you.”

Ever the skeptic, angry at my last employer for firing me due to a minor illness, I decide I’d put my skepticism aside for once and give it a try. I was tired of giving everything I had to an employer only to be treated like I didn’t matter at the end of it all. It was time for me to start my own business.

It wasn’t long before I began to question the methods of this program and I was in constant battles with my friend about the morality of what he was doing. A writer by profession, he horrified me at what was being done in terms of copyright and the validity of the written word. The internet was basically becoming a garbage bag of useless items. This was not comforting to me, I thought to myself; “Knowledge, history, and accuracy are important to humanity. Our ancestors tried to leave us information that they thought would be useful to us. We need to do the same for our future generations.”

This program (which will remain nameless forever) created bot accounts for SEO and social media simply by posting articles over and over again to hundreds of user accounts. The articles made no sense and didn’t matter, the goal was simply to create a link to the client’s website. In fact, he also did this same process for videos. It was basically created to “trick” unsuspecting SERPS and websites into accepting articles written by individuals.

Since I didn’t know much about the field at the time, I decided I needed to do some more research. I found experts on the subject who taught methods totally contrary to this idea. That’s when I decided that I would only use white hat methods and have been doing so ever since. In fact, I challenge many authorities on the subject to think in a more socially responsible way, as they seem to be moving away from that recently.

There’s some vindication for me, everything I’ve been preaching since those early days has finally come to pass. Google did it like this.

I run a successful social media and socially responsible SEO business, recently hired two new employees, and as for my friend, most of his clients were removed from the SERPS for bad practices and he has to rebuild. He thought he was crazy working twelve hours a day almost every day. No business succeeds without blood, sweat, and tears in the early years.

The truth about running a social media and SEO business is that there are no simple methods, and while you can use helpful tools like Hoot Suite to make it an easier process, you still have to spend all day removing the bots and followers that you could ruin your customers’ online reputation.

Social media is not a simple post, add followers and forget process. If you don’t control who is in your circles, validate their profiles and articles, you can ruin your business. Reading biographies, monitoring Klout, and creating two-way communication is a full day process. If you think that social networks are done in one hour a day, unfortunately you are wrong. It takes at least one hour per client to work across five social media platforms, find and research materials, verify followers, and schedule posts. If you have ten clients, that’s already ten hours of work a day. That’s just for posting, how about blogging, writing articles, and creating marketing strategies?

Thinking of starting your own social media business and not sure how to go about it?

Start small, take as many writing jobs, publishing jobs and other related tasks and learn the ropes from others. Make sure you learn it from trusted sites. Many social media experts sell training to get you started, what you need to know is what they are not telling you. They are not going to sell you a program and make it sound difficult, they will make it sound too good to be true. They will make it seem like you don’t have to do anything. I can guarantee that this is not the case. Question things, do your own research, and don’t believe everything you read. Social media is not all black and white.