It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around — but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

If you explore the links from Mr. Penn’s post (which I have preserved in my quote) you’ll find his data sources for his 100,000 visitors per month = $75,000 U.S. claim. I’m skeptical. Even if you did have 100,000 visitors per month (1.2 m per year), I still think $75,000 would be a tough sell. Volume of traffic is in itself valueless - the revenue-generating actions taken by that traffic makes a world of difference.

At Mr. Penn’s rate, a single unique visitor produces roughly $0.01 worth of revenue over the course of a year. A unique visitor can mean anything - it could be someone who stumbles across an ancient article sitting deep in a blog’s archives via a Google search or it could be a subscriber who checks the blog multiple times per day. Mr. Penn doesn’t qualify it beyond the simple “unique visitor” unit of measure.

At that rate, my blog is projected to earn roughly $450 this year from 72,000 unique visitors. When I had higher traffic figures  from August 2007 to August 2008 (over 100,000 visitors in that period) I made approximately $100 off of AdSense and Amazon Affiliate marketing combined during that period. Where’s the rest of my Internet money?

I lock horns with a lot of Internet marketers over the value of web-traffic. My philosophy is that not all web traffic is created equal, and a “visit” or a “pageview” ultimately has a dollar-value of $0.00 unless you can prove otherwise with accurately attributed data.

Articles like these illustrate my point beautifully - web traffic is of little-to-no value itself. It’s what your visitors actually do that makes them valuable. 100,000 unique visitors a month means nothing if those visitors don’t do anything of interest of or value to advertisers, sponsors, or affiliates.

This is why most CPM-based advertising models have vanished from the wild - impressions are mostly meaningless and don’t provide enough returns to advertisers to be sustainable. CPC/CPA advertising is meaningful because visitors actually have to do something of value before money changes hands.

As for the payola model of blog monetization. Well, that’s a wholy different (and scary) story.

So I have a small dilemma when I see someone Tweet a link to a stolen version of our product online - I want to stop piracy of our product, but I also want to avoid the Streisand Effect. What’s a marketer to do?

The last time I had a question about Twitter etiquette,  I made a poll about it. Well, given that I got some decent feedback last time, I’m inclined to ask again:

Please ReTweet this poll (if you feel like being awesome.)

Here’s a quick taste:

Everyone from the System Administrator to the Shipping Clerk needs to understand how their work helps the organization advance – they need to understand their organization’s value proposition and how their work fulfills it.

If they don’t understand, then they are much more likely to make counter-productive decisions which ultimately hurt your organization’s ability to meet its goals.

Let me know how you like it!

A Man in Full is a famous satirical novel written by Tom Wolfe. It documents and satirizes the social dynamics of Atlanta across all divisions of class, race, and other veritable dimensions comprising the diverse socioeconomic strata of the New South. The hero of the book is Charlie Croker, a real estate mogul whose hand has exceeded his grasp and finds himself in a battle to preserve his personal wealth and self-worth against a pack of rabid bankers out for revenge and personal gain, self-serving politicians, and citizens on both sides of the racial divide who each have a stake in the outcome of a city-wide race scandal. Charlie’s very faith in himself is shaken by the sheer ferocity and volume of the attacks on his property and person, but he never relents and never gives up.

Today I read a post by recently-returned-from-hiatus TechCrunch proprietor and co-editor Michael Arrington that inspired me, quite frankly. Mike didn’t inspire me by writing about some new technology or service that is going to change my life; he didn’t inspire me by sparking some great business idea that I’m going to use to become the next Microsoft or Google; and he didn’t inspire me by making me see the world differently than I did before I made my visit to TechCrunch today.

He inspired by reminding me something that I have long been cognizant of but had simply forgotten. Mike reminded me what it’s like to be a human being who’s poured his heart into something only to see it poked, stabbed, and kicked every which way. Mike’s post, entitled “The Rules Apply To Everyone,” reads on the surface like a condensed self-defense against all of the angry, bitter people who have attacked him, his employees, and his work at TechCrunch. But if you read a little deeper into it you can see that it’s a muffled expression of Arrington’s hurt and pain over all of the negativity and vitriol that led Mike to take his much-needed hiatus in the first place.

I am sorry to admit that I have long been one of those people who thought lowly of Mike and company. I thought he was arrogant, I thought he was corrupt, and in general I thought the man was an asshole who cared more about breaking a story first than he did about getting his facts straight. If you look through the TechCrunch archives I’m sure you’ll find many comments authored by yours truly attacking him and his employees for factual mistakes, misrepresentation of facts, and any number of things. I resented the man because I thought it arrogant for one man to dub himself a kingmaker and act accordingly. Consider this an admission of my wrong-doing, unjustified resentment built upon distorted premises, and guilt to that end.

