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.

In fact, though, our advice to the client PRIOR to the incident was, “Your judgment is impaired. Step away from the keyboard. Leave TechCrunch alone. Let Arrington run his blog, you should go run your business.” The client agreed, but later suffered a late-night spasm of righteous indignation — near an Internet connection.

But at this point, their client went off the deep end:

But the client was obsessed with TechCrunch. Without consulting their SHIFT team, the company’s founder left a critical comment at TechCrunch. The client basically questioned Arrington’s integrity. This comment got picked up by ValleyWag. Which got picked up by Digg. Which led to Mr. Arrington posting at-length in defense of his integrity.

Furthermore, their opinion has been thusly:

Our advice AFTER the incident was, “Apologize. Publicly. Now. Then, step away from the keyboard. Throw yourself on the mercy of the blogosphere and cross your fingers.”

Well, that’s what I love about the blogosphere; you never know who’s blogging, and what they’re going to blog about.

The issue around Mike Arrington’s latest rant has drawn its share of controversy from both sides; some saying that Mr. Arrington is far too arbitrary bordering on elitest, while others congratulate him on the work he’s done, arguing that he can do damn well as he pleases.

The piece that set Mike off is a perspective we haven’t seen yet — and I’m curious to see where the blogosphere falls on this issue as well; clearly MothersClick is largely unrepentant for their opinions in spite of what their PR firm suggested.

But IS apologizing the right thing to do?

I guess if I was in public relations and I KNEW there were only a few key “kingmakers” in the web2.0 realm, I would also lie prostate and beg for forgiveness as well. If TechCrunch is noticeably arbitrary in who it reviews, then I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be cast in any black list (if such a list exists … hmmm … I wonder if that list does exist?)

That is, if Mike Arrington’s role is more than a blogger with pithy posts (or seemingly pithy posts), but someone with real connections, his ire, like any other “real” A-lister could have dramatically dire consequences.

If VC / Angel funding and the Crunch / Malik / Marshall crowd is as tight as the old boys club it seems to be, then its not a far stretch where you could envision someone saying (while brandishing an indigant fist in the air) “they’ll never work in this town again!”

So I understand where the PR firm is coming from.

No matter what happens to MothersClick, they’ve still got clients to represent — and they’ve still got to play in the same pool as last time, no matter how it might be tainted with another client’s metaphorical waste products.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for standing up for yourself and what you believe in. And in many cases, your integrity is the capital that trust is built on — which is the only real currency in the blogosphere anyway.

Question is – is it worth getting anti-crunched?

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.

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. 

• 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.

Rather, that Job Boards, like other aspects of monetization, really work when you have a lot of traffic running through your blog. The best traffic is that which is responsive to you and your site. They actually click on your recommendations, both intentional (such as an affiliate program), or unintentional (Adsense), but also to other mechanisms, both non-commercial (participating in the comments section) and commercial (such as Job Boards where people both post hires and HIRE those hires!).

The Real Lesson is that Traffic is King … because with enough traffic all monetary mechanisms are possible.

• Almost any sort of ad scheme will be profitable.
• Affiliate Programs will begin selling on their own.
• Job Boards can capitalize on the amount of people looking for work and looking to solve HR problem.
• Voluntary donation-campaigns will be on autopilot
• Any of your own products or services you offer will also, literally, take off.

If the goal of your website is to achieve any amount feduciary success then your focus should be in creating as much inbound traffic as possible — then retaining as much of that traffic in terms of regular visitors, and eventually fostering a responsible and responsive community of regular faithful visitors.

And perhaps, that is the biggest lesson of all: these larger “A-list” bloggers are only able to establish montary tools such as job boards only becauase they have so much traffic funneling through them. But its more than just traffic … its a community that’s swelled around them.

If you don’t have a community of faithful readers, don’t bother with a Job Board.

Focus on creating that community first.

While its mercenary to think so, doing all the sort of organic things to grow your own blog will pay dividends when it does grow. And these are things that you should be doing anything.

• Therefore, the race for creating worthwhile posts, “link baiting” and creating inbound links.
• Therefore, participating in comments section of your favourite blogs.
• Therefore, the posting to social content sites.
• Therefore, the purchasing of text-link-ads on other sites.
• Therefore, the participation in blog networks.
• … and so on and so on.

