When most people talk to us about their marketing, they focus on advertising. While advertising is a part of the marketing mix, that's all it is. A part. Marketing is much bigger.

A better way to think about marketing is to envision a pyramid. Marketing is at the top clearly defining the direction of a business or organization while advertising and public relations are at the base supporting the marketing function.

As we drove by a hospital construction site today, we chuckled at Angelo Luppino's forklift, cement trucks and other heavy equipment. Luppino, a contractor in northern Wisconsin, has an unmistakeable brand identity: all of his equipment is painted pink. You can't miss his big, burly workers driving and working from pink trucks. And the pink trucks always elicit a response.

From Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

"When Alice came to a fork in the road she asked the Mad Hatter which road to take. 'Where are you going?' asked the Mad Hatter. 'I don't know,' replied Alice. 'Well then, it doesn't really matter which direction you go,' he said."

We are speaking to a room of small business owners, sole proprietors and entrepreneur-wanna-be's and see them fidgeting when we ask the dreaded planning questions:

* How many of you have all the business you need? (No hands go up.

I've been racking my brain to come up with a really great headline for an article. I know how important it is. Headlines are your "front line" to any market. It's the first thing the reader sees. It's your one chance to interest and influence your audience.

And they're tough to create.

Good headlines:
- Create excitement, anticipation and enthusiasm for more
- Ignite interest through concise, power-packed statements
- Attract more customers
- Pull readers into copy
- Boost your bottom line

Yet most business owners focus solely on copy and give little thought to headlines.

Creating win-win collaborations with media to get your story in the news requires time, energy and imagination. And, if you want to get in the limelight, it's something you have to learn as more and more editors struggle with limited time and resources and the "shrinking newsroom".

The American Birkebeiner, the largest cross country ski race in North America, is a good example.

It used to be that middle age was the time to buy a fancy sports car, take up hang-gliding and mountain climbing, and dump your old life-partner for a newer model.

It's been called mid-life crisis, the sudden realization that life is finite and the time to achieve your dreams is already half gone.

Times change. It's not that 30- to 40-year-olds have all magically come to grips with middle-age, it's just that for many millions of them the method of scratching their feelings of angst has altered.

Are you one of them - a 50- or 60-something with a fire in your belly to launch a business or take it to a new level of success?

Or a savvy business owner tapping into the market of Silver Bulls - Baby Boomers - who are now reaching retirement age at the rate of 11,000 each and every day?

According to recent surveys by AARP, fully 70% of Baby Boomers see their 60s as an exciting opportunity for taking the bull by the horns and starting their own business, buying an existing business or acquiring a franchise of their own, with fewer than 17% opting for the more traditional view of retirement.

Dogs. They have a way of bringing out the soft, tender side of men, women and kids. And they're big business. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association (APPMA), 39% of American households own at least one dog. The APPMA estimates pet owners spent over $15 billion on food for their pets in 2006.

If you're thinking of building a business that targets dog owners, take a lesson from Greg Jarvis of Trick Dog Gallery in Elberta, Michigan, and Dan Dye and Mark Beckloff of Three Dog Bakery in Kansas City, Missouri.

If you own a small business then it shouldn't come as any surprise to you that one of the main problems facing most small businesses is marketing. How do you get your message out there? How do you make your business stand out from your competitors?

And, possibly most importantly, how do you do it at a price that you can afford?

It's not easy, unless you toss away the blinders of traditional marketing and embrace what have come to be known as Guerrilla Marketing techniques, as first described in Jay Conrad Levinson's now-classic 1984 book, Guerrilla Marketing.

If you are looking for a surefire way to market your business and increase sales, look at the copy on your website, brochures, press releases, advertising and sales letters. Good copy makes you stand out from your competition, establishes your credibility and expertise, and attracts ideal customers like a magnet.

You don't have to have Pulitzer prize aspirations to pull words together into copy that sells.

Call it research, but why kid yourself? What you are doing is spying.

And why not? How else are you going to know how your company and your product stack up against your competition? You must check out every aspect of your competition's operation and then objectively compare it with your own.

A prim and proper traditional marketer refers to this as "market research" but a down and dirty Guerrilla Marketer knows it for what it really is -- spying.