“It’s not your older brother’s or sister’s Internet.” Ten years ago you could put up a website for your small business without much thought or effort expended on it, and people would come to it. The competition was small and website design and marketing was rudimentary. That’s all changed. Web page design is much more complex, search engine optimization is essential, web copy will keep your visitors on your site, and search engine marketing will bring in the visitors and bucks.

A new study by Greg Sterling at Opus Research found of those respondents to survey, 59 percent do not do online marketing. It’s a short article–worth the read and worth thinking about.

Are you an email forwarding fanatic? One of those people who forwards jokes and YouTube links to all the friends in your email address book. I have a friend who every morning sits down in front of her computer with a cup of coffee, opens her email, and automatically forwards any jokes, outrageous photos, or latest Paris Hilton scandals links to me–and according to the email recipient list–about 2 dozen other closest friends. Don’t do that. Most likely she is in dozens of email address books of other email fanatics. How else could she find so much on the web to forward during one cup of coffee?

I don’t mind an occasional joke or crazy photo, especially when the sender knows it will tickle the particular kind of sense of humor I have, but I do get annoyed with the shotgun approach to forwarding anything that comes into an inbox.

The rapid spread of viruses that such practices enable aside, errors and offenses can happen. Take for example another friend of mine who worked for a religious organization. While at work, she would spend a good deal of her time reading email jokes sent to her by other members of her “fanatic forwarders” club, and relay them to all her friends she had so efficiently consolidated into a mailing list for just such purposes. One day a joke arrived in her inbox that was particularly sexually graphic. In her zeal to send it out and garner favor from all those in her “email joke mailing list” she hit the wrong link and sent the offensive joke not only to her fellow workers, but everyone on the organization’s official email mailing list. I can only imagine how much apologizing and explaining she had to do.

Here’s a reminder to small businesses in The Florida Keys who would like to be listed in our Internet directory. Go to www.florida-keys-pages.com/ to find out how to get your small business website added to our directory.