Every once in awhile I run across a blogger who says don’t do this or don’t do that because it’s a waste of time. Perhaps it is, for them.

As an example, one blogger recently commented that Twitter is a total waste. Well, would people be doing it if it were? I mean, there are thousands of successful business people on Twitter every day. That doesn’t mean you should be using Twitter. It just means that those business people have found a use for it.

I’m all for making your own decisions. I think it would behoove every business person to study the options available and pick the ones that are right for you. Need a blog? Only you can decide that. Need to do some forum posting? Maybe. Have the time? Give it a try.

It’s all about trying new things, seeing what works, ditching what doesn’t, and keeping your business afloat. Aren’t you doing that anyway?

Google Trends has been useful tool for some now. You could compare two competitors to see which one was getting the most traffic to their website and use the information you find to make your own website more competitive. Google’s newest tool, which can be even better, is Google Insight.

Google Insight allows you to analyze keyword data by region and time. In other words, you can see search trends by month, quarter, year, or across multiple years. You can also analyze search trends by region, which is very helpful for looking at the competitive landscape for your niche at the local level, a limitation of Google Trends.

Let’s say you want to start a state-wide auction site similar to eBay that allows farmers to buy and sell farm equipment within your state. You can see how many searches for farm equipment within your state or region have been conducted in the last 90 days or even the last year. You can also see which search terms related to farm equipment have been the most popular.

Just for grins, I decided to see what the data for farm equipment would look like in Michigan over the last 90 days. Here’s what I found: On June 29, the search volume for farm equipment in Michigan was high. By mid-July, it had dropped to almost half. And by the end of July just tapered off altogether.

Now I’m not altogether sure that those end-of-July figures are 100% accurate, but if I look at the trend over the past year then I can see that the most number of searches for farm equipment in Michigan took place at the beginning of May. Again, I see a huge dip toward the end of July. This makes sense since I know that farmers usually start plowing fields and working their crops in early summer/late spring and by the end of the summer the need for farm equipment goes down. But suppose I want to compare that data for the states of Michigan and illinois? I find that the trend in Illinois is similar to the trend in Michigan, but there have been more overall searches for farm equipment in Illinois.

This is the kind of drill down research you can do with Google Insight. It’s a very helpful tool, to be sure, and can be used to narrow a niche or broaden one that is too small BEFORE you commit yourself to your business model.

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.

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.

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.

If you aren’t familiar with DMOZ, you might want to brush up on your Internet marketing history, culture, and traditions 101. The Open Directory Project is only the oldest human-edited directory in existence and has probably twice as many enemies as they have friends. And they have a lot of friends.

DMOZ has been the subject of much controversy in the last few years because what used to take a couple of weeks (approval for a listing in the directory) now takes six months to a year. It used to be that getting listed in DMOZ was very important for a webmaster because almost all of the search engines crawled DMOZ and took information from the directory to index their sites. Google has always relied heavily upon DMOZ and still does.

The problem lately, however, has been its growth. Because it isn’t a for-profit institution, it is all volunteer run, and DMOZ gets a ton of applications from websites every day, it takes awhile to get listed. Many webmasters have quit submitting their websites altogether.

On today’s DMOZ blog, however, I found this promise from long-time DMOZer Bob Keating:

In keeping with the successes of the past 10 years, the future of DMOZ is as an information provider rather than a destination site. We will be enhancing to service to become more of a 21st century web service and simplify the integration of DMOZ data in other resources and applications, by creating “mashups”. For example if you maintain an informational site about gardening, you can use DMOZ to get you a list of hand-picked gardening sites to point your readers too, or if you are a hockey fan you can make a little widget on your blog to show hockey clubs in your local region. Stay tuned and please share your feedback here on the blog. We’ll be sharing more information here in the next month or so and appreciate your thoughts.

That’s a strong assertion. I commend DMOZ for putting together a plan for making itself relevant again. If this is followed through on then DMOZ could very well make itself one of the most important sites again. A link from DMOZ used to mean legitimacy for a webmaster. But these days you are more likely to meet with success long before you get that all-important DMOZ link, so it isn’t quite as important any more. The DMOZ of the future could make the directory more important than it ever has been, but for different reasons.

