Reading the day’s headlines, one may get the impression that succeeding online means being the biggest company in your industry. Or the one with the most recognizable name. But neither of those is true.

The key to succeeding online is to develop a niche. It doesn’t need to be a huge niche. It can be a narrowly targeted niche. But it has to be a niche that you can develop and capitalize on. It also has to be large enough to sustain a business model around.

Preferably, your niche will have no competition. It would be nice to get into a niche with no competition and with lots of potential for profit. But even if there is competition, it has to be a niche where you have some skill and expertise and that you can turn into a reputation for yourself.

You don’t have to be big. You just have to be good.

Google rose to prominence on its own strengths. Facebook too. But Bing has largely sought to increase its share of the search market through strategic partnerships – first with Yahoo!, which hasn’t exactly panned out yet, and now, with Facebook.

This will be an interesting partnership if it ever sees the light of day. Google owns YouTube, which is in the top 5 most trafficked websites. Bing and Facebook, of course, will still be wholly owned enterprises so their relationship will be more of a partnership, but Facebook is the second most trafficked website online. Bing falls in somewhere in the top 10. Are you starting to see what’s going on?

If Bing powers all of Facebook’s searches then that will likely increase its share of search. Will it be enough to compete with Google?

That’s a question that remains to be answered. My first response is likely not, but if Bing gets significant enough of an increase in searches from its relationship with Facebook then it could at least make a little bit of a jump on Google. The big question is, how much?

If you’ve been watching Facebook over the years then you know it grew from relative obscurity to the second most trafficked site on the Internet. It didn’t happen overnight.

From its childhood years when it was only the province of college students keeping up with each other to today when it enjoys being a business haven, Facebook has grown into one of the most popular sites by offering a way to connect and network with like-minded people. Social networking has come of age.

I think it’s just a matter of time before Facebook overcomes Google as the Internet’s most used site. It could happen. And if you haven’t started using the site yourself for some business networking then you are behind the curve. Facebook is soon to do something powerful and it’s going to shock the world. I’m watching, are you?

One marketing tip that small business owners can take advantage of and that doesn’t take long or a lot of resources to do is to resurrect old content. By that I simply mean re-introducing it to your networks.

Let’s say you have a blog post is a couple of years old. It got some immediate attention when you wrote it because it was relevant and well written. A lot of people liked it. But time moved on and the popularity tapered off. However, it still gets a little bit of attention now and then. That’s evidence that the content is still valuable. Why not pull it up and promote it some?

Take that old content that is still valuable and that gained some initial popularity and re-promote it. Tweet it or share it on your social networks and drive some new traffic to it. You might also write an update – a new blog post – and link back to the original so that any new blog readers and subscribers you have can discover an old gem they never experienced in the first place. Your old readers will appreciate the reminder.

Sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to resurrect old content for newer audiences.

What if you knew that 20% of the e-mail that you sent to opt-in subscribers wasn’t reaching its destination. Would you change the way you look at your ROI? According to recent statistics from Return Path, you should.

This poses two issues for e-mail marketers:

• How can you increase deliverability?
• What is the correct measure for determining ROI?

Obviously, you can’t count bounced e-mail as deliverable. The problem seems to be, however, that we’re all getting more bounces than we believe we are because some of the e-mail we think is getting through isn’t. And we’re not getting an undeliverable report on the return. That most definitely affects ROI.

As an example, if you send 100 e-mails and you have a bounce rate of 10% then there’s an additional 20% that you should include in the bounce rate. Instead of 90 deliverables you should only count 72 deliverables. That’s a 72% deliverability rate. If you close an average of 25 e-mails from that 100 then you don’t have a 25% conversion rate nor is it 27.7%. Rather, your conversion rate is 25/72, or 34.7%.

Why is that significant. It’s very significant because if you can figure out a way to decrease the undeliverables then you’ll make more sales. Now the question for savvy e-mail marketers is, How?

SEO.pn asks (paraphrased), What’s the most important thing about Internet marketing?

Well, there are so many things to think about that it’s really hard to come up with just one thing that is important. I mean, do you say that SEO is the most important thing? How about driving traffic to your site? Or traffic conversions? Maybe your take is to leverage social media for maximum performance. It’s a bit of a fill-in-the-blank question.

But I do believe there is one thing that is more important than everything else. No, it’s not SEO. And it’s not social media. Nor does it have anything to do with traffic or conversions.

The most important thing about marketing online as a small business is to be true to yourself and your customers. You may be doing business online, but you are still doing business and whether you are an Internet-only business or a brick-and-mortar business with an online presence, it’s still all about building relationships. So, my one tip would be this: Build your brand with honesty and integrity.

