I came across Joe Pulizzi’s blog post about Why it’s bad to be a big company (and the marketing opportunities that arise for small companies) the other day and think it’s a great subject. Especially at this time, when internet marketing still hasn’t found its way in some of the world’s major companies’ marketing strategies, being small can still have several advantages. Although big companies usually have big budgets, a broad range of knowledge, huge networks, lots of content and also a brand advantage, smaller companies and even individuals have shown that these benefits are not always the key to success. Besides the fact that large companies not always know how to use these benefits in their advantage, there are also a few places where small businesses tend to win most of the battles.

Big vs Small; image by Somun

Speed

If you’re small, you’re able to make quick decisions. There’s no need to fill in action request forms, organize a two week lobby and there’s no other time consuming, decision slowing process necessary. If you spot a trend, you often see only small companies respond to this trend. Big companies follow much later, because of their long lines and exhausting processes.

Speed is not only an offensive factor, but smaller companies can use their size in their defense as well. When someone discusses the brand of a large company, this company usually has to decide if they should respond. When this decision finally has been made, the right division should be determined (communication, PR, customer service, …) and a plan will be made. Once this plan is ready to get executed, the discussion will most likely have either exploded or died.
Smaller companies, on the other hand, are able to react fast. In stead of damage repair, these companies may even be able to turn the bad press into good press. What’s not to like about a company that responds to (and solves!) critique really quick, right?

Centralization

Big companies have lots of different divisions. Each division has its own goals, which means that there are different points of interest. While division A has goal X and division B wants to reach point Y, a small business only has one or a few different goals. This means that you can work towards the same goal, in stead of discussing and finding some point in between.

One of the disadvantages of being a small company is that you have to be very picky with selecting new people. You can’t afford it to hire 20 different specialists, but you’ll have to settle with only a few employees with a broader range of knowledge. While it can be very hard to find these people, having only a few employees can also be an advantage, because it’s a centralization of knowledge. In stead of organizing meetings with each of the 20 specialists (who also have their own agenda and focus) for every decision that has to be made, you can decide things on your own or with your small team.

A centralization of knowledge also means control. You probably won’t end up fixing other peoples mistakes, such as adding a noindex tag to the website’s homepage or explaining the web design team why launching that new 100% flash design probably wasn’t a good idea. You know about the company’s plans, so you hopefully won’t come across surprises like that.

Passion

This probably is one of the most important advantages that a small business has over a big company. In stead of being goal or wallet driven, smaller companies tend to have a spirit and passion that’s above average. You can find people that enjoy the fact that they’re checking out new trends even in the weekends or on a holiday and that are always looking for things that might improve a process at the base of almost every small company. Real dedication, commitment and drive is what made lots of small companies big and is the key to success.

This post could have been about general marketing, but I didn’t title it “Big Company Internet Marketing” for no reason. At this moment, knowledge is one of the factors where small companies can still easily outperform the giants. PR divisions that don’t know anything about the effect of links, web designers that still don’t design SE friendly and copywriters that don’t do their keyword research will soon be a thing of the past. Until then, use it to your benefit. Like I mentioned before, being big -obviously- has its advantages, but it really isn’t that hard for a small company to exploit the points where they’re better.

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Warning notice: while this post is easy to digest, it also contains a lot of crap.

I’m sure almost every search marketer has been in the situation of thinking “so how am I going to tell this friend/ prospect/ client that his website is crap in a polite way?” in at least more than one occasion. Some people are in the situation of being able to decline such opportunities while others even publicly talk about the fact that they won’t do work for certain websites. However, numerous companies will happily accept to build links for a crappy website, because they only see the big bag of money that this new client will be bringing in. For this last group, I’ll be diving into the art of getting links for crappy websites today.

          Image: Ashahi Beer’s Golden Crap, by chrissam42

This starts with analyzing the link profiles of the competitors of the crappy website. Neglect the good links from high authority domains. Let’s face it: these sites probably won’t be linking to your client, so you’ll just have to focus on websites that look like or are just plain crap and settle with links on resources page #4. Together with 99 more crappy links.

- After this, you can submit your crap to dozens of SEO friendly directories that all look the same and almost instantly accept all kinds of crap. You’ll end up with a few links from AdSense overloaded pages that get crawled even less than a suncream salesman visits Norilsk, Siberia. But the website you’re promoting is still crap.

- You can try to create bait by painting your crap gold. You’ll be getting some attention and might even attract a few links from people saying “Hey, look over here, I’ve found golden crap!”. But it’s still crap.

- You can try to get people to write about or review your crap. The quality of the links you’ll gather usually correlates with the amount of money you’re able to pay, but it’ll only get you links of a certain quality level. These links will be from posts or pages stating “this company sells great crap, so check out their crap website!”. But it’s still crap.

Ok, I guess you get the point by now. My point is that you may have to think twice, if you’re planning on earning a quick buck by accepting nearly everything. You might fool search engines for a short while, but eventually, search engines will come to the same conclusion that the visitors of your client’s website have already came to: the website is crap and shouldn’t be ranking where it does.

In stead of promoting crap, make sure to start with improving the website, for example by changing the website structure, its layout or by adding quality articles. And I don’t mean adding 297 crappy turnkey articles, but quality stuff that people might actually enjoy reading and may be willing to link to.

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