I’m of the firm belief that if you’re consistent in your those efforts, it will pay off — literally. You’ll command a large share of traffic through the blogosphere and in turn, will have fostered a real community under your stewardship. The yard stick of your success will ultimately be in that community your able to foster and cultivate.

So what are you waiting for?

Start start planting those seeds today!

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.

The people who are playing the Adsense Game, I *suspect* are people who are unlikely to be hardcore info-marketers who are jonesin’ for the next offering by the next marketing guru.

The vast majority are *probably* people who have somewhere between a passing and moderate interest in Adseense for their blog (if they have a blog at all).

After one or two “days” in the Adsense simulator, a pop up comes up with what looks like a bit of a hardsell, offering that you should “Discover the secrets to Adsense wealth with the web’s most successful e-book”.

Of course, there is a graphic of a book and so on as well.

No matter how successful he is, I wonder how much more effective he’d be in tailoring his offer to a more general, a more casual audience.

Rather than putting the graphic up and coupling it with a pretty salesy bit of copy, would a more transitional piece of copy would work? A simple “Click here for more information on how to improve your Adsense earnings”.

It might be interesting to actually run *those* changes through a simulator (or A vs B testing)!

I think the website illustrates a few important principes in Internet Marketing

1. Direct Marketing is a powerful tool when you have a business with products or services to sell: the Adsense Game is part of a larger strategy that is trying to sell a book directly to the consumer. Its pretty damn effective.
2. A Multi-Step strategy is important when approaching a new audience or trying to offer something different or expensive: Joel’s not trying to sell it in one go — he could have thrown up a one page sales letter, but its actually more effective to have multiple steps, or “hoops” for visitors to jump through. This way it improves your conversion at each step and ultimately improves your overall conversion from potential custom to actual customer.
3. Keeping track of your own metrics, or statistics is absolutely vital when it comes to trying new or different things as it applies to your own marketing strategy: The best thing about internet marketing is that you can make changes to your tactics at a small or no cost. Here’s the critical thing: if you don’t measure what you’re doing there’ll be no way to know if what you’re doing makes any difference!

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?

Here’s a partial list of Indian bloggers who have substantial Alexa/ PageRank profiles.

If you have anymore, please list’em!

• http://www.kiruba.com/ — India’s Top Blogger?
• http://www.dashes.com/anil/ – Anil Dash of Typepad.
• http://www.123suds.blogspot.com/ — On IT, Tech, Outsourcing in India
• http://www.emergic.org/ — Rasjesh Jain’s Blog on Emerging Tech and Emerging Markets
• http://www.ckunte.com — Chyetanya Kunte‘s Blog on Tech/Wordpress issues
• http://ajaydsouza.com/ — Ajay D’Souza’s personal musings and blogging about blogging.

Its a small list — but this is a topic I’ll be blogging about in the future, so definitely more to come!

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.

Their role in the large ecosystem of e-commerce is that these sites will introduce folks to other niche products in the area that they already have an interest in. The best of these sites, after all, were the very first to integrate audience participation in terms of “recommendations”.

While the Long Tail phenomena no doubt exists for larger (and perhaps smaller) online retailers as well, commerce sites that capitalize on these niche markets will also prosper. In fact, the existence of the Long Tail probably helps create and foster niche markets in a way that was not possible before the Internet.

Disintermediating Amazon

“Going to Amazon can get the item to the fan, but going directly to the artist creates a fulfilling, lasting relationship. As a content creator, once you have a direct customer, you can strengthen that relationship with ‘thank you for your purchase’ emails, new release preorders, exclusive tour presales, etc. At the end of the day, building a relationship with your fan is the most important thing to enable the tail to grow and become a sizeable revenue producer.”

Around the time of the first Internet bubble, there was a lot of press / hype around how the efficiencies of e-commerce would enable retailers to disintermediate the supply chain.

One of them, as I recall, was Amazon.

At any rate, disintermediation’s really just a fancy word for eliminating the middle man.

The irony here is that although disintermediation was trumpted by companies like Amazon during the first bubble, smaller independent retailers now on the Internet can harness the same phenomena to disintermediate Amazon.

