“With small businesses – the web has levelled the playing field.”

It is not the web that levels the playing field because the web has no way of doing that. It is the search engines that can level the playing field and they can also drive your competitor’s sales miles past your aspirations when your competition spends more than you do.

Although advertising has bombed in almost every way that it has been tried on the web it was not until Google coupled PPC ads with searches that advertising started to “click.” This means that push marketing using PPC ads are a viable means of marketing online, but it involves a lot of work and a lot of money.

The essential difference between push and pull on the web
The essential difference is that push marketing is best suited for short term goals, and pull marketing for long term goals.

Push marketing works with high inventory levels to clear quickly, fast turnaround in product stock (always something new), ecommerce sites with lower cost brand name, these are all suitable for a push market campaign.

On the other hand, building trust with your market, building brand equity or setting up a destination site based on social, business or ecological values are all about long term goals.

And be sure not to mix them as one will undermine the other. At the very least you will confuse your market. Do one exclusively and build a website that is design only to pull – or only to push.

The web shares
You need to understand that the web shares. This is not a consideration many business people have embraced. They still think that sharing means giving their product away. Not so, there is a ton of value any business can share with its market at little or no cost to the business. Everything that grows on the web does so because it shares or gets shared.

Search Engines do the pulling for you
This is why pull marketing is so inexpensive. Anyone used to push marketing is aware of the high cost to push, but pull marketing is done for you at no cost and there are free tools to help you pull.

Implementing Pull Strategies
I thought you covered this very well and the trade off between cost and time.
All of this is my opinion for what it’s worth and the fact that this article is over 2 years old and so many web marketing people are still not seeing the value you write about is kudos for you.
Good stuff

1.) You can be found by your unique and original business description
2.) You can be found by your business and social values
3.) You can be found by your products or services.

Push marketing only gives you the 3rd choice because it undermines the first 2.

As useful as pull marketing is there is something bigger and stronger that does more to attract your market than pull marketing does. You can understand this for yourself by answering one simple question: “what does the web do better than any other marketing medium?”

I’ll leave that with you folks and if you can’t find your own answer then I’ll be back to give you mine. For me it was like a revelation, subtle to be sure, but powerful just the same.