Many times I've cautioned you against imitating what Big Brands do in their advertising.

It's true, marketing at the small business level is very different. But there is one area where you can reliably do the same things the Big Guys are doing, and win:

Email Marketing.

It's worthwhile subscribing to some of these just for tips. Newegg, Omaha Steaks, Groupon are some examples of companies whose email broadcasts are a model of "How to Do it."

Here are some points to look at. Some of them apply only to promotional broadcasts, if yours are primarily informational, use what does apply.

1. Subject Line. These are always very well thought-out, to create interest. Usually they offer a discount. They also avoid certain words that trigger spam filters (you can Google that).

2. Layout. Simple but eye-catching. No more than two columns. A relatively narrow width, so even if you can't see the whole thing in your preview pane, you can see the meat of it. and of course, it matches the branding of the website.

3. Use of Imagery. They are big on imagery without depending on it - since many people will not see the images until they click to download them.

4. Links. LOTS of links you can click on to go to their website. Even if they all go to the home page, they seem to offer different things.

5. Unsubscribe. Very easy unsubscribe, at bottom of the screen. In most cases, they now offer a "partial unsubscribe" such as to receive emails less often, or on fewer topics.

and of course....

6. Message Continuation. When you arrive on the website, the offer or item in the email is right in front of you, in the same words as the email.

Mark Twain is supposed to have said: "Julius Caesar is dead, Shakespeare is dead, Napoleon is dead, Abraham Lincoln is dead, and I am far from well myself . . .''

The same can be said for products and companies. They don't last forever.

What is one to do?

First of all, "Make hay while the sun shines." When you have something good going, push the heck out of it. Who knows how long it will last.

Second, stay alert and flexible! If the buggy whip manufacturers had switched to selling driving gloves back when Horseless Carriages first started selling like crazy.... well, they would probably still be in business.

Third, realize that change also means opportunity.

Quite a few millionaires emerged from the ashes of the Great Depression. Japan was all but destroyed by World War II. Out of the rubble and chaos, some of the world's greatest companies emerged - Toyota, Sony, Nissan, others.

I guarantee that the major recession we are finally (hopefully) now coming out of, has created huge opportunities.

If you can see a need not being filled, and work out a way to satisfy that need - and to make your solution known - you could have the next Google or Facebook.

There will be a next Google. It won't be a better search engine, probably, but it will be just as obvious, through a rear view mirror.

It's the geniuses who can see those opportunities now, who will be household names, two or three or five years from now.

A primary use has emerged for Twitter (NOT as a marketing or PR tool).

It's for keeping up on what's happening.

Marketing in general is a very fast moving field and Internet Marketing evolves so rapidly it is a real challenge to keep up. With a few Twitter follows, I'm sure nothing is passing me by.

Here are the key Twitter accounts for me (in no particular order):

1. @SEngineLand - SearchEngineLand is one of the two or three best and most reliable sources of information on the world of search.

2. @SEWatch - Search Engine Watch - Another top source for What's Happening with Google and the gang, plus (usually) reliable advice.

3. @Mashable - "Social Media News and Web Tips" - one of the giants of the Internet with a huge following.

4. @TechCrunch - A good source on Bleeding Edge start-ups, technology and data.

5. @PewInternet - Always insightful, sometimes stunning survey information on usage, habits, etc.

6. @Google - Official Google Twitter feed. Important announcements will appear here.

7. @MattCutts - Google's main spokesperson for Search.

Now that is only seven - and between them, they keep me at least 90% informed on what is happening in Search, Social Media, the world of Mobile, and other aspects of Internet Marketing.

Not bad.

FB now gets more page views than Google.

That makes it a tremendously appealing target for marketers.

How to make it work is the big question.

Answers ARE emerging. But don't expect the dust to settle for a while.

If marketing through FB interests you, here's a new report to help guide your experimentation:

Facebook Traffic vs. Website Traffic

It IS experimenting, you know. So don't just do something and forget about it. Do something, monitor statistics, tinker with it, throw it out and start over if needed.

