In a rather obvious nod to the great book, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark by the brothers Eisenberg, I would like to suggest that their advice, figuring out what works and doing it better rather than expecting results from something that isn’t natural for people to do, is dead on. But, sometimes you’ve got to have some side bets placed on long shots too.

Here’s what I mean. There are three services that you may or may not have heard of that, on the surface, don’t seem to offer the typical small business owner much in the way of marketing use. And yet, there are elements of each that contain the spark of some very useful DNA. I’m not suggesting that you should throw your energy into every new thing on the web. You’ll drive yourself crazy do that. I am suggesting that you figure out what works, measure it, improve it and do more of it – all the while keeping some side bets going on up and coming tools that might just be a dog in cat’s clothing.

And now, three for you to play with:
• Stumbleupon and a Guide to getting traffic with Stumble Upon
• MyBlogLog and a guide to building blog traffic with mybloglog
• Twitter and a guide to using Twitter as a marketing and PR tool