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As an independent professional service provider looking to succeed online you’re going to encounter one fundamental problem. You – your time, your skills, your personality, your charisma – are not scaleable.

No matter how well you market yourself, and how much business you bring in, you can only do so much of that work yourself. Once you’re fully booked, you’re fully booked – you can’t take on more work until you stop doing something else.

How to scale your online business

There is one absolutely vital thing that you do own, however, which is valuable and truly scaleable: that’s your knowledge. By packaging your expertise effectively, and turning it into a product rather than a professional service, you do two things:

1. You make access to your expertise more affordable to a much wider audience
2. After the initial investment of creating your knowledge product you’re free to sell it to as many people as you can without much additional demand on your time and resources.

But how do you go about developing a product based on your knowledge and expertise?

Dave Navarro, AKA “The Launch Coach”, has built a successful online business showing people just like you how to do exactly that!

I’ve been working through Dave’s excellent free online marketing workbooks in the LaunchCoach Library. The workbooks take you step-by-step through:

• 7 steps you can take to playing a much bigger online game
• 7 steps to networking yourself to A-Listers
• 7 simple income streams that you can actually create
• How to start making real money with your product in just 3 days

The thing I like most about Dave’s style is that he avoids the usual marketing hype of your typical online “gurus”, and gets straight to the meaty stuff that’s really valuable to people like you and me who are looking to turn our expertise into a scaleable online business.

I’m not a "guru."  I’m just a guy who’s pretty darned
good at teaching people how to do things in a simple
step-by-step, you-can-do-this manner.

Dave Navarro – The Launch Coach

The free stuff that Dave offers is amazing – but if you’re looking to fast-track your online product creation and promotion skills, you should check out his latest offering

Two downloadable Workshops — 10 great training modules — that show you how he built his own online business, and that could be just the catalyst you need to kick start your online business.

I’m certainly going to check it out. You’ll find all the details on Creating Products that Sell & Building a Responsive List on Dave’s site.

Understanding Digital: CREATIVE will take place at the National College of Ireland in the city centre from 4-7 pm, followed by a drinks reception and  an opportunity for informal networking.  We’re hosting the event in conjunction with the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) as part of Design Week 2009.

For just €50 (€10 for current ICAD members) you get to share the expertise and insight of four leading digital creative minds.

Places are limited, and at that price they’re going fast so register now to secure yours.

The speakers

As well as Damian and myself… who’ll be hosting he event… our panel of speakers will explore how digital media can expand the scope of creative marketing online, facilitate interaction and ultimately improve the bottom line.

We’ll hear from Dave Birss, Creative Digital Director at Ogilvy London; Matt Butterworth, Managing Director of Folk Creative; Nick Suckley, Managing Partner of Agenda 21 Digital and Robin Grant, founder of We are Social.

It’s a line-up that Damian and I are very excited about. It promises to be a great event, and the drinks reception afterwards, in association with Design Week sponsor Bombay Sapphire will be a great opportunity to meet and chat with us, with the speakers and a great mix of people from inside and outside the digital media sector.

We hope you can make it, and look forward to welcoming you on the 05 November.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Our new book somehow seems very real this morning. I opened an e-mail from our publishers, Kogan Page, to find a link to the “Understanding Digital Marketing” page on their website.

It’s an exciting time.

Apparently:

Details of your book have already already been circulated to the book trade and to key online booksellers such as amazon. Your book will also feature in our ‘new books and bestsellers’ catalogue which is circulated by our Sales Agents to the international book trade

So, all good stuff then.

We’re planning to launch an accompanying website in the near future to support and build on Understanding Digital Marketing. This is still in the very early planning stages, but the vision is to build a dynamic and constantly evolving, community driven online marketing resource.

Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our RSS feed or check back regularly to see what’s new. It’s going to be fun!

The internet is a superb market research tool for your new or growing businesses. It can provide all sorts of useful insight into your industry, your competitors and, most importantly of all, your customers. In this article and the next in our series we take a look at twelve ways that the internet can make gathering marketing intelligence more productive and less costly for your fledgling business.

1. Read industry association websites: A quick search for industry related websites in your favourite search engine will unearth all sorts of valuable information: up-to-date news, white-papers, research and best practice guidelines, and more to inform the strategic direction you take with your new business. Decide to join, and you’ll probably get access to even more online resources, training and support….