Whether your are engaging your audience through social media, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, or some other method online, being true to yourself and your customers is the most important thing. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter how good you are at anything else.

Google has two keyword research tools (actually three, but I won’t count the Google AdWords internal toolbar) and you should be aware of how to use them.

The first tool is the Google AdWords External Toolbar. This is essentially the Google AdWords internal toolbar except that you don’t have to be logged into your Google AdWords account to use it. It’s a great tool if you are just doing cursory research that you don’t think you are going to use right away or you don’t have a Google AdWords account and want to do some keyword research.

You can generate ideas in one of two ways – using descriptive words and phrases or by associating them with a website. If you are generating a keyword list for a specific website that have already built then be sure to check the box for Website content.

Next, enter some keywords in the box and check “Use synonyms”. You can also filter your keywords to exclude unwanted words that you don’t want to target. For instance, if you are searching for keywords related to “widgets” but don’t want anything related to “red widgets” then you can exclude the keyword “red” or the phrase “red widgets”.

After clicking the box to generate keywords, you’ll see your keyword list pop up with the following columns:

• Advertiser Competition
• Local Search Volume (month specific)
• Global Monthly Search Volume

The match type will also be set to broad. You can change it to exact, phrase, or negative. I recommend starting with broad and you can narrow it down as you do more research. You can also expand the columns that are displayed, but if you aren’t planning to do any PPC advertising then the other columns won’t help you much.

You can use this list to see which of your keywords are the most popular from month to month and to judge what your competition for those keywords is. It’s a good tool to use.

Google’s Search-based keyword tool is slightly different. With this tool you can actually get more specific in your research initiatives. Since the data is based on actual searches rather than broad research data it should be more accurate, but that doesn’t mean it will benefit everyone. This tool is a great tool if you already have a website built and you want to expand your list of keywords for specific pages on your site.

The search-based keyword tool allows you to compare keywords generated for a specific web page on your site and the keywords in your Google AdWords account. If you are currently running a PPC campaign then you can find new keywords to target. It is a great tool for showing where you might be missing opportunities.

I challenge you to learn more about these to keyword research tools. Use them when the time is right.

If your website allows people to add content, leave comments or fill out forms of any kind then I highly recommend that you use some kind of spam catcher to prevent spammers from introducing dangerous content to your site visitors.

It’s a sad fact that most spam is generated by bots, not humans. Therefore, if you allow a doorway for their malicious content then you are likely to be an easy target and you’ll receive more spam comments than you can ever filter through and kill on your own. That’s why you need CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” There are a variety of these tests online, but they all have one thing in common: They are easier for humans to fill in correctly than bots.

Because CAPTCHAs are difficult for bots to fill in, they filter out the bot generated spam comments so that you don’t have to. That doesn’t mean you won’t get any spam. You’ll still get human generated spam, but there is a lot less of that than the bot generated spam. Get the CAPTCHA. You’ll thank me later.

Another global service has gone local. This time it’s Twitter Trends.

Earlier this week Twitter announced that Twitter Trends has gone local and it’s been rolled out to everyone. Everyone, that is, within one of several major metropolitan areas. If you’re not in one of those areas then you see a message promising that they’re working on it.

This is good new. Facebook has had the ability for local people to network with each other for quite a while now. Twitter has had the ability as well, but by and large it is seen as a global mass communication tool. It most certainly has local applications and local small businesses in need of such a tool can now gain easier access to local information to help them in their communications. Count this as a thumbs up.

It seems that some media companies don’t like people linking to them. They want to charge to be linked to. The history of the Web is such that website owners have always linked to content on other pages – ones they don’t own – without needing permission or paying for the privilege to do so. The Web is the public square.

That does not mean that the Web is public domain. You can’t steal or appropriate whatever you want for your own purposes just because it’s out there. Intellectual property rights still apply online.

But where is the line?

I think the line is clearly intent. Are you being helpful and does your link benefit the site you are linking to without detracting or impinging on their right to profit from their own content? If so then I’d say you are good for your link.

Linking has always been seen as a form of payment. When you link to another website you are essentially benefiting them in the search engines because that link could be counted by Google, or another search engine, in its search ranking algorithm and could potentially benefit the other site by pushing it up in search rankings. But you are benefiting the other site as well in another way. Traffic.

If you send traffic to another website because you link to it then that’s payment. That new traffic could very well purchase something.

So I really don’t understand these media companies that are complaining about being linked to. And, remember, if it’s true that you are benefiting those websites you link to then it’s true that sites linking to you are providing you with unpaid benefits as well. Why complain?