This article at WebProNews only touches the surface regarding the issue Net Neutrality. While this is a political issue, there are profound implications with regard to how business is conducted in the future.

If Comcast, or any Internet Service Provider, has the ability and the legal wherewithal to ban sites from its users for any reason then that opens the door for large corporations to rule the Internet and dictate to the rest of us how we can conduct business, for what purposes we can conduct business, and with whom we can conduct business. An article at eWeek is more explicit about Comcast’s violations.

Think about this: Your ISP decides that it doesn’t like you watching Internet TV because one of its largest supporters is a local TV station. So the TV station and the ISP collude to block your access to any website that provides Internet TV. Would that seriously tee you off?

Well, this is essentially what the issue is about. Should your ISP decide what you have access to or not have access to? In areas where consumers do not have a choice about who their ISP might be, that would constitute an unfair business practice. I think in this case the FCC getting involved is the right thing to do. Net Neutrality is an issue all of us can care about. It’s about making sure the Internet remains a fair playing field.

Your small business CEO decided it’s time to update your company brochure. But you have a tight budget. Your options are a bi-fold, tri-fold, or hypertext brochure. What do you do?

First, let’s define what these are:

• Bi-Fold - Traditional four-sided brochure. One fold, an inside and an outside. Simple and straightforward, but not a lot of space so you have say the right things and say them fast. But your options are more than simple. Will you use graphics? If so, what kind. Glossy paper? Fancy fonts? What will you do to get the customer’s attention?
• Tri-Fold - A little more space than the bi-fold brochure. Two extra space blocks. Two folds. You can say more, but the options are still the same. Glossy, graphics, etc. Is it a real option?
• Hypertext - This is a website. No space limitations, but because of your limited budget you can’t build a full-fledged website. Limited functionality with an unlimited page space.

There really is no comparison between a brochure website and a print brochure. You might as well get it out of your head that they are the same. Both target different audiences, they’re capable of different results, and instead of thinking of them as either/or options you’re better off thing of them as both/and compliments. In other words, don’t use all of your budget on one and forget the other.

Secondly, if you’re going to bother with a hypertext brochure, or a website of any kind, then I highly recommend ditching the brochure concept and just building a full-fledged website. The expense is not that much greater, but the benefits are. A brochure site is one page. A real website can have as many pages as you think you need. So if your brochure site has 6 “pages” within the one-page that acts as a frame then you can spend just a few more dollars get a 6-page website. Your benefits will far outweigh the cost and you should see more than 600% return versus the hypertext brochure format.

If at all possible, you might try to expand your budget a little and think about building a real website with print marketing collateral that includes a brochure. If you need to scale back some, build the website now and put off the print brochure until the next budgeting cycle unless you are completely out of print brochures. In that case, go ahead and replenish your supply of brochures and work extra hard to put the website into your next budget.

Since newspapers are raising their rates to keep up with gas prices, where will advertisers go to advertise?

It looks as though it is a never ending cycle. First came the Internet. Newspapers got by OK for awhile, but circulation declined as more and more people went online for the news. Newspapers raised their advertising rates and lost advertisers. Then paper prices went up. Then fuel prices went up. Newspapers raised their circulation rates and lost more readers. They raised their ad rates again and lost more advertisers. It looks like a spiraling decline into oblivion.

In truth, this is the market at work. More and more people are going online to get their news from Internet sources. As they do, advertisers follow. It won’t be long that we’ll be getting all of our news from online, but will advertisers be advertising online? The smart ones will.

Now is the time to start thinking about how to use the Internet for maximum advertising ROI. The opportunities are there, but many local businesses are still a little bit weary of online advertising. There’s really no reason to be. The main thing to remember is advertise in places where your target audience are likely to be. And, yes, you can do that at the local level too.

There are various ways to run an Internet marketing campaign. But what if you want to succeed? Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your next Internet marketing campaign:

• Don’t just focus on one thing. Include as many strategies as possible into your campaign to improve your maximum reach.
• Use a professional sales copy writer who knows how to close the sale.
• Coordinate your e-mail marketing, blog marketing, and PPC advertising so that they all point potential customers to the right landing page to close the sale.
• Don’t leave out off line marketing. Television and radio are very effective for driving traffic to your website.
• Don’t allow yourself to get too narrowly focused.
• Define your goals early on and make everything you do propel yourself toward that goal.
• Set a realistic budget and stick with it.