2. Subscribe to analyst newsletters and report updates: one of the main sources of information for market research is reports from analyst firms like Forrester Research, Gartner Group and others. Stay ahead of the game by subscribing for e-mail updates on new analyst reports for your industry. You’ll get up-to-the minute summaries of the latest research direct to your inbox, and can invest in a full report or two if you feel it will help your business.

3. Use news aggregators to keep up-to-date: know what’s going on in your industry by searching for relevant keywords on news aggregation sites like Google News (news.google.com) and Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com), both of which offer convenient, easily accessible window to global and local news stories, press releases and other material. You’ll have access to a much wider range of material that’s infinitely more useful than scanning through hundreds of print publications.

4. Read blogs: blogs (short for web-logs) are personal publishing platforms that allow people to post their thoughts on anything and everything to the web. A lot of them, naturally, won’t be relevant to your business, but dismissing blogs could be a serious mistake. The most popular bloggers on a particular subject can command huge audiences, and have massive influence on opinion in online communities. Reading these blogs can offer you valuable insight into what these key influencers in your field think. Remember, blogs are a two-way medium – so check out the comments to see what readers think, and perhaps even offer an opinion or two of your own.

5. Check out online forums: online forums can be great places to glean valuable information and advice for your business, and to identify the online influencers in your space. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – a quick search is sure to unearth relevant interactive forums full of people passionate about your particular subject. Many of them are only too happy to share their experience, expertise and insight with newcomers. Just remember it’s a two-way-street, so be sure to engage in the conversation and help others out whenever you can.

6. Keep your finger on the online pulse with media submission sites: find out what’s flavour-of-the-moment with online consumers by checking out the top stories on online media submission sites like Digg.com (www.digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) and others. These sites allow people to recommend, vote on and discuss news articles, blog posts and web pages they’ve seen online. As well as more general sites, be sure to check out industry specific media submission sites (Sphinn.com, for example, is an online media submission site for search and internet marketers). More of these are emerging all of the time, and they can give you a very industry-centric indication of what’s hot and what’s not online.

Pursue more established online marketing strategies and ignore social media and your letting a golden opportunity slip by – but by equal measure, if you put all your efforts into social media and eschew more established online avenues you could be missing the lions share of online business.

Or as Damien puts it:

How many people have an email address, how many have a Facebook account?

Consider all your options

You absolutely can’t ignore the online "conversation"… but then neither should you neglect the more established elements of online marketing, like e-mail, SEO, PPC, affiliate programmes and even online display advertising if it dovetails with your particular audience. Also, its often worth considering how offline marketing can augment and complement your online campaigns.

Do your homework

Know what you want to achieve before you start, know your market and where they spend their time online, identify the key influencers. Then align your marketing strategy accordingly.

New marketing doesn’t kill old marketing

Marketing is evolving — but that evolution doesn’t eradicate what preceded it, it just adds more strings to the marketers bow, giving you a suite of new and exciting ways to engage with the people who really matter to your business.

You can see — or rather hear the proof of this in any outdoor market, anywhere in the world. From the street markets of London to the Souks of Marrakech to Asia and beyond,  you’ll find the very first marketing medium in history — the human voice — employed to hawk the merchants’ wares, as effective in the digital age as it ever was.

A more rounded future

I think we’ll see a much more holistic approach to marketing emerge over the next few years, and will gradually see the stark delineation between "traditional" and "online" marketing converge into a much more rounded whole. We’ll stop thinking in terms of “traditional” versus “digital”marketing… it will just be marketing, and we’ll employ a carefully tailored blend of techniques spanning a variety of media to engage effectively with our target market.

It’s going going to take time, of course… but it promises to be an intriguing transition.

Naturally, then, it pays to spend a little time, care and attention on your subject line. You want to craft a subject line that clearly states the value proposition of your message, and obviously make sure there aren’t any glaring typos in it that make your organisation seem unprofessional.

It’s a shame that Irish e-retail portal Buy4Now.ie didn’t do this with their latest missive. I just received the following e-mail promotion from Buy4Now.ie on behalf of Thomas Sanderson conservatory and sunroom blinds with a glaring typo in the subject line. Instead of “sunroom” they’d typed “sundroom”. A perfectly understandable typo… but why, oh why, wasn’t it checked and corrected before hitting send?

