{Today’s guest post comes from my hubby and Web guy, Dave Newman, who shares three things PR folks should know (and practice) if you want to get your arms around the Internet.}

1. Stop trying to control where your message lives. The biggest mistake we can make concerning putting our stuff on the web is trying to rebuild what’s already working. Let’s use video as an example. YouTube has WAY more hits and searches than your site is ever going to have; they know how to deal with traffic and streaming rates; their file hosting is free and putting your video there improves your search ranking. Why would you ever try to do it another way? This guy agrees.

2. Always try the new free social network/web tool/app. I know, there are a million new apps out there every week vying for our attention and begging us to upload our fun little pictures to. How do you keep up and how do you know which to try? It’s easy. Try all of them that either you are interested in or your friends/clients/enemies are interested in. You never know what will catch on but signing up for all of them – even if just to try them – will never hurt your search ranking, exposure or how knowledgeable you’ll seem to your clients and friends.

My simple advice would be to sign up, skip the newsletters, and give it a quick run through to see if it does what you think. Then do a couple of searches to see if there are enough relevant answers/people/topics there to make it a useful resource. Then use it or ditch it. If it comes back around later – like Twitter did – you’ll have already staked your claim and not feel like such a noob when it hits the big time. Best place to find out about new stuff like that: Mashable or Techcrunch. They have RSS feeds, which brings us to the third strategy…

3. Fatten up your RSS reader. This is not about the tools you use but about how you use them. I love Google Reader. It stays synced wherever I go – whether I’m reading on my phone, in a browser, through an iPhone app, whatever – I have the same read and unread items wherever I am. That keeps me organized and not wondering if I’ve heard of this social network before (because I may have read it this morning).

The key to using RSS is to subscribe to too many things and filter out the ones you don’t care about. Don’t be stingy – subscribe to anything and everything you like and anything you don’t like. It’s FREE (unless you’re on a Kindle) and instead of clicking from one site to another all day to read the news, it’s all on one “page” so your boss won’t know you’ve been surfing for three hours (and if you’re really paranoid about that you can even read RSS feeds in Excel. Another great feature of Google Reader: it ties into Buzz and you can post interesting items to your Twitter account using more free tools.

The bottom line: use free stuff. It’s good for your wallet, good for your clients and good for expanding your knowledge.

Dave Newman is the reigning Extreme Flyweight Tea-cup Poodle Wrestling Champion of the World and a webguy married to a PR professional. His work site is here and his play site is here. He posts all of his interesting Google Reader links via Twitter (@groovysoup). You should, too.