This is a composite view of Internet marketing success, but these are important points. You want to coordinate your efforts in every area of marketing and not limit your ability to reach your audience. Internet marketing is not too different from traditional marketing. You still need to plan.

We’ve known for some time that people shop online and purchase off line, although that may be changing. Nevertheless, according to a study by Nielsen, 80% of people who purchase off line purchase from a store whose website they’ve visited. That’s nice to know, isn’t it?

Well, it is nice to know unless you are the store they aren’t buying from. Keep in mind that if people are buying in your brick and mortar store because they’ve been to your website then your website is the reason they are buying from you. You have to connect the two. Is your website user friendly? Can customers find what they are looking for easily? Could they purchase just as easily from your website even if they do drive to your store to get it in person?

In today’s business economy it is vitally important not only to have a website, but to have a website that beats the competition hands down. For most retailers, your competition is not just local brick and mortar businesses, but online businesses located anywhere. That means the competitive landscape is bi-fold (brick and mortar/local and online/global). You have to compete on both folds.

The No. 1 priority for online retailers with a brick and mortar location for customers to make purchases is to make your website so intuitive that customers can purchase from it if they want to. Due to rising gas prices, many customers will opt to purchase online because it will be cheaper to pay for shipping than it will be to drive. Soon, the only people driving to pick up what they want to purchase will be people who need it now. But even they will do their consumer research online before making the drive. You’d better have your website ready to receive them.

I found a great article on SiteProNews that discusses how marketers can use meta search engines to increase their customer base. The article focused on two aspects of meta search: Ranking and research.

I’ve never actually given this much thought, but it makes a lot of sense. You can do keyword research and research on your topic using the meta search engines. The author, Bill Platt, recommends two meta search engines, Dogpile and Widow.com. Dogpile is perhaps the most well known of the meta search engines, but searching Dogpile is really like searching Google, Yahoo!, and MSN and compiling the results. There are thousands of search engines out there to choose, some niche and some meta. You should expand the scope of your research to include those and not just stick to the big 3.

Companies making the transition from print advertising to online marketing might wonder whether web page design is like print page design. This is a legitimate question and it deserves a thoughtful answer. My answer, the one I’d like you to keep in mind is, yes and no.

Cliche, I know. But it’s also true. In some respects, the two are a lot alike. In other ways they are completely different.

Design is design, right? The purpose for any page design - whether print or Web - is to attract a reader’s response. You want your copywriting and visual elements to work together to elicit a positive reaction - close the sale. That’s the point to any kind of page design, whether we’re talking web page design or print page design, but that’s really where the similarity ends.

Web page design is a bit more complex and a lot harder to nail down that print design. With print design you are dealing with a two-dimensional canvas. Web page design is a four-dimensional canvas. Consider:

Print Design
Brochures, flyers, newsletters
All are solid and flat
Words sell, graphics enhance
Limited space
Say too much, lose the sale
Say too little, lose the sale
Say the wrong things, lose the sale

Web Design
Blogs, websites, and html newsletters
Words sell, graphics enhance
Audio and video capable
Unlimited space
People thrive on information
Biggest danger is not saying enough
It is almost impossible to say too much (almost!)

The essential difference between web page design and print page design is that with web design you can include elements that you can’t include with print design and once you publish something it has no time line. A print page can be discarded or discontinued and you know that the information at some point is no longer valid. Once you publish information to the web is there forever and even if the information is outdated, you’ll have a tough time retrieving it. Let’s explore that:

E-mail Newsletters - Hit send, it’s gone. No getting it back. Better make sure it’s accurate and you better make sure that if your information is timely or has a deadline that it is carefully and intentionally spelled out.

Blogs - Blogs are, by nature, timely. Make a post today and this time next year it is obsolete. It’s a given. People expect that. But the blog post is still there and will always be available for viewing. If you want to correct a blog post with incorrect information in it, you’ll have to make another blog post and make sure that your readers can find it. Simply removing a blog post leaves a cache copy of the incorrect information in cyberspace.

