The other “tribe” of course is into keyword research, SEO and affiliate/product sales. I swing from one to the other and can see both viewpoints have their strengths and weaknesses.

Promoting your website can work well for brands and community building. Of course not doing keyword research and SEO for your business could also cost you money in lost sales.

Google have also been experimenting with “real time search”. I was having a problem with a blog of mine and after I fixed it up, I did a keyword search for one of the main keywords and I was ranked number one.

There could be a few different explanations for this, but it seemed like it was because I had just updated the site. It’s not something that makes much money so, I didn’t bother looking into it further.

I also heard that in Google’s real time search experiments, they pulled data from twitter and ranked it based on factors like number of followers etc. I haven’t been much of a fan of twitter, but it made me realize, that if you have at least one niche that care about, you need to be on it.

I also installed a vbulletin mod yesterday on a forum I run, that automatically tweets every new post. I was doing something manually anyway, so it is going to be a real time saver.

Of course you can do the same thing for blogs. You can also create Facebook fan page and import your blog’s feed to it. Hubpages also allows you to add RSS feeds to a related Hub.

I am not saying you should do everything automatically, but if you can use a combination of real and automated messages, it can be a real time saver. You should also link your twitter account to bit.ly, because I have heard a number of times now that Google is also doing something(?) with those links. Bit.ly also provides some nice reports, like how many times your links have been clicked on.

Google came under a lot of criticism with their new Buzz application, which is linked to your gmail account. If you use gmail and have a problem with it, turn it off and create a new gmail account, just for Buzz. Create a nice avatar and start connecting to people in your niche.

While I don’t think people should spend all of their time trying to promote their sites on social media as it has been proven time and again that generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, I don’t think it is something that internet marketers can completely ignore.