My oft-unexpressed opinion of Mike and company has evolved considerably over the past months, not because of any substantial changes in the demeanor, tone, or content of TechCrunch, but because of the events in my own life.

In May of 2008 I started working as a full-time content marketer, and being the passionate person that I am, I have poured my heart into everything that I do even if it isn’t apparent or obvious to the casual observer. I write much of the new marketing content, including our blog, and I fuss and stress constantly over getting details right and doing the best job I can under the constraints of time, money, and life in general. If I can successfully educate at least one person on the benefit and value of using a product like ours, then I feel like I’ve done my job - but obviously the constraints of cost-effective marketing demand that I educate several hundred at once (damn those constraints!) Although I do a good job of not taking things personally if a single entry falls flat, I would be crushed if for some reason I had to abandon my company’s blog or do away with it otherwise.

In the past year or so I’ve learned what it’s like to bear your soul into an ongoing, indefinite project that is all-too-often underappreciated compared to the amount of effort that the project demands. It’s like being father or mother to an idea only to watch that idea get kicked and smashed by its peers in the playground. It’s an effort that can be as rewarding as it is despairingly soul-crushing.

The most offensive thing above all others that I and anyone else have ever called Mr. Arrington is a “hack.” Michael may or may not be the things that I listed earlier, but the one thing that he most certainly is not is a “hack.” The one thing about Michael Arrington’s character that is plainly obvious is his passion for his work on TechCrunch and his endless pursuit of stories in the rapidly-changing world of high technology. It is clear that TechCrunch is, if nothing else, a reflection of the totality of the character of the man who fathered it. It’s edgy, it’s detailed, it’s on the cutting edge, and above all things it clearly represents the passions of the people who slavishly devote themselves to it. To us it may just be a blog, but to Arrington it’s his life’s work, whether he’ll admit to it or not. To call the man a “hack” you’d have to ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary - hacks don’t care about the truth nor do they care about their reputation beyond when it is merely convenient for them to do so. Michael clearly cares about both.

From my own experience working on a blog that would be lucky to have one one-hundredth of the readers that TechCrunch has I’ve learned to empathize with the man. I’ve learned what it’s like to see something you love dismissed with outright disdain and scorn from people who appreciate nothing about the monumental effort taken to give them value in return for their attention. Worst of all, I’ve realized that I myself had acted the part of the disdainful, scornful ingrate when I had no right to do so, and it took being in Mike’s shoes to realize it. Well, probably a much smaller pair of shoes than Mike, but you get the idea.

I doubt that Mike will ever read this, but I just wanted him to know that he is truly a Man in Full in the sense which Tom Wolfe intended it - he’s a man who constantly stands up the strain and scorn of the masses and retains his self-worth contrary to the routine presentation of abrasive criticism, much of it unwarranted, from people who would kill to have a sliver of what he has built from scratch. TechCrunch was not the same with him gone and I found myself reading it less and less until he returned. I appreciate Mike’s thoroughness, his passion, and the entertainment that he provides to me and my co-workers, friends, and family free of charge.

I’m a person who’s naturally quick to anger, quick to cut someone down, and even quicker to cut someone down behind the comfortable anonymity of the Internet. That kind of vitriol does us no good - we must never forget that behind every blog, behind every business, and behind every social media identity there is a group of people who are trying as hard as they can to provide some value or a service. All too often I attack those blogs, businesses, and amorphous social media identities for being sloppy, careless, or any number of easily pardonable mistakes. When I attack those things I’m attacking a person, like Mike Arrington, and in the future we would all be served well to remember that.

Return on Investment means a lot of things; it means one thing in the world of accounting, another in the world of financial investments, and it means another in the scope of project management. We’re just managers of one sort or another here at Working Smarter, and we use ROI as a figure to illustrate the costs and benefits of our projects. We find that calculating ROI helps us avoid pitfall projects, helps get our co-workers to buy-in to project ideas, and helps us prioritize how we use our resources.

However, when I do calculate ROI for a project or a new marketing initiative it can be drastically helpful for my co-workers, my boss, and the other teams within our organization who might be involved in some way, shape, or form. ROI figures help them buy into the project and help them prioritize their projects accordingly – something with an ostensibly high return on investment will be prioritized ahead of things with uncertain or perceptibly low ROI.

As always, if you have suggestions for improving it, I am always open to them. Feel free to contact me with recommendations or suggestions.

First, let’s learn about how nofollow inadvertently creates “SEO blackholes” which end up favoring less accurate mega-sites like About.com, Answers.com, and WikiPedia instead of more accurate, more detailed niche sites. From SEO Blackhat:

Black Hole SEO employs a technique that causes the normal laws of Google Physics to break down. Link juice flows into a massive body, but can never escape. When employed on a massive body, it tends to dominate the SERPs.

