You’ve put together a great marketing brochure. Excellent copywriting. Stunning graphics. Beautiful paper. But you’ve got a tight schedule. Is the deadline really important?

That depends. Do you want your customer to receive your brochure in time to take action on it? If not, then deadlines aren’t important. But if you want your customer to receive the brochure in time to be able to make a decision on attending your event or taking advantage of that special then, yes, deadlines are critical.

Even in this Internet age and the era of digital delivery, print runs still happen every day and the deadline is just as important now as it ever was. Miss one deadline and it could mar your reputation forever. The customer will not wait for your brochure. They’re going to get what they want or need even if they have to shop with the competition. Be sure to plan your work and prepare for enough time to meet all the demands of the print and production process.

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.

If you are worried about duplicate content on your website or blog, good! You should be. But you can worry yourself to death, too, and it’s not really necessary.

You’ll hear people talk about the “duplicate content penalty.” It’s not really a penalty, though. If you have duplicate content on your website you won’t be penalized, per se. But the duplicate content won’t benefit you either. That is, it won’t be listed in the search engines. How does this truth apply?

First, if you have content that appears more than once on your own website then you have virtually little to worry about. Google will index one of the pages and not the other. If you want Google to index a particular page, but not the other one then you can “noindex” the page that you don’t want Google to index. Pretty simple, right?

But if you are borrowing content from elsewhere on the web that belongs to someone else (make sure you aren’t violating anyone’s copyright - that’s a more serious offense!) then your biggest concern should be legal, not search. More than likely, if you don’t have permission to publish that content then you’ll get a cease and desist letter before having your ISP pull the plug on your site, but that’s a danger. If you do have permission to publish the content then the only issue you’ll face is the search engines not listing that content in their indexes. Again, it’s not really a penalty. You’re not going to lose anything; you just won’t gain anything.

So what can you do to avoid the duplicate content issue? Here are some ideas:

• Use articles from article directories
• Write all original content
• Borrow snippets, not whole pages, and add at least as much original content as you borrow
• Add a “noindex” tag on the page with the duplicate content
• Ask Google not to crawl pages you don’t want indexed
• Stick to print collateral

Yes, if you stick to print collateral then you don’t have to worry about the duplicate content issue, but you will have to worry about the rising cost of printing - paper, ink, equipment, maintenance, etc. At least online you don’t have to worry about paying someone else’s fuel bills.

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.

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.

Let’s face it, the world is changing, and so it the Internet. Then why shouldn’t marketing itself change?

If you are a business and you are trying to figure out how to get your products to appeal to the younger set, you probably want to read this article about Generation Y. There are some real good clues here as to what the younger generation is into. Here are some of my take aways:

• They’re tuned in digitally
• Don’t have much use for TV
• Friends are more important than ads
• There’s more to life than work
• Generation Y is a lot more socially conscious
• They aren’t afraid of technology
• They have short attention spans
• And they really like their mobile phones

I find all of this to be rather promising, especially if you starting to do some Internet marketing. As Generation Y gets older and become users of the tools that we now employ to do business, you’ll see search grow, social media grow, and mobile applications grow. You might as well prepare now for marketing in the 21st century. The Baby Boomer generation may still have some good life left in them, but they aren’t the ones driving the economy any more, at least they won’t be in another 10 years. It will be Generation Y, the largest generations since the Boomers. And it makes good marketing sense to pay attention to what drives them.

I understand your small business dilemma. You only have so much budget for marketing each month. You can’t spend it all online.

That’s true. And I wouldn’t suggest that most small businesses with a local presence spend their entire advertising budget online, but you should be spending some of it online. The question is, How much?

First, let’s discuss how much you should allocate to marketing in general. You should earmark 15%-20% of your revenue each month to marketing. In other words, if your company brought in $10,000 last month then allocate somewhere around $1,500-$2,000 next month to your marketing or advertising initiatives - online and off line.

That’s just a figure. Spend more or less depending on your individual circumstances. Do you have a lot of overhead? You might have to spend less. Is most of your profit free and clear? Spend a little more. But how much should you spend online?

