So in my own haste to write down my own humble thoughts about Mike Arrington and the current bash-a-thon (or love-a-thon, depending on your point of view), I neglected to pore over a few details.

Namely, that MothersClick had some sour grapes over the cold shoulder and not getting “Crunched”, despite numerous efforts at getting Mr. Arrington’s attention (clearly, they didn’t stroll out Miss Universe-quality material — and Mike? You’re never going to live that down)

And — that sour grapes had turned into down right venom at Mr. Arrington “Crunching” the hell out of their competitor Maya’s space, who may or may not have had personal connections with Mr. Arrington himself (perhaps Maya’s goods are Miss Universe quality? — What did I tell you? Not living that down, Mike).

Well, ever wondered what MotherClick’s PR firm told them to do?

In light of Edelman’s blogging buffoonery, one wonders what sort of angle / spin / story / act / strategy / song-and-dance that PR firm tried to opine on what was the best way of approaching and managing Mr. Arrington.

Even though MothersClick had done all the right traditional marketing maneuvers at that PR firm’s behest, it sounds like they were still utterly obssessed with getting Crunched.

[ASIDE: PR Squared doesn’t mention their client by name — so sorry for outing you on this one, but its all over the blogosphere]

So, what was their counsel?

Surprisingly level-headed. It sounds like they told him to let it go.

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Folks blog for all sorts of reasons. Some do it for fun. Others do it as a cathartic release of their own feelings and emotions. Others do it for cold hard cash. If you fall into the latter category I have a question for you:

What’s your business model like?

Here’s another question: Have you read the E-myth? If not, do yourself a favour and go to Amazon and read it now. It gives a fuller, richer, and more detailed and example-filled description of what follows.

Many people have aspirations of leaving their current job and pursing more of an entrepreneurial way in life. Good for you. But you have to be cautious about how you go about it. One of the critical branch points in your planning is asking yourself a few fundamental questions:

Why are YOU blogging? How are you planning to generate revenue?

Critical question, now: are you treating it like a second job? Or like another business?

Businesses have structures, processes and systems so that it can, in some measure run by itself. Offline business have employees, managers, capital and a way of doing things, so that they can produce revenue — even if you’re not there.

A job, on the other hand, only produces income while you’re at it, and working. Some people find this is in fact why they blog. They don’t want the responsibility, the time commitment, and the perceived aggravation of managing a businesses. but they’re hoping to bring home a little exta.

If you’re trying to replace one job (the one you have right now), or looking for a second job, then frequenting job boards and thinking about PayPerPost is a fine thing. You may want to take a hint about going about it the right way, even.  These are ways for you to utilize your efforts to get a greater return on every unit of time you’re spending at your job.

Although, as an aside, frequenting the PayPerPost job board is disappointing. How many posts would you have to do in a month to earn $500? $1000. A helluva lot. What’s your time worth? More than $5 (the seeming average paycheque per post) per hour I hope.

If your aim is to create processes and systems which run automatically, or with minimal effort — stop wasting your time. There’s been a lot of hoopla around the proliferation of job boards, and I’ve already blogged about it once. Moreover, there’s been an evolution in how other busineses are using blogs as a marketing tool — see PayPerPost. Don’t get caught up in it as an employee of that system if creating a business is your aim.

You need to be in charge of that system instead. You should be thinking of USING those systems to hire people OR find people to blog for your products or services. What systems do you have in place to automate the business processes? What is the model that your business runs on? Is it ads? How are you maximizing your traffic generation methods without relying on the volume of posts you have?

If you go to job boards or PayPerPost sites — you ought to be viewing it from the other side of the table. Look for bloggers to help you fill in those posts. Hire a freelancer to help design your site. Free your hands so you can concentrate on marketing and strategizing.

Blogs can be utilized as different kinds of tools for businesses. Are you trying to run a business — or replace your job. The answer will determine how you ought to see the evolution of many blogging related topics in the news … and how you should take advantage of them.

Much like a quiet herd of bears suddenly discovering a honey pot, the Internet Marketing crowd has turned its eager eye on user drive social content sites — particularly Digg.

While it may have received smaller attention in the past, wiley veteran Ken McCarthy stirred interest two days ago when he wrote about the potential disaster with ICANN deregulating the cost of .info, .biz, and .org domains. [update: apparently ICANN had their proposal overturned]

Ken Mccarthy is the founder of the System Seminar, a highly regarded seminar series focusing on Internet Marketing.  Mr. McCarthy has a pedigree.  Amongst other things he organized the first conference ever on the economic potential of the world wide web, enlisting the help of then-unknown Marc Andreeson (of Mosaic, then Netscape). to help present at the conference.

One alert digger, dkubb, posted the blog post to Digg — and it subsequently got a tremendous amount of attention.  Currently, it is sitting at just over 1300 “Diggs” with over 170 comments.

Its difficult to know what this portends for sites such as Digg, Reddit, Shoutit, Netscape and the many others that have sprouted up over the last 12 months.  

Traffic is the lifeblood of the e-commerce website, and with so much of it flowing through many of these new user driven news sites, one might expect that certain internet marketers may begin to take advantage of this. 

Unfortunately, with a prediliction towards heavy handed one-page sales letters, squeeze pages and the like, with their ebooks, guides, info-packages and so on, some members of those user-driven communities (such as Digg and Reddit) may regard these attempts as nothing more than quick cash grabs by merchants who deal in “get-rich-quick” schemes.

Will these sites get a deluge of hype masquerading as genuine newsworthy submissions?  Or will the community of Internet marketers at large approach these sites with caution and circumspect?  Although these sites such as Digg and Reddit a variety of policing and editorial methods, time will tell if the community is able to police itself in that regard — or even embrace them with open arms. 