The mashups are a good idea. And it will likely mean that DMOZ will pick up new website applications from people who had written it off as irrelevant. It will also mean that webmasters can add credible information on their sites about other sites within their niches. I can hardly wait to see what this looks like.

Four Hour Work Week posted a great blog post on how to make the best use of RSS and social bookmarking services. Many small business people still don’t use RSS and I think they should. Just look at these points from an RSS pro:

Tips for Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out. It is better to list them all out in a single view and use the “j” and “k” shortcuts [hitting the “j” key move you down, hitting the “k” moves you up] on Google Reader to navigate your feeds. This inserts variety into your daily read and lets valuable material stand out, as opposed to reading 30 posts in a row from the same author.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends
By batching it up and adding a sense of urgency to the process, you’re much less likely to waste time on crap. Be ruthless. If it’s good and you miss it, it will come back to you, I promise.

3) Clean House
You’re in charge. Your time is valuable. You’re too good to put up with someone who phones it in. If your friend told boring or pointless stories, would you call them up in the middle of the day and give them your uninterrupted attention? If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
If you fall too far behind, don’t dedicate 4 hours to catching up on 1,256 posts. Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on. If you’re utilizing Delicious and StumbleUpon correctly, both later in this article, all the important stuff will come back to you.

That’s all great advice and I really like those last two points. Don’t waste time reading blog posts and information from people who don’t provide you with the best stuff. Life is to short to waste on useless content. Instead, subscribe to the best content and read what is relevant to your business.

For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You subscribe to an RSS feed by clicking on the RSS button on a blog and the URL of that feed will be automatically added to your news reader. I recommend Bloglines or Google Reader. Both are Web-based and free.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you get to choose when you read the information. I recommend setting aside a specific time of day for reading all of your content. Then, information that you want to keep and refer to later should be bookmarked so that you can get back to it when you want. Google Reader has a bookmark feature that lets you place a gold star next to information you want to go back to later. You can also thumbs up the information StumbleUpon or bookmark it on del.icio.us. Whichever way you decide to do it, it makes it easy to save information you want to keep without having to use up your own hard drive space.

Seth Godin has been a big fan of mine for as long as I can remember. He is the author of such stalwart marketing books at “The Big Moo”, “Unleashing The Idea Virus”, and “Purple Cow.” He also writes one of the most popular blogs on the Internet.

In “Purple Cow” Seth Godin discusses how important it is to set yourself apart - to be different. I like his metaphor of the purple cow because there is nothing in the world more unique than a purple cow. Have you ever seen one?

The idea behind the purple cow is to be so different that people will talk about you. They may say good things or they may say bad things, but they’ll remember who you are. This is a good concept for business because if people don’t know who you are then they’ll have a hard time finding you to do business with you. But if they know who you are and don’t like what you are doing then there is still hope that you can persuade them to come around.

Seth Godin’s ideas on marketing a business in the 21st century are some of the most lucid and revolutionary ideas I’ve ever seen. I highly recommend him to you. Find out how you can get a good Seth Godin book today.

Two days ago I discussed two social networking applications that will allow local business sites the ability to add social networking abilities to their websites. Well, there’s been a change in one of them.

Facebook has told Google that it won’t participate in the Google FriendConnect application because Google won’t promise to protect the privacy of Facebook users. That’s a big deal to Facebook and I commend them for their stand on this.

What this means for local business site owners is you’ll now have two equally viable choices for building community into your local business website. But which choice you make will depend on what you value more - privacy for your users or flexibility. Facebook Connect will allow your users the ability to network with other Facebook users and the local Groups feature will be an excellent addition to any local site, but you won’t be able to network too well outside of Facebook and your local community. On the other hand, Google FriendConnect will allow your website users to network with people on various other social sites, Facebook excluded, and there will be no guarantee of privacy.

This isn’t to say that either of these tools will be better than any other. It’s that you’ll have to decide which one is right for you - and for your website users.