A black hole site is created when an tier 1 authority site ceases to link out to other sites. If a reference is needed, the information is rewritten and a reference page is created within the black hole. All (or virtually all) external links on the site are made nofollow.

The first example of a black hole site was the wikipedia. The internal links formed a network that passed link juice from one page to another allowing obscure articles with no external links to rank number 1 in the SERPs. This #1 ranking begets natural links from external links. When a webizen wants a quick reference, they consult Google and link to one of the top results. This causes more link juice to flow into the black hole and the body’s trust becomes more and more massive over time.

1. Link juice flows in, but it can never escape.
2. External Sites lose link juice at the expense of the black hole.
3. The relative link juice mass of the black hole expands exponentially.

Major sites like Wikipedia, the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Bnet, and other “something for everyone” sites will eventually dominate the rankings for most major keywords should this trend continue, the author argues. Eventually ~70% of Google’s top 10 search results could be dominated by 40 sites or less.

Although I haven’t seen any numbers to verify this, I believe that the author’s explanation of how this will happen under Google’s current algorithm is believable. A fascinating ramification of the law of unintended consequences - Google actually gets worse search results as a result of nofollow links. Heh.

The next thing is about how many fanastic links distributed via microblogging (read: Twitter) are grossly devalued as a result of nofollow. From SEOMoz:

My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.

This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.

In my opinion, some of the most “valuable” links on the internet at the moment are nofollow. Some examples:

• The average quality of outbound links from Wikipedia is incredibly high
• Many people are leaving their RSS feed readers untouched and getting their news via links their friends drop on Twitter
• We know many sites whose biggest sources of traffic after search are links which happen to be nofollow (leading to interesting discussion of the effects on the random surfer model)

So not only does nofollow end up crowding out great niche sites from organic search results in favor of less detailed information from megasites, but it also prevents Google’s users from discovering legitimately valuable content from these types of sources.

I think Will from SEOMoz has an excellent point - as microblogging starts to become a much more significant factor in how people share links, Google is simply going to have to start accounting for it in some way, shape, or form. The same goes for the other three examples he listed.

Moreover, Google is absolutely going to have to do something to prevent a handful of megasites which have seemingly shallow coverage of a large number of topics from dominating the search results, as that would inherently make Google less useful. If most organic search results are dominated by 40 websites, then guess what? Are we really going to need Google to find anything anymore, or will we go straight to Wikipedia/About/Bnet/Answer? Hmm…

Good going, Google.

You see someone mention your product on Twitter via Twitter Search.

Follow them.

Observe, converse, and engage.

Sounds simple enough, right? But for the life of me I can’t get into it - I manage my company’s Twitter account and the only instance in which I feel comfortable contacting a customer is when they’re experiencing a technical problem of some sort.

I’m the gunshy social media maven when it comes to my business’ account I suppose - I simply feel like it would make people who use our product uncomfortable if I indiscriminately followed them after they mentioned us on Twitter.

So I’d like all of you to help me definitively answer the question listed in the poll below - does it make you feel uncomfortable when a company follows you immediately after you mention one of their products?

And if you are feeling particularly generous, I would love it if you could ReTweet this - I’d really love to get a wide sample of opinion on the matter.

Thanks a lot folks, and a happy Friday to you all.

Youtube: Oozinator - The Questionable Super Soaker

Next, I suppose this is because I don’t live in a rich area, and in fact don’t know anyone who is rich as John McCain would define it, but I don’t care how high taxes go on the wealthy 50% or 60%? Hit me.

On American news all I hear is rich men whining about class warfare, while we have lower tax rates for rich people than any other world power. And these idiots didn’t get rich in China, it was American Labor that made them rich.

Obama in my view is opening up the books and not using buzzwords. A tax cut means a minus in the funds. I don’t think it makes Democrats villains to say they don’t want to live in a country where Donald Trump never has to worry about health care but sick children do. I measure progress in poor Trumps and healthy kids.

In response I’ll repost a bit of what Rich Karlgaard said this morning:

Declare war on “entrepreneurs, investors, business and more” and you get a market crash. Stocks, reflecting our future hopes, have bonked 28% since the November election, 14% since the stimulus passed and 5% since Obama revealed his budget last week.

When you attempt to punish the investment class, the group of people responsible for funding the expansion of business and the creation of jobs, for no reason other than personal envy and a healthy dose of a self-righteous entitlement mentality, you get what we have now: rampant economic decay and the slashing of jobs left and right as a result of the investment class assuming a defensive posture.

When you point the finger at businessmen who became wealthy as the result of their own innovation and imagination and screech “THEY DID IT ONLY BECAUSE OF OUR LABOR” then you are overlooking the most important question of all: “who in the hell would have needed your labor were it not for the people who found a way to make you useful?”