Facebook, the New Marketing Frontier.

This is a subject I keep coming back to. It is important. And we see it constantly violated.

All marketing efforts should be consistent in look, message, and text (tone, as well as exact wording of key phrases).

There are two major aspects to this.

First of all, consistency in your advertising gives you the benefit of repetition. After a while they start to notice your ads. It takes repetition to do that. Hardly anyone notices an ad the first time it appears.

It also means you won't be competing with yourself. It can literally happen that consumers think there are two or more companies advertising in your industry when they are all you.

This consistency must apply across ALL media. Print ads, Yellow Pages, TV, radio, Internet, billboards, direct mail, etc. - they all become part of a whole, building awareness and an impression with your target market.

The second major angle is consistency through the steps of the marketing chain. That means that your website, sales materials, signage, even on-hold messages, every "touch point" continues that same look, message, and wording.

Tests have shown numbers like a 250% improvement in a website performance when this rule is followed. After all, they clicked through to your website (or entered the URL) because of the look and promise of the ad they were responding to.

Food for thought.

I've written before on the perils of do-it-yourself click ad (Google AdWords) campaigns.

You can easily waste a lot of money that way. In fact I regularly talk to people who have wasted a lot of money to discover this is not an amateur activity.

The same can be said for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

There is a lot to know, tools needed for research, and a considerable time commitment to develop high search engine rankings.

Even if trying to do that yourself doesn't waste a lot of money - it can waste months with little result. And as has been said, time is money.

Marketing is such an intangible. You can't touch it, and it is often hard to make the connection between sales and marketing.

Plus there are legions of con artists and amateurs promising the moon and delivering.... less.

It's easy to conclude that Internet Marketing is not a profession, requiring study, practice, know-how and thought.

It is and it does.

Don't believe me. But do remember: I told you so.

FastF has won new awards for two of our websites.

GQ Concrete Design and Med Peds Docs of Sarasota both won 2011 Graphic Design USA American Web Awards.

Congratulations to our designer Pat Floyd!

Two reasons black hat SEO (trying to trick Google) is living dangerously:

It is easier than ever to report someone and get Google to take action.

Magazines and newspapers like the New York Times are in competition to expose violators.

Of course there is the third reason, sooner or later Google's algorithm changes will catch up with you. But you could make a lot of hay in the meantime.

Here's an article that is opposed to reporting on competitors:

The Coming Tide of SEO Tattletales

I disagree. There's too much money at stake, and without proactive efforts, someone could survive a long time just under the radar screen.

The only method of disadvantaging bad practices, that stands a chance of really discouraging them, is if SEOs police the industry themselves.

The author of this article is concerned about negatively affecting the reputation of the SEO industry.

Apparently he hasn't noticed that the reputation of our industry is right now somewhere between that of Congress and Bernie Madoff.

If we all get busy, we just might stand a chance to clean up our industry and start to build some trust amongst prospective clients.

Here's instructions and a link for reporting:

Reporting Spam

SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) like to talk about "Conversion Optimization."

In short, increasing the percentage of visitors to the website who become customers (online stores) or otherwise take action.

Of course calling it "conversion optimization" makes it sound like SEO whereas this is a completely different subject.

But, more people these days recognize that it is not enough to get a visitor to your website. What happens when they get there? And SEOs are jumping on the bandwagon.

Used to be the subject was LPO (Landing Page Optimization) which only dealt with the one page your visitors arrived on.

I have a fundamental beef with these terms. Oh yes, I appreciate the idea built-in to them that these are measurable. Higher percentages = better.

But I still think it is missing the elephant in the room.

Which is that the subject is really "The Visitor Experience."

That is an organic whole of everything the visitor sees, thinks and experiences as they go through your website - which ideally adds up to sales.

Think in terms of improving the visitor's experience of your website. You'll get rising numbers AND you will avoid a lot of stupid errors.

