(FORTUNE Small Business) – Is McDonald's being McGreedy? Business owners like Barbara Staehelin think so. The burger giant, says Staehelin, almost made mincemeat of her small company, McWellness, an Internet-based medical services firm. But if she'd done a little research before naming her three-year-old firm, she would have learned that McDonald's has rarely given its McBrethren a break. The company has sued plenty of small fry like McSleep (a motel), and McCoffee (an espresso cafe named after its owner, Elizabeth McCaughey). The Golden Arches were never an inspiration for the McWellness name, insists Staehelin. She contends that she and her partner originally came up with the name while working for the management-consulting firm McKinsey. Any reference to the better-known fast-food giant was purely coincidental, says Staehelin. That explanation didn't cut it with McDonald's lawyers, who threatened a lawsuit and filed a grievance with the U.S. patent office's trademark trial-and-appeal board earlier this year. Like those who went before her, Staehelin chose to yield rather than fight a long, losing legal battle. In June she renamed her company GetWellness, at a cost of $1.8 million, four times its annual revenues. A McDonald's spokesperson responds with some surprising logic. "We are small business people ourselves," says Anna Rozenich, pointing to the company's 2,800 franchisees. "[We'll] defend against any attempts to take unfair advantage of our brand." Is this what business means when it rails about tort litigation? "All companies have an obligation to police their marks," says trademark attorney Mitchell Stabbe of Washington D.C.'s Dow Lohnes & Albertson. "McDonald's, though, is definitely on the aggressive end."

The ranks of independent bookstores have been mowed down by discount superstores and the likes of Amazon.com. Many have joined Booksense.com, a kind of online village filled with independent booksellers. But some have decided to join the enemy. Barry Jones, owner of The Avid Reader in Chapel Hill, N.C., now counts Amazon and Barnes & Noble as clients. The giant retailers often tap him and other used-book sellers to fill hard-to-find and out-of-print book orders. According to the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, 350 of its 475 members are online, compared with fewer than 50 in 1995. Collaboration can be profitable. Jones now rakes in $40,000 a month from online sales. While much of that comes from individual shoppers, a substantial portion comes from the big e-tailers. "It doesn't make sense to compete with advertising and software," says Jones. "It's wiser to be a partner."

Send in to win $1 million! Caught your eye, didn't we? It's one of the oldest marketing ploys: Hold out the promise of a sweet cash prize, and customers will flock to you like kids to an ice-cream truck. Don't have the million to spare? Dallas-based SCA Promotions and a lengthening list of similar companies now offer to help your business stage its own big-bucks sweepstakes. They front the cash prize, and you (in theory) win legions of new customers. But before changing your name to Regis, proceed with caution. Sweepstakes can sometimes be seen as swindles, making you vulnerable to lawsuits. (FSB's parent company, Time Inc., and American Family Enterprises, 50% owned by Time Inc., have recently settled huge class-action suits after years of litigation over alleged consumer fraud.) No matter how fair the game, of course, your customers' odds of winning are low. An SCA sweeps, for example, requires scratching off the correct five squares on a 25-square card. (Odds are one in 53,130.) Meanwhile you're helping companies like SCA make a hefty profit; they charge a fixed fee, typically 2%-20% of the grand prize. SCA has offered $10 billion in jackpots since 1986 but has paid out only $65 million. "Contests bring businesses attention and provide opportunity for sales," says an SCA spokesman. Perhaps. But do you really want to risk having your customers play Who Wants to Be a Chump?

In our last issue we gave a nod to Turning Point , a D.C.-based nonprofit, for placing full-page newspaper ads urging readers to unplug, shop local, and save a mom-and-pop. Turns out it's possible to shop local and stay online. The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently polled 1,200 communities that are revitalizing their commercial districts and found that 84% of Main Street businesses are wired. For the 16.4% of them that use the Internet for retailing, sales are up 13%. Maybe Main Street can save itself.

Club Media is training the next generation of your customers. And, if founder Diane Samples does her job, you may no longer be able to speak to them the same way. Club Media was borne out of Media Knowledge, a Connecticut nonprofit that Samples founded to help children and educators develop more marketing savvy. While some camp kids' extracurricular programs include baseball or batiking, Club Media kids deconstruct advertising, figuring out how pictures are digitally altered and how ads are deceptively worded. The point isn't to raise a crop of advertising moguls (although who knows), but to alert kids to the likes of Joe Camel, Budweiser's Spuds MacKenzie, and other pet and nonpet advertising gimmicks. So how can your business appeal to kids without pandering to them? The younger the child, the more straightforward your ads should be, says Samples. Tell them what your line of toys does, not that it guarantees popularity. And then there's Samples' golden rule: Create ads you'd feel comfortable having your kids watch.

Launching a business online may no longer be just a matter of grafting ".com" to the end of your company's name. Soon you may have to choose among several new top-level domains like ".sales" and ".shop." At press time, the domain-name registration watchdog, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (icann), was set to announce two to six new domains. Why? Partly to help consumers decipher which Web addresses belong to certain types of business. At first the ".com" will likely remain the gold standard, but expect that to change within the next year. So which should you choose? Depending on the domains icann decides to create, pick one that best describes your company. If you're an attorney, consider ".law"; if you're a newsletter, consider ".news."

Here's a new word for the e-wise: Webinars, a.k.a. online seminars. Economically minded small businesses are hosting these online presentations to lure far-flung potential clients. Prospects click onto a Website and follow along while listening to a sales pitch via conference call. In theory, Webinars attract a global clientele but are a lot cheaper than creating an offline (real world) event, which would eat up the marketing budget with air travel, hotel, and conference fees. But are they as effective as a face-to-face? Ellen Pensky, of KnowledgeTrack, a portal-software company based in Pleasanton, Calif., says she organizes three or four Webinars a month to sell her wares. She won't say how many customers have signed on as a result, but the Webinars work well enough that KnowledgeTrack doesn't hold on-site seminars. "Larger companies have the resources to do physical seminars," says Paul McNulty of Wheelhouse, a Burlington, Mass.-based consulting company that conducted its first Webinar last summer. "For small businesses, [Webinars] are more cost-effective."

by Arlyn Tobias Gajilan with Carlye Adler, Beth Kwon, Rathe Miller, Maggie Overfelt, Mary Seehafer Sears, Sara Shepard, and Julie Sloane