I absolutely loathe and detest this type of ignorant, vitriolic populism and it has no place in this country or any other Western country. The poorest people in this country have opportunities that kids in other parts of the world could only dream of - we sit here and harp about how some percentage of this country’s population is uninsured when people in other parts of the world can’t get clean water, food, or even the rule of law. Our own problems pale in comparison to those of other countries around the world. Instead, we bitch about the income divide as though it’s some great moral, social, and economic injustice.

The “divide of income” in this country is an entirely imaginary, emotional problem; we perceive that the income gap between our poorest and wealthiest citizens is somehow the cause of major societal ills. Let me be blunt: my life is not any worse because someone else makes 1,000 times what I do. In fact, that person has probably made my life better by contributing a valuable service that has made it easier for me in some way, shape, or form.

Even the wealthiest heir or heiress, who did nothing to earn their fortune, makes my life easier because their money sits in some mutual fund or some bank somewhere which helps inject capital into our markets and into our loan system. That heir’s inheritance might have been the initial capital loaned by their bank to a real estate developer to build the shopping mall which rented some space to the coffee shop which makes a latte just the way I like it. My life is better off because of that heir’s wealth.

So when I hear some ignorant shit on some blog harp about taxing the balls off of the rich because the “rich” can take the cut, I can’t help but say out loud “you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you? You aren’t thinking about this rationally at all. You really can’t see the cause and effect between the wealth of the rich and your vastly superior standard of living compared to the rest of the world? You think that Government will do a better job,based on what? Empirical evidence? I doubt it.”

I try not to be political on this blog, but this really pisses me off. You want to know why the stock market is plummeting? Because the rich people that commentors like this want to soak are dumping their assets as fast as they can - the biggest problem with the economy is confidence, and this kind of class warfare is exacerbating a legitimate economic slump by attacking the class of people who are going to help get us out of it.

Everything has an associated cost with it, whether it’s represented in time or in dollars or both.

During my Google Docs experiment I found out that although I didn’t have to throw down $299 for a student copy of Microsoft Office 2007, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time transferring Word and Excel documents into Google Docs, and even once I had them transferred they were rarely imported in a fully functional state.

After 4-7 weeks of that, I gave up and bought Office 2007, because the $299 was less expensive than the amount of time I spent futzing with my Google Docs documents. Haven’t looked back since.

When I have to recommend new products and services at work, things like content management systems, I am very hesitant to cling to the first acceptable “free” solution because of the hidden costs associated with it. I tend to think about things like:

• “What happens if it breaks - who will support it?”
• “How much modification will it take to integrate it with existing systems?
• “How long will it take the IT team to learn this technology - are there any books, certification programs, or training materials available?”
• “What happens if we find a major bug - how long will it take to develop a patch for it?”
• “How long will it take the users of the system to learn how to use it - is it easier to learn this system than the others?”
• “How will this system be an improvement over our existing system?”
• “Will this system be better than any of the alternatives for our specific needs?”

And so forth - I think about this for products that aren’t free either, but in the small amount of experience I have had “free” solutions have almost always lost to solutions that have a definite price tag.

So my question to all of you readers, visitors, and disappointed organic search users looking for Facebook.NET development tips is this:

Would you give something a second look just because the visible dollar cost is “zero,” or do you a go through a similar cost/benefits thought process like mine?

A key part of what I do at work is explain to people how visualization makes it easier to understand and react to complicated issues, and these short cartoons do a great job at explaining how the U.S. credit market has entered its current state of crisis. I may even repost this on my blog at work. Either way, I’ve never been happier to spend 10 minutes watching a YouTube video.

Via The Consumerist.

Sites like Yelp and Amazon have helped put a lot of power back into the hands of consumers over the years - the ability to aggregate and publish the cumulative experiences of thousands of online consumers has given companies good cause to be mindful of the average user experience. Companies can’t get away with pushing mediocre products as easily anymore.

So what’s the big drawback of these big online review aggregators?

The biggest drawback, other than the ease-of-abuse of social review systems, is that companies don’t have the ability to effectively refute inaccurate or malicious / unfounded comments on sites like Yelp - they have to rely on the collective wisdom of other anonymous users to invalidate inaccurate reviews, which rarely happens.

So what ironic thing happened to Yelp today? It got trashed in an East Bay Express story entitled “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0,” which artfully accused the service of approaching local businesses and offering to eliminate negative reviews for a price. Whether or not there’s any merit to the accusation is besides the point I’m about to make. Read this part of Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s response the East Bay Express story:

We showed this evidence to Kathleen, but it didn’t find prominent placement in her story. Beyond this obvious point I have three additional issues with the story I’d like to highlight (thanks for bearing with me!).