So, you may have heard of job boards sprouting like weeds across the blogosphere:

• GigaOm Jobs — $200/listing per month
• Crunchboard Job Board — $200/listing per month
• 37Signals’ Job Board — $250/listing per month
• ProBlogger.net’s Job Board — $50/listing per month (until the end of sept — then $100)

While it may represent more opportunities for bloggers to find work professionally (on some of these boards), the proliferation of job boards poses an interesting conceptual issue for smaller, non-A-List bloggers and marketers a like.

For example, should we expect a proliferation of Job Boards around the blogosphere now? Ought YOU to open up a Job Board, for example?

Well, as a monetization tool, Job Boards are a great alternative to “just ads” — they foster another aspect of your readers involvement and can provide a useful service to them and the blogosphere at large. They also provide another stream of income in addition to other things you may have going on. They do not require a great deal of sophisticated code either — many “job board” or classified scripts can be found inexpensively on the web as it is.

However, for them to work, they need traffic. And not just any traffic — *good* traffic. Responsive traffic. I suppose another word for this is a real community.

And I think this is the Real Lesson behind the Job Board proliferation of late — and its not that YOU should necessarily think of adding “Job Board” to your own monetization scheme.

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So as you may or may not know, there is currently a flash “game” — really, a simulator — to give anyone a taste of what its like to use Adsense on their website to earn some cash.

Personally, I think this is a great tool.

It gives you a real sense of the steps you have to go through to actually implement Adsense in a meaningful fashion, and in doing so, tries to highlight major variables that can determine how successful your Adsense adventures will be.

What the website seems to fall flat is in its own purpose as a marketing strategy. And that purpose seems to be for lead generation.

That is, while its a nice simulator, its real role is to lead the user into a “funnel” for a further educational / marketing program that Joel Comm is selling. For it to be an effective lead generating tool, it should really create a seamless transition from one step to another.

Ian Laurie, over at Conversation Marketing, has mentioned this recently, but basically direct marketing needs to involve a multi-step strategy for most items … and the more expensive, the more odd, the more potential resistance there is to the service or product you’re offer, the more steps you need to have.

Perhaps this is where the Adsense Game’s own popularity is its own “downfall”. While I have no doubt that it is successful in “converting” its players to the next step in the marketing funnel, I wonder how much MORE effective it could be.

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One of the blogs I’m hitting up consistently these days is Amit Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration over at Blogspot.com. I’ve got nothing but respect for a guy who is pounding his keyboard day in and day out with just tremendously practical and useful stuff.

Anyway, while making my usual RSS Rounds this morning, I couldn’t help but notice Amit’s latest post, where it turns out he was recently featured on CNN IBN. Big props, and general congratulatory salutations over to him! How often do you see your favourite blogger on (international) television?

As an aside, I think its always interesting to see the actual people we read about — in the flesh and out of a studio photographer’s booth. Sort of like all of those photos at the Techcrunch-apalooza that was recently held.

Anyway, the 3 minute piece has a focus on professional blogging in general, with a target audience for India. It does use a few terms that I’m not familiar with (not being from India, and living in Toronto as a Chinese Canadian), like “Lak” (I think) — which seems to be a unit of monetary compensation. Seems like a few “Laks” equals quite a few “bucks”. :)

Its focus seems to be on the problogger lifestyle – which is really that of the modern internet entrepreneur. You can do most/ all of your work remotely from anywhere, and if you’re successful, it means a tremendous amount of flexibility coupled with a nice paycheque, albeit long working hours.

I’ve already blogged a litle bit about the International Blogosphere, Chinese-digg-type sites and the like mostly.

But Amit’s latest kudos got me thinking about the Indian Blogosphere in general.

Like, how snobbish are we North American bloggers to our global counterparts? Its one thing if the blogs are in another language, but English being one of the official languages of the region, and I’ve noticed that most Indian blogs are, in fact in English — so no excuses there.

If TechCrunch featured A-list North American Bloggers, who make up the International Tech/Web2.0 A-List?
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FastCompany has a great article on exploring the Long Tail and how it exists beyond Amazon. Well I couldn’t agree more.

In my mind the article confirms my suspicions. For the smaller players, and non-VC funded startups, The Long Tail, is really just a Web2.0 Buzword for Niche Marketing.

The Long Whaaa?
So, as a primer for those not caught up in the bubble, “The Long Tail” refers to a phenomena described first in a Wired article by Chris Anderson in 2004. It talks about how product offerings by a business, usually considered to be “unpopular” because of low sales volumes, can make up a significant portion of an online business, because the total volume of said “unpopular” items can be significantly large.

E-commerce had created a business model where this is feasible because of low overhead; when it costs little or nothing to stock these items, it becomes viable to sell them. Example: Amazon and Netflix — large centralized warehouses reduce the cost of carrying exotic and unusal books/ DVDs. Contrast this to your neighborhood Blockbuster: it costs money every month for every square foot of space; because its probably in a visible location in your neighborhood, those costs are probably, per square foot, multiples of what a larger warehouse in the middle of nowhere costs.

Blockbuster MUST be stocking what’s considered mainstream and popular, because they’ve got to get a return on every square foot of sales space they’ve got.

Amazon’s Got a Huge Tail — But How Effective is It?
I think this is where the article hits it on the head.

Young believes that direct-to-consumer commerce is the wave of the future for Long Tail items. Yes, Amazon and other aggregators will sell small numbers of each niche title, but Young is convinced that both artist and consumer benefit when they cut out the middleman.

While the Amazons and Netflixes of the world flex their long tail muscles — because even though its a lower cost to stock and maintain those niche titles, it *does* cost money — I think Chris Anderson’s story doesn’t quite end there.
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