Websites - You have a window in the beginning to catch information before it is indexed by the search engines. Once a web page is indexed, it is difficult to have the information de-released. You can change your web page, but there is still a cache copy of the old page until the search engines crawl the new page again. Even then, websites like archive.org will make the old page a treasure for centuries.

I mentioned that web publishing is four-dimensional. I’ve already talked about the time element. The third dimension is what you can do with audio, visual, and links. Programs like Flash and technologies like podcasting and video marketing allow you to do things on web pages that you can’t do in print. A rising trend is the use of spokesmodels on web pages. You can actually turn your web page into a running infomercial. This type of technology plus the element of linking between pages - and between websites - makes web page design a completely different publishing platform than print design. There is more to think about, there are more ways of doing what is possible, and your imagination is the only limitation. The offset is that with web page design, there is much more potential in terms of monetization and reputation success.

Yelp has been around since 2004 and has caught on with consumers who want to rate local businesses. But are customer reviews good for small business? Furthermore, do sites like IHateYelp add much value?

TechCrunch says the Yelp haters are good, that it means Yelp is doing something right. I agree. Knowing that customers are reviewing your business and telling other customers the good and the bad, you’ll spend more time trying to do the right thing and please them.

The part about the anti-Yelp sites that I find disturbing is that the businesses that go public with their disgruntlement over Yelp’s policies could be shooting their own foot. Public comments will be scrutinized by your customers. They will find them. And whether they agree or not with your statements, they will scrutinize those comments in light of customer criticisms of your business. So if you’ve been reviewed by customers and you have public statements criticizing the website that makes those comments possible then it could be construed that you are criticizing, and afraid of, the review process. In the end, that won’t look for your business. Like it or not, customer reviews are here to stay. You’re better off just focusing on improving your business.

If you are a visual and auditory learner then you might be interested in viewing one of Blue Chip Marketing’s powerful videos. I have put together a handful of terrific videos that teach the basics of SEO, content development, and search engine marketing. Specifically, my five videos (two of them are two-part instructional videos) cover the following topics:

• The Three Prongs of Your SEO Fork (Two Part Series)
• Content Is King (But Keywords Are Queen)
• How To Make Google Fall In Love With Your Site (Two Part Series)

I encourage you to watch these videos. All of them are under 10 minutes in length (one is 10:43) and are packed full of useful information that you can use in your business.

I hope you’ll take a moment to watch this first part of the “Three Prongs Of Your SEO Fork” series and then check out the other videos as well:

Watch all five videos at Melberg.com.

Marketing has been around a long time. Without it, most businesses would never have survived. Though I’ve met some business owners in some towns who say they’ve never advertised. I guess their service is so good their customers just talk about them. That’s the best kind of advertising there is - and you don’t have to pay for it.

But most of it, even if our service is darn good, still have to pay for some form of marketing.

Traditional marketing works. So why abandon it, right? Internet marketing works. So we should use it, right? Well, it depends on who you talk to.

The key to any kind of marketing, of course, is effectiveness. The bottom line: Will it increase your ROI? Traditional modes of marketing like the yellow pages are being replaced rather quickly by online versions of the same product, except that the online version is much more flexible and versatile and has the power to increase ROIs tremendously more by reaching a broader base of people interested in your core product or service. Other modes of Internet marketing are doing the same thing. But this is no reason to assume that small business owners should abandon traditional marketing streams.

Sure, you can give up on some of those methods. If you find that your reach is declining through certain traditional marketing methods that you used to see gains on then that could be a sign that it’s time to try something different. But there are still traditional marketing practices that work. That’s why I recommend something I call integrated marketing.

Integrated marketing is taking the best of traditional marketing and coupling it with the best strategies from Internet marketing to tailor a marketing strategy that works for your business. We will examine your business model to see what you have done in the past and to evaluate your current marketing blueprint. If something is working for you then we won’t change it. But if it isn’t then we can find something to replace it, something that will increase your ROI.

Today is the day to look at changes to your marketing plan, changes that could propel you into the 21st century and reach more customers with fewer dollars. Find out how now.