1. Heavy reliance on anonymous sources.

Kathleen relied on five anonymous sources and only three non-anonymous sources. Use of anonymous sources is fraught with hazards and is strongly discouraged by most editors, as explained by the American Journalism Review, “Editors around the country…agoniz[ed] over the use of anonymous sources, fearing they were relying on them too heavily, damaging the press’ credibility in the process.”

Whoa, wait a minute, Jeremy. You’re telling me that using anonymous sources to review local business is cool but it’s not ok to use anonymous sources to review yours? What’s the difference?

Oh wait - Yelp users aren’t anonymous because you get to see their first name and their last initial? Tell that to Jive Turkey, the fictional Yelp reviewer that I just created. He lives in a fictional place with a fictional birthdate. Oh but don’t worry, you can see his first and last name - so he must be real.

Take your own medicine, Jeremy. Small business owners have to put up with inaccurate reviews that rely entirely on anonymous sources from your site, so I suggest that you either do the same when some small rag newspaper decides to use anonymous sources to slime your business or you should consider implementing a for-reals verification method like Amazon’s Real Name system, which uses credit card validation to verify non-anonymous users.

These comments are then sent to all of the employees who care to subscribe to them (and one customer support person who has to respond to any service issues that are raised in the comments).

I get the customer comments report automatically sent to my work inbox every day - usually customers leave us comments like this:

Please place package on the third step of my house behind the garden wall (shipping instructions)

I found your product through the Internet (referral source)

Loved the trial! (general comment)

As you can imagine, most of these aren’t particularly useful for a marketer like myself. But every now and then we get something like this that wistfully tugs at our heartstrings:

I would have made a larger purchase if your product had included obscure features X, Y, and Z

Our instant, unreasoned reaction to reading such words is to go “OH OH OH OH WE CAN GET MORE REVENUE IF WE ONLY ADD FEATURES X, Y, AND Z, BRILLIANT! SEND THIS TO THE ENGINEERS AT ONCE!”

But then we have to accept the sad, cold, reality - the amount of money spent researching, developing, and supporting those features wouldn’t net us a realizable return within an acceptable time frame. It’s the time-old problem of some guy who is just outside of our target market asking us to open up our market focus just a little bit to include his needs.

Just outside our target market :(

Unfortunately, all too often customers like these reside just oustide of our target market (depicted above.)

The Truth About Targeting

Targeting isn’t some stupid archaic thing that marketers do because that’s what they were told to do in marketing school. It’s an activity that we all have to do in order to achieve:

• Communicative differentiation
• Product differentiation
• Specialization
• and most importantly, profit optimization.

Targeting is one of the most important parts of profit optimization, for two reasons - the first of which is price. Different target markets need different prices in many instances.

Let’s say you designed a piece of task / project management software. If you were trying to sell the same piece of software both to individual consumers and to businesses / organizations you’ll find that these two markets are very, very different animals. High price points will drive away individual consumers and price points that are too low will make your product seem uncredible in the eyes of corporate buyers.

The second reason is that targeting affects your sales volume. In a B2C (business to consumer) environment you’re likely going to be selling a high volume of lower-cost goods to individual consumers, whereas in a B2B environment you’re going to sell a low volume of higher-cost goods to organizations.

And within the B2C and B2B markets there are even more specific targeting distinctions that have to be made. But once your company has settled on a target it needs to stick with a targeting strategy until:

• it determines that the current targets are less profitable than others OR
• it invents a way to pursue multiple targets through product or customer segmentation.

So back to those customer comments - it’s a major bummer when someone lays money on the table right in front of you and says “do this and I will pay you X,” but more often than not we have to say “sorry, dude, but you aren’t like, in our target market and stuff.” Well, we don’t actually say that, but we think it.

I find that a lot of web-based startups, particularly those driven mostly by early adopter feedback, fall victim to trying to please everybody. You can’t, and you shouldn’t. You have to stick to what you know will bring realizable returns and stick with it.

One easy form of providing this value / engagement is to pass along interesting links to our audience, and often we do this by means of reactionary blog entries, but that’s fallen by the wayside in favor of a much more immediate and simple choice: Tweeting the link. The only issue with sharing the link via Twitter is that you have to account for the 140 character limit - this means making lots of trips to TinyURL or installing a Twitter client that automatically shrinks links.

Well, why not go with a simpler option and use del.icio.us to syndicate your links? Not only do you get to add value to your Twitter account by tweeting something that is useful (hopefully) to your audience, but you also get to add value to your del.icio.us account and your URLs will automatically be shortened for you.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a del.icio.us account if you don’t have one already and add the del.icio.us Firefox plugin

The Firefox plugin makes it a lot easier to add new favorites - you can simply right click on any page that you’re browsing in Firefox and select "Bookmark This Page in Delicious…"

2. When tagging a new favorite page, decide if your followers might want to read it

I write about marketing - I  assume most of my followers on Twitter are interested in marketing. Thus if I find an interesting link which contains information that is highly relevant to marketing in some way, shape, or form then I will probably want to share it with them. Here’s a simple decision process that I use to decide whether or not to share a link:

3. Add a specific "syndicated" tag in del.icio.us

Now, you don’t want to syndicate ALL of your del.icio.us favorites to Twitter - just the ones that are relevant to your followers! So pick a specific set of tags that you want to syndicate and add those tags to any new favorites that you want to share.