If you are new to online marketing then you’ll have to do some testing. Don’t just jump in and start spending money wildly. Take some time to understand the principles before you get too deep into it. But you should be doing some online marketing. I would recommend that you start with 10% of your total marketing budget to online marketing and test a few things to see what works best for you. Then you can slowly increase your online marketing budget to 50% of your total marketing budget, cutting out those off line marketing efforts that aren’t working as well as they used to.

If your total marketing budget is $2,000 per month then start with $200 per month as an online budget. Let’s say you decide to build a website and SEO it for best performance in the search engines. After that you’ll need to do some other things to market your business. Examine your options and see which online marketing methods might suit your business goals and needs. As your online presence grows, you can increase your budget and cut off the off line marketing measures that are making you less in terms of ROI. Do this until you reach 50% of your total marketing budget being spent on your online marketing. Keep only those offline marketing efforts that are making you money and cut the rest.

Doing a little online marketing doesn’t mean you have to abandon your traditional marketing efforts. No matter what you do online, you still need to reach at least a segment of your target marketing through off line marketing means. I suspect that you always will.

Newspapers have been around a long time. People didn’t stop doing newspaper advertising when radio came around. They added radio advertising to the mix. The same is true of television. They didn’t stop their newspaper and radio advertising. They simply added TV to the mix. And that’s the way advertising is developed over time. You don’t have to abandon the tried and true methods. Just add the newer ones to your advertising efforts.

But don’t do this overnight. Do it gradually over time. In other words, run a few tests first to see how you do. If it doesn’t succeed then you’ve lost a little, but not much. Also, try tweaking your test and running another. Just because you tried it once and it didn’t work doesn’t mean it won’t work the next time. Try to learn what the successful people are doing in the new advertising medium and emulate them.

Online advertising does work. Like traditional advertising, there are certain principles that work better than others. Learn the successful principles to your advertising efforts - online and off line - and add it to your mix.

Traditionally, marketing and sales have gone in hand. But they are not the same thing. Marketing is the the entire process of creating, pricing, distributing, and promoting a product or service. It can be something as simple as a mailing label on a box you send through the mail (the label has your return address and logo on it, doesn’t it?), or it can be something more complicated like a multi-tiered market research initiative.

Sales is the actual process of getting the product into the hands of your customers. The two disciplines are related and need each other, but if you don’t understand the difference between marketing and sales then you could spend a lot of time on useless activity that doesn’t pay off.

Online, the distinctions are still the same. Marketing is presenting your message to consumers not yet ready to buy. Selling is getting your product into their hands.

Online marketing, like traditional marketing, is the entire process of building relationships with people who want what you have to offer. The very idea of creating a product involves marketing. Pricing is marketing. Distribution is marketing. Customer service is marketing. But sales is simply explaining to your prospects what the benefits of your product are and making it easy for them to get it.

These distinctions are necessary because you need to know which tools you are going to use to help you achieve your objectives. Do you need a blog? Are you going to have a live chat box on your website? If so, who will respond to messages and what kinds of customer service needs will you address through that tool? All of these are questions you’ll need to answer and when you do, you’ll find that your business will run a lot more smoothly.

Well, I could go on and on about traditional marketing, but today, I thought I´d let some of the best in the business hand out the advice and I can just comment.

Customers buy for their reasons, not yours.
- Orvel Ray Wilson

How true! This is something to remember when you are planning your traditional marketing campaigns. What do your customers want?

“People don’t want to be “marketed TO”; they want to be “communicated WITH.”
- Flint McGlaughlin

Yet another great traditional marketing tip. Whether you send out a paper newsletter or just market with ads, make sure that you are really communicating with your clients, not preaching at them. A good way to make sure you have that is to really focus on what your target market is like and who they are.

Strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing. Everything else is the Catskills.
- Al Ries

If you get the strategy figured out and get your timing down . . . the rest of your marketing should be pretty easy! Not to mention,you´ll find that these traditional marketing techniques are very effective and if you focus on them first, you will usually be far more successful.

There you have it. Traditional marketing advice from some of the greats. We can learn so much by listening to those who have already been through the marketing game.