Put yourself in the visitors' shoes, look at your bounce rates and you can SEE what the problem is. Bad experience = visitors jumping overboard.

You see my point?

People often comment on the main menu navigation on our website. It is designed to be different, unique and yet functional. That was very carefully calibrated to be edgy yet obvious.

Stepping away from the usual in navigation schemes is dangerous.

People have expectations on where to find your menu and what it will look like.

As soon as you do something different, you run the risk that you may completely lose your visitor. Because they didn't immediately see how to navigate the site, they are gone.

Here's a collection of unusual navigation schema that prove my point.

26 Websites With Unusual Navigation

Different? Innovative? Yes.

Fun? Creative? Interesting? You bet!

And yet almost all of them should be considered complete failures because they are going to confuse the visitor.

Make the menu fit the look of the website, make it interesting and appropriate.

But satisfy your visitors' expectations. To do otherwise is to operate at your peril.

If you aren't on page one of a search result, pretty much you are nowhere. Only a tiny percentage of searches ever go onto page two.

It takes a very important, high-volume search term to make being on page two do much. There are situations (with tremendously high-volume search terms) where even being lower than page two can keep a small business afloat.

But mostly, page one is the Holy Grail you are seeking.

How much difference does your position on page one make?

Generally, the higher the position the better. Except organic listings are more clicked on than paid listings - by a wide margin, in most cases usually 3 or 4 to 1.

Beyond that, it gets controversial. I've seen a lot of studies I don't believe.

Here's one that could be true. In a new study, the number 2 paid position got more attention than the #1 position, and the #3 got as much as the #1 spot.

Amazing. But still - does that translate into more clicks? The study doesn't say.

On the other hand I've seen multiple studies claiming that the #1 spot in organic listings gets around 1/3 of ALL clicks.

I don't believe it. We've seen too many results that indicate the drop-off as you go down the page is way more gradual than that.

Absolutely this kind of number is going to be true IN CERTAIN SEARCHES.

But let's take the situation that most people are in. A small or medium-sized business, selling something locally or in a niche market, where the competition is other small and medium-sized businesses.

That's WAY different than someone searching for a certain brand name or company. Or who is looking for information, not looking to buy something.

With nearly all of our clientele, we see a gradual rise of traffic to the site as they move up the rankings from bottom of page one, to top half, to a #2 or #1 position.

Of course it is better to be #1. Keep working at it until you get there.

All I'm saying is if you are #6 on an important high-volume search term, take a win. It is probably generating you a lot of valuable visitors to your site.

A year ago, Twitter was all the buzz. At that time it was really only useful as a marketing tool for celebrities.

Things have changed.

It has now reached a point where it is a useful tool for SOME (a small percentage of businesses).

What makes it useful is it is a low-friction method of spreading ideas. Short, so fast reading. A couple of clicks to forward it to your followers.

But it only works in situations and with ideas interesting enough to spread virally.

Market penetration is still only about 9% of US Internet users, so you see the limitations.

Nevertheless, it is worth exploring.

When you do, you need to know how to go about it. Twitter has been around long enough now so there's a good understanding of what to do and what not.

An excellent write-up (click on the links especially the one on a perfect tweet, for more specifics):

40 Tried and Tested Twitter Tips

Happy tweeting.

Google has many official blogs devoted to different subjects and markets.

Oddly enough, they've had no blog specifically on Search.

Welcome to the new Google Blog, Inside Search.

Every time search habits are studied, they find 3 or 4 times as many people click on organic listings as on click ads. This despite the fact that click ads are the very first listings to appear.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. The click ads show less information (just fewer words). That gives a searcher less basis for deciding what to click on.

This has been reinforced even more by the appearance of "integrated place pages" for local listings. The map listing and organic search listing appear together, often with a thumbnail and a red balloon. You get one giant result that grabs the lion's share of visitors' eyeballs.

2. Most people know you can purchase position with click ads, but have to earn your position in organic listings. They have learned to trust Google because the high ranking organic results tend to deliver what they are looking for. That isn't always the case with paid ads.