I use two "syndicate" tags primarily - marketing for all content that is relevant to my personal brand and totwitter for content that I want to share that isn’t relevant to my personal brand.

4. Grab the RSS feed for each of your syndicated tags

To get to your RSS feed for a specific del.icio.us tag you will want to do the following:

1. Go to your del.icio.us favorites (e.g. http://delicious.com/Aaronontheweb/)
2. Drill down to the display page for one of your specific tags (http://delicious.com/Aaronontheweb/totwitter)
3. Click on the "RSS feed for these book marks" link (see below)

5. Login to Twitterfeed

Once you’ve logged in, do the following:

• Go to "My Feeds"
• Create a new feed
• Use your syndicated del.icio.us tag’s RSS address as the target RSS address (http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/Aaronontheweb/totwitter?count=15)
• Set update frequency to every hour or every 30 minutes (so links gets syndicated in near-real time)
• Prefix each tweet with "Reading" or "del.icio.us" or something along those lines.
• Create a new feed for each tag that you want to syndicate.

Once your feed has been set up all you have to do is tag items in del.icio.us using those "syndicated" keywords and they will automatically be tweeted via Twitterfeed. Enjoy!

This seems like a pretty obvious thing to do once you’ve done it, but frankly I’m surprised at how few people actually practice link syndication via del.icious / Twitterfeed / Twitter. Darren Rowse’s Twitip blog hasn’t even covered it yet.

You figure it out - you discover that your organization is doing something fundamentally wrong with the initiative and you develop a plan to fix it. You present this plan to your boss, who reads it over, agrees with you, but then drops this ten ton hammer on your head:

Your analysis is sound and your plan is solid, but we simply don’t have the resources to pursue this right now. It’ll have to wait until next quarter when we have the resources to implement the change.

You have to keep doing the wrong and incorrect things until your organization has the resources available to right the ship. This causes physical pain for me. Those times when I have to sit down and publish a blog entry that I know is totally out-of-sync with what our strategic goals just because we have nothing else to run makes my stomach turn. It’s agonizing.

So what can you do if you want to do things right?

1. Be patient.
2. Keep building your case for why things need to change.
3. Develop a detailed plan for how you’re going to fix your company’s marketing errors.
4. Get other people on your team involved, especially your boss and any other key decision maker. Make it a group effort.
5. Stay positive and do the best you can with the “wrong marketing” for as long as you have to.
6. Try and get a specific date / time from your boss about when you can get started.

Marketing is an iterative process - nobody sits down and engineers the perfect marketing strategy, tactic, or campaign on the first try. You have to constantly refine everything, so don’t worry too much if you find yourself being forced to ride out an imperfect email marketing campaign, a series of off-message blog entries, or a mistargeted AdSense campaign.

I am by no means a veteran in online marketing. I have the pleasure of working with and learning from people who have 10+ years of experience in online marketing, but I didn’t start riding shotgun with them until last year. I’ve talked to dozens of other online marketers, attended meetups, webinars, seminars, conferences, and any other gathering of marketers that you can name. The lay of the land doesn’t take long to understand, at least the surface of it.

However, every time I’ve been to one of those marketing get-togethers I always leave thinking the exact same thing: “are those other marketers totally clueless or am I clueless?”

Being the overly self-critical person that I am I’ve ruled out my own cluelessness via proof by exhaustion - I’ve scrutinized all of my work to date and found a lot of things that I can improve upon but my performance indicates that I know what I’m doing.

I agree with the notion that online marketers as a whole are an imperfect lot, but I’d take it a step further and call most of online marketers “dysfunctional.” Here’s a short list of why I think so:

1. They don’t spend money according to the tenets of results-oriented marketing.
2. They don’t document what has and has not worked historically.
3. They jump into the latest social media fad / gizmo / gimmick without really understanding it.
4. They don’t develop real plans with actionable, quantified goals.
5. They don’t understand that not all web traffic is created equal.
6. They play things safe until they realize that they’ve been left behind.
7. They try to apply old tactics to new mediums, which fails more often than it works.
8. They cling onto bizarre ideologies about what is truly in the “spirit of the Internet.”*
9. On the flipside of point #8, they come storming in to a new online channel without understanding the proper etiquette.
10. They never properly segment their traffic.
11. They spend more money acquiring customers than they could ever earn over the lifespan of those customers.
12. They don’t have a process for any aspect of their operations - it’s all seat-of-the-pants.
13. They don’t do any research half the time.
14. They don’t test anything properly at all - multiple variables at once, invalid controls, statistically insignificant sample sizes, etc…

Were it not for the fact that I have a lot of copy to edit in the morning I could probably get this list up to 100 bullets in length, but you get the idea - online marketers are a disorganized bunch. What else do you think we could add to this list of online marketing dysfunction and chaos?

