Probably every business would love to dominate their product category.

The textbook case is Apple. They so dominate several fields - portable music players, tablet computers, smartphones - that you can't have an intelligent discussion without reference to iPod, iPad, or iPhone.

How did they get that way (besides the fact that Steve Jobs is a legitimate, screaming genius)?

Here's an excellent article on the subject:

Why Apple's Distortion Field Works

Notice that in several cases, innovations that Apple is credited with were NOT in fact first introduced by them.

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The toughest job is selling your product or service on a shoestring budget, when there is nothing special about it.

If you have lots of money to spend, you can always overwhelm the competition.

If you have a unique product or service, you can get attention.

But here's a caution - a huge caution. "Unique" means unique IN THE EYES OF YOUR PROSPECTS.

Of course what's different also has to be highly desirable.

The bigger point, the one routinely missed, is that just because you think you're different doesn't mean anyone out there in the wide world is going to think so.

And they are the ones whose wallets you are trying to pry open.

Think about it.

What does your website look like on different screens?

Find out.

All the marketing in the world won't deliver LONG-TERM prosperity if you don't have a great product or service.

Having a great product or service will go a long way towards making marketing an easy job.

That doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your door, as the saying goes, because you've built a better mousetrap.

A GREAT PRODUCT and GREAT MARKETING.

That's the winning ticket.

Two of the most widely used (and effective) marketing techniques are largely opposed to each other.

One is the "new", innovative, something different thread.

The other is the, been around for a long time, we are stable, famous name, big building, you can trust us idea.

They can come together to a degree. Usually that is a company or a brand that has been around for a long time and is trusted, combined with a new, innovative product.

But you don't expect the latest, hottest fashions to come out of a company that is branded as "clothiers to the House of Windsor since 1648."

Clearly this is a case of one size does not fit all.

It is going to depend on your product or service, is it in fact innovative, a new category of item?

It is also going very much to depend on the nature of your industry. Is it one that runs on new and different (like fashion) or one that is heavily weighted towards the staid, like banking?

Is it perhaps an industry that has been running on tradition forever, but now has an increasingly large percentage of unhappy customers, ready for something different?

You decide.

A critical point on usability is that not everyone has the same needs or expectations.

Needs: Someone on an iPhone is not going to be able to navigate a Flash menu, because Flash doesn't work on Apple mobile devices. So you can do cool things with Flash driven menus, but then you have to provide text links as an alternate method of navigation.

Expectations: Most people expect after they enter their credit card information, that the next time they click a button, their card will be charged. Also that it may take a few seconds for processing during which nothing is going to be happening on their screen.

But not everyone knows these things, so you need to tell them.

Now there is no way to accomodate everyone. If you have a small business, chances are you aren't going to provide a version of your website in Urdu for the few visitors who only speak that language.

So you have to figure out how far you are willing to go, can afford to go, or need to go.

But a starting point is CONCEIVING of your different types of visitors, their needs and expectations. That means knowing who your potential buyers are, how they think and what they know.

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If you look down the lower right column of this blog, you'll see reference to a Creative Commons license, and the phrase "Some Rights Reserved."

What is that?

Creative Commons is an answer to the belief of many people - myself included - that traditional Copyright law doesn't serve well all the needs of intellectual property ownership.

There are six different licenses, specifying different degrees of control and ownership.

The license version used on this blog specifies that anyone can copy and re-distribute the material in this blog, even sell it to others so long as they don't alter it and so long as they credit me as the source of it.

Other versions let you specify, for example, that others can use your material but not charge for it.

Great idea, no?

When you send an email with a link to a web page, if that link is very long, many email programs will spread the URL over two lines and the link won't work.

The cure for this is a "link shortener" which is a service that gives you a short URL that redirects to the page you want.

This also works when you have to fit your message in a limited amount of space, like Twitter's 140 characters.

One issue with link shorteners is, will they be around forever? Because you don't want to save a shortened version of a link only to have it non-functional because the link shortening service went out of business or something.

Well, Google now has a link shortening service, and you know Google isn't going to drop it.

It is http://goo.gl - just go to their site, paste in the URL, click "shorten" and get the shortened URL you can paste into an email, text message, tweet or whatever.

If you're signed in to your Google account when you do this, you'll build a library of them you can look up later so you don't have to save the information elsewhere if you will be reusing shortened links.

Useful.

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I think I finally found a way to communicate what is special about our Internet Marketing Program.

It's here.

SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages are the screens Google serves up when you do a search.

Even since the launch of Google Instant five weeks ago, they've introduced a number of significant changes to their search results display:

1. Source of materials for Snippets. "Snippets" are the two lines of descriptive material on a Google search page listing, in between the title and the link. For several years, if you used a meta description tag (a piece of behind the scenes code), you could tell Google exactly how you wanted this to read. Now, Google may or may not use that. If the description tag doesn't include the search term, but copy on the page does, Google is likely to use copy from the page.

The big improvement here is that the snippet will vary and be more appropriate to the particular search.

2. More than two listings. For about a year, Google has been VERY reluctant to show more than two pages from a website on page one of its search results. The idea was to serve up a variety of listings to try and ensure they got what people were looking for.

This is clearly less true, especially on less competitive searches, we are seeing Google serve up three pages listings.

