Okay, I’ll admit up front that this might sound a bit self serving, and it is because it’s about me. But, I’m only showing you what can happen so that you can see where you might be in 10 months if you start a social media optimization plan today.

I didn’t even know I was tracking results until yesterday when I opened a file marked “to do” that I wrote back in May 2008. It contained a pretty good social media optimization plan that I forgot I wrote. Of course I didn’t follow it. It was in the teaching file as an example for my some day students. What I found was where I ranked on that day about ten months ago. For proof, check out this image that shows the file properties and the original search engine results numbers.

So, I decided to see how my current stats compared. As you can see, I’ve gained a lot in some search engines thanks to twitter, this blog, LinkedIn and Facebook. A qualifier: higher numbers look so impressive, but can be collapsed into a much smaller number based on similar results. Still, it’s good to know that I can share a personal social media optimization success story with you and my soon-to-be students. Do you want to be one of them?

Next step: start working on top social bookmarking sites strategies.