*How many people are praising the genius of the purist jackass at Microsoft who passed up paid search in 1998 because he thought that it was “unethical” to promote paid search results over organic search results for his due diligence to the morality of the world wide web?

I’ve had more ideas than I can count, implemented many of them, but never taken one and ran with it. Most of those projects I implemented were done while I was in school. An amateur entrepreneur by a veteran’s standard, but implementing ideas to 90% complete at the ages of 14, 16, and 19 is more than most can say for themselves.

At some point in the last semester of my senior year I decided to ditch the road of engineering and computer science. I went into marketing instead. Marketing was something I knew I had to learn in my quest to become an entrepreneur. I knew I could pick software development up again the instant I wanted to - you might forget syntax and practices, but you never forget how to think like an engineer.

My project ideas stopped flowing soon after I started my first job. The job demanded my full creative energy and, as odd as this sounds, it felt as though my brain was subconsciously denying itself the pleasure of identifying new business opportunities. I wondered if I’d ever be able to get my entrepreneurial groove back.

From what I’ve laid out so far, it sure sounds like I’m one of those unsuccessful entrepreneurs - in fact it sounds like I’m all three of those types of amateur entrepreneurs that Jessica described.

Success in Failure

Those three projects I built when I was in school and the thousands of other ideas that have gone unimplemented - are those my failures? None of them ever transformed me from a nerdy kid into the next Bill Gates; they didn’t even generate enough revenue to fill my gas tank (well, I probably didn’t have a tank to fill when I was fourteen.) Does that mean that I failed?

No. Did I catch some flack from my friends when those projects publicly tanked? If I was lucky enough to have them notice that those projects existed to begin with, then yes, maybe a little.

The reality is that my entrepreneurial failures are my greatest personal successes - they taught me how to manage a project and how to materialize something that I imagined into something real. They taught me how to analyze a business concept. They taught me how to think like a customer and how to hold my own ideas at arm’s length. Most importantly, I walked away with each successive failure with an increased level of confidence because I knew that it was simply a matter of getting more at-bats before one of my ideas made it.

About two months ago my entrepreneurial mindset came back with a vengeance. I actually have to write all of my ideas down in a leatherbound journal in order to remember them all. Despite all of these new ideas, all of which are much more compelling than what I could come up with in college, I am in no rush to implement any of them. Does this hesitation to focus and commit on a specific project make me a “failed” or “amateur” entrepreneur?

No. Jessica has the same problem that I did when I was a junior in college - she sees the businessworld through the prism of a trend-savvy, young engineer. They think that all it requires to become a great entrepreneur is an awesome idea, the technical expertise to implement it, and the commitment to see it through. That’s not reality - that’s a romance novel for businessmen.

I’m not pursuing any of those great ideas in my leatherbound journal at the moment, not because I’m worried that someone else might think they’re stupid or that they might fail, but because I’m in a good learning situation for any entrepreneur. I’m in a position where I have an exceptional amount of creative freedom for someone my age (23) and I’m learning a lot about the unromantic practicalities of running a business. My failures (and successes!) are simply in someone else’s name for the time being.

Becoming a successful entrepreneur requires learning from failure - you’re rarely going to hit the ball out of the park on the first at-bat, so set yourself up to take as many of them as you can.

The fact is that all marketing, to one extent or another, will always depend upon some level of interruption in order to function. Email marketing is a relatively mild form of interruption marketing compared to TV and radio advertising, but there are a handful of people who respond to it with what can only be described as “disproportionate vitriol.”

Now, I dislike direct mail marketing, but not because people are trying to sell me stuff through my physical mailbox. I dislike it because I feel like it’s wasteful - I feel bad for throwing away all of that paper that I’ll never use. I can’t say the same for email marketing - ever since spam filters evolved to a point where actual spam never made it into my inbox I’ve never had a problem with it.

I suspect that the handful of vitriolic responses I receive can be attributed to “anti-capitalist moral indignation” - these people are upset that a stranger tried to sell them something, in their inbox, those evil bastards!!!11! Maybe they’re just upset about the annoyance of having to delete an email, but I think it’s really the fact that the email embodies commercialism to one degree or another which makes them upset.

I’d like to cut down on the number of angry emails I get from people who want to hurt me and the other innocent people at my place of business by explaining the difference between spam and email marketing.

