Marketing is simply talking about something in a way that lets others know that it is important to you. If your child is important to you then you will talk about your child. If your spouse means something to you it will not be a burden to talk about your spouse. If your car is significant you won't pass up the opportunity to talk about it.

That which is important to us will be spoken of. Since this is true one has to wonder if some online businesses really consider their website business to be important.

Maybe they simply haven't done the math and they don't see that business + marketing = success. Maybe they wrongly think that business + website = success. A website is a tool, and marketing is the means of getting people to use the tool.

In an online environment there are a variety of ways that you can ‘talk' about your website. If you have pride in your business idea then you need to find ways to get the word out.

Far too many businesses relegate marketing to something that is unattainable. It is something they don't understand and don't know how to do so they simply toss that part of their business plan to the side and hope someone will drop by and buy.

I heard about a specialized library recently. It had been in existence for more than a decade. Yet I was unaware of its existence. The organization behind the library simply relied on word of mouth advertising. While I'm all for this type of advertising it is only one phase of marketing. I wonder where the library would be today if they had made a concerted marketing effort.

Beyond telling people why something is important to you it is also important in marketing to let others know why your idea should be important to them. This is also a missing element in most marketing plans.

It may be possible for businesses to let people know that the business is important to them, but neglect to help customers understand why they should consider the business important, too.

If you can't demonstrate a reasonable outline for your visitors to consider then you can bet they won't expend much energy in trying to discover that truth on their own.

Most site visitors want a reason to believe in your site, but they don't want to hunt for it like a miner seeking gold. If you can't articulate a reason to believe they won't believe, they won't care and they will exit your site quickly.

The mathematics of marketing require simple equations, but many business owners insist on using inaccurate marketing ideas in an attempt to understand their marketing goals. We wouldn't settle for this in accounting for our business profits so why do we insist on ignoring marketing math in business?

I think the primary reason is it's easy to avoid those things that make us uncomfortable. Face it, marketing can make anyone uncomfortable simply because it can seem foreign to our sensibilities or that if we use marketing ideas we will be thought of as pushy.

Give everyone a reason to believe.