Twitter is a waste of time … is something I see often in SEO or internet marketing forums!

Did I miss something or am I just a frikken’ idiot.  I am not one for missing an opportunity and I often scrutinize so called guru techniques.  You know the techniques that are often sold or regurgitated in a 47 or 97 last chance offer.

My observations have indicated that Web 2.0 is alive and well if you use it wisely and use a bit of common sense it will reward you very well.

I decided to start building my twitter followers based on this so called nonsense that some well respected people were claiming it does not work. I have to wonder if they like spent two hours on Twitter and gave up;  as of this writing I have only 749 followers.  Not much to write home about but it is a small following.

What has this small following done for me?  Well I notice something surprising in only two weeks!  A page rank on my own Twitter of 2.  Nothing spectacular.

So I started digging around a little more.  I found Twitter profiles of about the same following or less with a page rank 5!

Now if you are like me you are thinking wow a PR 5 and a possible link! This is where it get nice.  In your bio on your Twitter page yes you can list your website link.  Sweet and simple and free page rank.

Twitter is a very viral marketing tool for internet marketers, affiliate marketers and people who just want to get thier message out to the internet.

If you are not using the potential of web 2.0 and specifically a micro blogging platform such as Twitter to promote your business or spread your message you are really missing out on a lot.

That title may be a little dramatic but is it really?  PR is something you should try to keep on site and you do not want to be giving it away or unknowingly create page rank bleed.

Page rank bleed is when you let page rank bleed through your links to other sites.  This can be a good thing if that is what you want.

Now you have to ask are you knowingly giving page rank away?  If you are giving it away then how will you keep yours up?  It is best to reserve that page rank for your own pages and internal linking.

If you are linking to your merchant without a no follow tag then you are not only giving them a sale buy you are also giving them some ‘juice’ or page rank.

The only relationship you have between your merchant and you is you provide an affiliate sale and in return they give you the commission. You are not required as part of the deal to provide anything else. In a few cases the affiliate program TOS may require you to leave the affiliate link unaltered if it is a cut and paste link.

I have seen numerous times affiliates giving away hard earned page rank then having the merchant surpass them and end up in the top 5 spots of Google and guess what? Not only have their sales dried up but the merchant has decent page rank surpassing just about all their affiliates that were promoting them.

So get your page rank bandaids out and start patching those holes.