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.

But the more interesting thing is watching how web-based small business owners avoid using the term altogether. Sure, they talk about marketing, but rarely about advertising. Why do you think that is?

Yet advertising is simply a part of marketing. The best, simple, explanation of the difference between marketing and advertising was written by Rick Cockrum some time back.

“Marketing is the sum of the activities you perform to get the word out about your business and attract the customers you want. Advertising is one marketing activity. It usually entails publishing paid announcements about your business. At our theatre we advertise in the local paper weekly. Our marketing consists of a website, word of mouth from our customers (our best marketing), involvement in local activities, public service functions, involvement with local business groups, (etc)… . You can see that advertising, while important, is only a small part of marketing.”

Rick goes on to suggest that you should “use both.”

I fully agree. I’m a huge – I mean huge – proponent of word-of-mouth marketing and client referrals. Yet it can be difficult to grow a successful business just by word-of-mouth. I’m not saying it can’t be done. Heck, I did it myself. But I know that the right ads in the right places can speed up the growth process immensely.

And advertisements work. No doubt about it. Otherwise Pepsi, McDonalds, Ford and every other company in the world wouldn’t spend the money on it. Even spam email works. And that’s basically what spam is – a paid advertisement sent to your inbox. What makes it spam is that you’ve not given the sender permission to email you about their product. Yet spam must work otherwise no one would be paying spammers to send their messages.

Advertising, for good or bad, simply works. That’s not the question.

The question? Is adverstising working for your business? If so, how; what sort of results have you gotten? If not, why not; what have you tried and how did it turn out?

And if you’ve not tried paid advertising on the web, why not? What keeps you from jumping in?

Let’s talk about it.

(note: image from Pink Ponk on Flickr, some rights reserved)

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.

So this weekend, oddly enough, I StumbledUpon this video. In it, a couple of advertising professionals are ‘hired’ to create an ad for a company’s pilot product. It’s nearly seven minutes long, but you have to watch it to the end to get understand what the film makers were trying to show.

[youtube qxMGClMeDKY]

So, what do you think? Are we highly subjective to advertising? To media? To what other sorts of stimuli? Or is this just all psycho-mumbo-jumbo?

Any experiences either way, yourself?

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.

But I really enjoyed the technology.

The eletronic version of Blogger & Podcaster uses Olive Software’s Active Magazine technology. The experience is amazing. When you first view Blogger & Podcaster your brought to the front cover, just as you were holding the magazine in your hand. Active Magazine simulates turning pages – so you get to experiences pages turning as though you’re holding the ‘real thing.’

But Blogger & Podcaster goes further than your print magazine can, yet. Some ads in the magazine include audio – and I found one video. Can you imagine being able to promote your business, service, book, product with not only your traditional print ad, but with interactive video as well? Really amazing.

The simulated page turning along with the audio/video features and live links to websites really made Blogger & Podcaster a fun and enjoyable experience for me. And, the articles were pretty good.

The electronic subscription is free (at least for now). The print version is $79 in the U.S. ($99 outside the U.S.). The print subscriptions seems a bit steep, especially when you consider the first issue was only 48 pages. Though publisher Larry Genkin said on BloggingPro,

I made the decision to charge for the print subscription to allow as many people as possible to have access to the magazine. If we would have given the print edition away for free like many trade publishers do, we would have had to cap circulation at around 10,000 before our printing and mailing costs would force us to have to charge advertising rates that would be to steep for what the industry can afford at this time. By offering the digital and podcast editions for free we can literally allow millions to have access to the content without having to significantly raise our advertising rates. Hope you understand.

Dave Taylor seems to think Blogger & Podcaster is doomed to certain failure. What do you think? Is it something you would read regularly?

…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.

Do I care? Absolutely NOT!

This is reality folks… nothing else. It pays to advertise, period. That said, advertising may gain you rank, influence, authority, and search engine placement… but it won’t keep them. In order maintain your rank, influence, authority, and search engine placement, you need to work on your content. Otherwise your site will become a revolving door of visitors and your ranking will go down the tubes.

What Doug says makes sense to me. I that there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to advertise/market your blog anywhere you can. And I certainly agree that it’s your blog’s content that will ‘convert’ your visitors to readers.

So my issues isn’t about the ‘how.’ It’s more about the ‘why?’ Why so much attention paid to my ranking in Technorati? I’ve read Making Common Sense of Link Counts and Technorati Ranking: Indepth & Explained and I get how the rankings get built. And I can certainly see a ‘prestige’ in having a high Technorati ranking.

But what does the Technorati ranking mean, really? Nowhere can I find good, clear, reliable information about how bloggers use the darn thing. So I’m uncertain why I’d put any emphasis on it to begin with. I guess I simply don’t understand how bloggers are using the Technorati ranking system. Are they evaluating other blogs based on this? I don’t know. I pay attention to my ranking and I do look at rankings for other blogs as well. But I’ve not used it as a litmus test for the blog’s relevance. I look for good content.

Maybe you can shead a little light on this Technorati Ranking thing. How do you use it? Both your own and looking at other blogs? What weight do you give it?