3. Indent of multiple pages. It has been Google's practice when it lists two pages for a site to indent the second one. That is now true only part of the time.

4. Rich snippets. You will sometimes see an extra line with links to internal pages. Google set up a way to communicate to them information that they would then use for these links and some other SERPs material. What has changed is they are more often figuring out and displaying these so-called "rich snippets" without the website doing anything special.

Now and then I have to go on a rant on the subject of professionalism in marketing.

It's a scarce commodity.

So much so that most purchasers of marketing services, in my opinion, don't have the idea that there even IS such a thing.

Of course, there are many marketing "professionals" - people who make a living at it, even big names and big name agencies - who have a vested interest in this.

I mean, when you go to a professional, you expect results.

Would you go to a tax accountant and expect him to charge you big bucks and tell you that you had one chance in five that your tax return would be correct, and that you WOULDN'T be audited by the IRS??

It is true that there is a fair measure of art to marketing. It isn't pure science. Yet there is a great deal of science to it: Exact rules and methods that DO work.

Anyone who doesn't know them or doesn't follow them is an amateur and has no business charging people for marketing services.

A page linked directly from your website's home page, is going to be considered more important. So it can get high rankings more easily than if it is "deep linked" meaning it takes several clicks to get to it.

Does that mean you should load up your home page with hundreds of links to pages on every conceivable search term you want to rank for?

No.

The general idea - and this is only an approximation - is your home page has only so much "link juice" to transmit.

Too many links on the page and Google devalues ALL of them.

This is not something you can attach firm numbers to, like "no more than 23.5 links."

It's a guideline for what you can do to improve rankings, or what may be worsening them.

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I've written quite a bit about taglines or slogans, but here's a guy that specializes in creating them (some of which you'll recognize):

Tagline Guru

If you don't believe me about boring, meaningless or inappropriate taglines, listen to the man. He's an EXPERT

(he's got some GREAT examples too, both plus and minus.)

I mentioned this yesterday as the title of a book on marketing for the small businessman.

That title shows immediately that the author's marketing know-how leaves something to be desired.

What's your first reaction to that name? Positive or negative?

"Duct tape" suggests a temporary patch-up job using something designed for another purpose, because that was all you had available at the moment.

You want to learn how to market like that?

This is an effort at positioning - suggesting what something is by reference to something else the person is familiar with. Like "7-Up, the Un-Cola" or "Guerilla Marketing."

It's just a BAD effort. If you want to be associated with something, you better associate with something people have a positive attitude towards.

Of course the author meant to suggest a completely different concept.

But in using positioning, you have to work with the concepts your audience actually has.

You don't want duct tape marketing, you want effective marketing for the long haul.

I read a lot of marketing books.

A major reason I started this blog is I couldn't find a really good general marketing book for the small business owner.

Someone with perhaps 10 or 20 employees, with at most one full-time person in marketing.

Someone who isn't themselves a marketing professional and doesn't have time to become one.

Someone who doesn't have the time to keep up with the unbelievable pace of change especially in the world of online marketing.

Someone who doesn't know who to trust and has probably been burned over and over again buying marketing services that sure sounded good.

Someone who needs better marketing and so keeps trying.

Someone who could use quick, easy to understand guidance he can trust.

That, by the way, pretty well describes our typical client. It also describes probably 80% of all the businesses out there.

There are tons of marketing books for small businessmen. Most of them are really designed for somewhat larger companies, with maybe 25 to 100 employees. Most are focused on some specific aspect of marketing rather than the subject as a whole, or they have some angle on the subject rather than being a practical tool for the business owner.

The ones that are general books that try and cover the whole subject aren't really very good.

Guerilla Marketing and Duct Tape Marketing are a couple of examples. Both have a lot of good material. Both also are hard to read, make mistakes and leave out important material.

Hopefully I'm doing better.

I call this blog "Market or Die" first of all because, that's the truth, and secondly, because I'm trying to serve the small businessman who has that same viewpoint.

And the subtitle should really be "Everything The Small Business Owner Needs to Know to Make Marketing Work, Even Though He Has a Very Limited Budget and No Spare Time."

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There's a new initiative from the various industry groups involved in email marketing.

These include the Better Business Bureau, American Advertising Federation and Direct Marketing Association amongst others.

This includes an opt-out website and an "advertising option icon" that websites can display to indicate they subscribe to the recommended practices.

I think this is an effort to deal with the increasing nervousness about spam and hackers and the fact that it can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That has contributed to decreasing effectiveness of "newsletter sign-up" type offers on websites - or anything that requires a consumer to give a website their email address.

Whether this new effort takes hold - or is effective - remains to be seen.

Google has dozens of single-topic blogs. They also roll out new applications and features at a mad rate, which are typically announced on the most appropriate blog or blogs.

Now they have a blog specifically for such, called Google New, "The one place to find everything new from Google."

It has, by the way, a terrific video introduction to Google Instant (hint: Bob Dylan stars in it).

In September, no premium website hosting service we provided was down for more than 5 minutes over the course of the entire month.

The average uptime was 99.997%.

(Sites are checked automatically every five minutes. If they don't respond within 15 seconds it counts as an outage. Outages are automatically reported to us by email and cell phone text message, 24/7. I didn't get woken up once in September.)