How? Well, the article quite rightly points out that the evolution of the Long Tail is for smaller e-commerce players, who are closer to their target audience, and can leverage the power of the Long Tail in a different way by catering to their needs in a way that the larger e-commerce players never could …

… precisely because of the Long Tail effect.

Amazon, for a lack of a better example, cannot really focus their efforts in catering to a niche in the way that these smaller retailers can. More to the point, their audience would never associate that undefinable quality that some would call authenticity with Amazon.

Its the same reason why department stores have all but dried up with the exception of the all-mighty Walmart.
Walmart is so large that its able to achieve economies of scale that no other entity is able to — and its able to pass its savings to the customer. But department stores in general — Eatons, in Canada, Woolworth’s in the States — have all but disappeared because of their precise lack of specialization and focus.

More to the point, as with Amazon, there’s a limit to what customers are willing to pay in exchange for a lower price, and the experience is integral to it.

• Its the experience of dealing with a party who has real similar interests.
• Its the experience of dealing with a party who is response and attentive to your complaints or concerns
• And its the experience of being able access products or services in a much more intimate way than a big box dealership or the equivalent thereof simply cannot offer.

The best part?
Customers are willing to pay a premium for it.

Don’t Do the Tail, and You Won’t Have to Compete on Price
And that’s what niche marketing is really all about.
It was (and still is) still a bit of a buzzword in Internet Marketing circles, but as it applies to the Web2.0 trends, it really has applicability in terms of understanding and capitalizing on the Long Tail phenomena.

Small businesses, entrepreneurs and bootstrappers probably don’t have the capital to create economies of scale that make sense from a business model point of view. But, it probably makes no sense for them to do so anyway, because they would really be no different from those business models.

While it may have been impossible pre-Internet to create a retail business with a real storefront, a lease, employees and so on for a niche prouct or site, the cost of doing business now on the Internet has dramatically dropped. Operationally, the cost of building and maintaining an e-commerce site is a pittance compared to the regular costs of an off-line concern.

At the same time, because you’ll be offering something unique and special to your customers, they won’t necessarily be looking for bargains when they hit your site. They’ll be looking for other things — in particular, the experience of dealing with a business who knows them and their product of choice intimately … who they might even have a relationship with.

The value that it all adds to your product or service offering is more than enough to offset any price premium you might have over a larger e-commerce concern, like Amazon. Although clearly you can’t be gouging your customers either.

The keyword is value: what they get / what they have to give.

In order to maximize value and profits, think about the following tips:

1. Remember Your Roots: If you’re an artist, creator or author selling directly to your audience, fantastic — be as real as you possibly can. Your audience is paying for your own unique “voice”. If you’re not, remember your own roots; you’re probably a great fan of those works yourself. Authenticity is the currency of cool, and its not something you can or should fake.
2. Create Great Content: Start a blog, publish articles, do interviews — have fascinating and compelling *stuff* for your site. This has a few reasons. One — its great for search engines; let your audience find *you*. Two — you’ll be creating a great relationship as you’ll allow them to participate in creating commentary to your works. Three — it gives your fans / potential customers reasons to come back. Four — it establishes your own credibility as person / site which is an authority on the subject … particularly important if you’re not the owner/author/creator of those works, yourself.
3. Convert Your Traffic and Follow up: Easier said than done — but its the mantra of direct marketing mavens everywhere. Your potential customers are now warmed up and rarin’ to go, thanks to your following the advice above … which, I might add, distinguishes you from your larger competitors in a great way … and its time to convert those potential customers into actual customers! Don’t just offer the book, CD, or the t-shirt! Show your audience you can offer more! Show them that your business has a better and more intimate knowledge of what they want and need. Offer limited release items not readily available anywhere else; shower them with bonuses and extras that would actually be used; follow up with meaningful email replies. Dedicate special RSS feeds and channels just for them. It goes on and on.

The Long Tail exists in today’s Web2.0 world, and we’ve probably all taken part in it at one time or another. For entrepreneurs who are single or small man operations, the trick is how to take advantage of it. For those individuals, it probably makes the most sense to consider Niche Marketing as the small business’ Answer to the Long Tail – and when applied correctly, it can create a richer experience for all parties involved (pun intended!).