I’m certain that you market your business. But, do you advertise your business?

I’ve heard so many web-based small business owners do their best to avoid using the word advertise that I’ve begun to wonder why. I’ve worked with enough clients offline to know that it’s not small business owners in general. Offline businesses use advertising constantly to get the word out about their business.

But it seems different for online small businesses. Somehow it seems that the word advertise is unclean or dishonest or something. While I haven’t quite put my finger on it, it is obvious that online small business tend to look at advertising differently. They often don’t consider placing ads – even Google Adwords.

This strikes me as odd because a few, well-placed advertisements can often drive far more than business than their cost.

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A couple weeks ago I got into a nice, heated debate with a friend over how manipulated we are by media – specifically commercials.

My friend’s position was that you’re manipulated only if you’re ‘weak of mind.’ He believes that if you’re aware that someone’s trying to manipulate you with subliminal messages, it doesn’t have any affect on you.

My opinion is quite the opposite. I feel that advertising companies are highly advanced at subtly manipulating us through constant subliminal messaging. Those subliminal messages, then, set us up for being highly suggestive to whatever stimulus is meant to get us to buy. Think about the last time a simple conversation with someone brought up the desire to have a Big Mac.

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Did you hear that there’s a new magazine specifically for us bloggers (and podcasters)? Yeah, that’s right. Blogger & Podcaster officially launched its first issue a few days back.

I’ve poked throught the first issue, which features our good friend Robert Scoble talking about podcasting (nice article, by the way). There’s also excerpts from a pretty nice discussion between Chris Pirillo, Technorati’s David Sifry and Tim Bourquin, founder of the Podcast and New Media Expo on the social media’s influence on our modern lives.

I found a bunch of other good articles as well from people like Leo Laporte, Rob Walch and Shel Israel, among others. I enjoyed the magazine very much.
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Yesterday I wrote about my experience with the 2000 Bloggers meme, in which I cited Tony Hung’s ‘2000 Bloggers’ is Over – An Exercise in Link ‘Building’ At Its Most Useless and Pathetic. My post and some great comments have created quite a buzz.
Now I don’t think that 2000 Bloggers, or any meme is pathetic, or even useless. But I do agree with some of Tony’s points. What I question is the point of using memes to inflate my Technorati ranking. I simplly don’t know what the point is.
If you read what Doug Karr wrote in 2000 Bloggers Gaming Technorati? Waaaaah!, you’ll see he’s not apologizing for how memes are helping grow his blog. He says memes are…

…absolutely no different from sharing your blogroll, trading links with someone, giving away merchandise for mentioning your blog, linkbaiting, “Make me a Technorati Favorite” button, ‘optimizing’ for search engines, Digging, …. or even BUYING your Technorati rank by advertising on other sites. John Chow, for example, continues to utilize any and all methods to give his rank a boost.
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