Spam

Courtesy of GMail’s spam filter, here are some spam emails that I’d never seen until I went intentionally looking for them for this blog post:

This email was obviously not sent by Microsoft - if you mouse over the links you can see that the URLs clearly do not link to a Microsoft web property, but rather they link to some sort of sketchy email capture site. So let’s identify all of the sketchy things about this email:

• Misleading Headline - This is not really Microsoft.
• Impersonation of a Trustworthy Company - These people are impersonating Microsoft - they even included MSFT’s Redmond address at the footer of the email, and if I had the guess, I’d say that the copy used in the email was ripped off from a real Microsoft email marketing piece.
• No Unsubscribe Feature - The “unsubscribe” link on this email doesn’t actually go to an unsubscribe page - it takes you to the same sketchy website as every other link in the email.
• Anonymous Sender - My email address (depicted here) is displayed as both the sender and the receiver - I have no idea who the sender really is.
• Unclear Intentions - The email does not have a clear motive or intent. If I had to guess I’d say that this is just a really cheesy traffic driving scheme - they just want people to view the web page linked to the email.

For the sake of comparison, let’s take a look at another awesome piece of spam:

As with the last piece of spam, let’s repeat the exercise - what’s sketchy about this email?

• Misleading Headline - Nothing in this email was seen on CNN.
• Impersonation of a Trustworthy Company - Obviously CNN has nothing to do with this email, but there’s also the subscriber requests address. That address belongs to local industrial equipment retailer in Texas, a company which has nothing to do with the content of this email.
• No Unsubscribe Feature - There isn’t even a remove or unsubscribe link for this email. At least the guys who wrote the last piece of spam had the courtesy to include a fake one.
• Anonymous (Sort of) Sender - There’s a real email address behind this piece of spam, but it belongs to a domain that has been banned from Google’s index and has anonymous WHOIS information. It might as well be anonymous, because I’m sure as hell not visiting that domain.
• Unclear Intentions - Ok, so I’m supposed to get info about my credit score and lower my payments… Or something like that. But… This email isn’t from a credit score provider…. And what payments am I supposed to lower? … What?

I think we’re starting to see a trend emerge. But what about that dreadful email marketing?

Email Marketing

Here’s part of an email marketing piece sent to me by Watershed Publishing, the guys who run MarketingCharts (a site I love.)

The subject line of this email is:

Which Metrics Matter? Why SEM and Analytics Work Together

How did those tricky spammers know that I was an online marketer? Are they spying on me? Do they have my social security number?!?!? Oh, wait a minute.

Turns out that I opted-in to MarketingCharts’ weekly newsletter, and it looks like the publishing company who owns MarketingCharts rented out the list to Omniture / Jupiter Research to promote their free webinar which probably promotes their analytics solutions / research products. Oooohh…

However, I have never opted in specifically for offers from these two companies or from MarketingCharts’ publisher. There was probably some box that I checked (or forgot to uncheck) which said that I gave my consent to be contacted with offers from MarketingCharts’ partners. Does that make this email “unsolicited” in the same way that spam emails are unsolicited? The people who send me angry emails would think so, but I do not.

Let’s analyze this email - contrast this to the spam from earlier:

• Content is Targeted to my Interests - These people know that I’m a marketer or at least interested in marketing, so they built an email that is highly relevant to what I do or what I am interested in doing.
• A Real Company is Listed as the Sender - The publisher has put their logo, their send address, their website, and their real contact information in the body of the email.
• The Content is Attributable to a Real Person - I know that the screencap has cut off some of the body, but the name of Omniture’s marketing guru running the free webinar promoted in the content of this email is listed at the bottom.
• The Production Values are High - Clearly someone put a lot of work into making this email look professional.
• The Content Has Value - This email doesn’t consist of a shillish sales pitch - it actually has some value.
• The Call to Action is Very Clear - They want you to participate in a free webinar, where they will undoubtedly try to generate some leads for their products of course, but there’s no mystery here.
• The Unsubscribe Feature Works - Yes, it does.
• The Email Was Not Entirely Unsolicited - I opted-in to receive offers, I got offers. I can always unlist thanks to a functional unsubscribe feature.

In case I haven’t made enough of a contrast between email marketing and spam, let’s consider this comparison chart:

The bottom line is that email marketers send targeted messages attributable to a specific to recipients who have indicated that they are open to such offers; spammers send untargeted, often deceptive messages to anybody willing to open an email.

Spammers also don’t make it easy for you to unsubscribe or unlist, whereas it’s in the best interest of email marketers to make it easy for people to do so.

Spammers provide very little value, whereas email marketers always try to provide substantive, valuable, relevant, and useful content in their communications with you.

Email marketers are not spammers, and spammers are not email marketers. Spamming is not marketing as it is counter-productive to everything that legitimate marketers want to accomplish.