Last month Google launched Instant Previews for click ads. Meaning you can now see a preview of the page you will be taken to, BEFORE you click.

As this article explains, it gives searchers a better opportunity to scree click ads. That potentially increases click through rates - IF the landing page has an appropriate and professional look and content:

A Game Change for Landing Pages

And, in fact, we have seen Click Through Rates (CTR) rising for many of our click ad campaigns.

Will click ads achieve complete equality with organic listings? I doubt it. But this can help.

Have an online store?

If you DON'T have free shipping, you're missing a good bet.

Customers like it. It simplifies purchasing and seems like a discount (even though they know that the shipping charge is built into the item price).

Amazon, by far the largest online retailer (more than 10% of all online sales in North America) gives free shipping on almost all orders (just spend $25).

Is free shipping common? How about almost 50%:

Almost Half of All Online Orders Now Include Free Shipping

Consider it.

Here's one of the biggest proofs that the Internet is continuing to change.

Netflix is now responsible for a higher percentage of Internet usage than any other source, in North America - almost 30%. With other streaming entertainment sources, plus file sharing, they account for 2/3 of all traffic.

For a comparison, all web browsing only totals 1/6th of all traffic volume. That's less than half of what it was, percentage-wise, in 2009.

You can safely assume the amount of traffic from web browsing has increased. So total traffic volume has probably tripled in less than two years.

What does this mean?

Traffic limitations on accounts - meaning you are going to pay extra to your monthly Internet Service Provider if you are watching a lot of movies online.

Continued work on Internet infrastructure to handle the volume. That particularly includes higher speed connections to homes.

Anyone out there still on dial-up?

(Here's the article I got these figures from): Netflix Largest Internet Traffic

Google has, for months now, been putting a heavy emphasis on quality of search results.

They've even gone so far as to announce an algorithm change at the time it was made (the so-called "Panda" update).

Now Google's head of Search Quality, Amit Singhal, has written a blog post giving a detailed series of questions to ask yourself. He of course states these aren't Google's algorithm signals. They are something even more valuable.

A guide to what Google thinks makes quality content, quality:

More Guidance on Building High-Quality Sites

The essence of "White-Hat" SEO is to try and work WITH Google and how it thinks. If you do that, over time, as Google improves its algorithms, your rankings will tend to improve or at worst maintain.

And if you are having ranking problems, this list is a good place to start.

See how you stack up against them.

According to the most recent study, 57% of your visitors will be gone if it takes 3 seconds tor your page to load.

There can be many reasons for a slow load time.

Here's a nice service. Plug in a URL and it'll tell you how long it took to load the page. Click on "waterfall chart" and you'll see exactly what on the page is taking so long. Mouseover a slow time and get more details on why that element took so long to load. Then you can do something about it.

Test How Fast A Webpage Loads

You can test in different browsers and from different locations. At this time it doesn't have the newly released versions of browsers, but you can test on the most widely used ones.

That also give a great comparison of which browsers are fast and which slow.

Google states they use some 200 different "signals" or factors in their algorithm computation that determines your search engine rankings.

Of course they don't say what they all are - though some they have stated, some are obvious and some have been figured out by the large crowd of us professional Google Watchers out there.

Here are a couple of efforts to compile a complete list. They are from two of the best websites where professionals hang out, the lists don't agree, and there are DEFINITELY things on these lists that just aren't true.

Yes, the lists aren't new (both date from late 2009), but things haven't changed THAT much.

So keep on guessing folks....

200 Parameters in Google Algorithm

What Are the 200 Variables?

How fast does Google update its results?

That depends.

For the average website, about 3 weeks typically is enough for Google to have re-crawled and indexed your entire site.

For news, it is vastly different.

Here's an excellent report on how Google responded to the news of Bin Laden's death (and a comparison to how it operated 10 years ago):

Google & The Death of Osama Bin Laden

Quite a difference.