A closer look at the offending subject line showing the offending typo:

If I was Thomas Sanderson I’d be less than chuffed with this effort. It reflects badly on them and on Buy4Now. Come on guys… you can do much better than this!

We’re in the final furlong now. After six months of hard work the body of the book is written, and we’ll be getting the final bits and pieces (figures, diagrams, glossary, case studies, etc.) out to the publisher over the next week or so.

Phew! It’s been a marathon… but worth it.

Estimated publication date in the UK and Ireland is very early 2009 with international markets following later next year.

Very exciting stuff!

Why write this book?

Understanding Digital Marketing is a book for anyone who want’s to take their marketing to the next level by making the leap to digital as it moves into the mainstream. It’s for small business owners, traditional marketers, entrepreneurs and business executives who want a comprehensive overview of online marketing that will help them to hit the ground running to promote their business on the Internet.

It will:

• Help people with little knowledge of digital marketing to get up-to-speed quickly
• Deliver the the basic know-how people need to work effectively with online marketing professionals
• Provide a solid foundation for business owners and entrepreneurs looking to implement their own Internet marketing campaigns

More news on publication dates and availability nearer the time – meanwhile, subscribe to the Digital Marketing Success RSS Feed or check back regularly for extracts, insight and news from the online marketing world. And don’t forget to let us have your feedback in the post comments.

Calvin & Damian!

SMX Social 2008, Long Beach, CA: “SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

SES 2006, Chicago: “SEO is bulls**t…90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesmen.”

The firestorm that followed reverberated across the social web….

At the risk of attracting a little vitriol, I have to say that there’s truth in both of those statements.

Content isn’t king… the customers is

I agree, for instance, that spending time trying to “game” the engines for short term results is a futile exercise, at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term prosperity. For sustainable rankings you should focus your efforts on producing great content, and making sure the search engines can index it and recognise it as such… which of course is where SEO comes in.

I’m not convinced yet that purely human search — like Calacanis’s offering at Mahalo — is the answer to the search conundrum. Perhaps some sort of hybrid search will emerge… a synergy between algorithmic and human-edited search that delivers better results all ’round.

Ultimately great content is what users are looking for… and therefore what search engines, regardless of their flavour, want to deliver. And as search engines get better at determining what users really want when they fill in that little box, it’s outstanding content that’s going to win the day. Not because content is king — because the customer is.

Plenty of good SEOs

While there are certainly a lot of cowboys out there in the SEO world who prey on the gullible and exploit the naive, there are also plenty of SEOs who are passionate and genuine and do a great job of getting their clients’ websites in front of their users. They help people to find great content that would otherwise slip under the search radar.

Search engines are amazing, but they’re not good enough yet to find and analyse all the content on the web correctly. They need a bit of help. Good SEOs have the knowledge to be able to align their clients’ content with both what users are looking for, and what Search Engines can index… again, a synergy that, in a perfect world, ends up with a win-win-win for user’s, search engines and site owners.

The snake oil salesmen? They routinely crop up in every new industry all over the world: the vampirical underbelly of humanity emerging to suck sustenance from the unwary and anknowing. It’s not an SEO thing — it’s a human nature thing.

Fire the good people

Which brings me to Jason Calacanis’s latest outpouring of controversial entrepreneurial wisdom. In an interview on the Sydney Morning Herald’s small business blog this week, he advocates firing the good people to make room for the great.

Again, a lot of what he says in the interview makes plenty of sense… you do want to attract and retain great people… and sometimes good just isn’t good enough. If you want to cultivate a culture of excellence, you have to build a team of excellent people. So far, so good.

Where he loses me is with the following statement under the heading of rewarding obsessive behaviour:

“You don’t want people with balance in their life. You want people who are responding to email at two in the morning… People with balance in their life can work at the post office.”

Er… how do I put this tactfully… WRONG!

Excellence demands balance

Balance is a good thing… and if you want to encourage excellence in your staff you damn well better make sure they have some balance. Balance doesn’t mean punching in, working 9-5, five days a week and then taking the weekends off. But it absolutely does mean having more to your life than work. I like to call it working for life… as opposed to living for work, which is what so many people seem to do these days.

Without balance, all you have is… well, imbalance, and where does that get you? A company full of wired, burnt out former geniuses tethered to their internet connection is no company at all.

To get the best out of people, I believe, you have to encourage them to be people, rather than automatons. In my admittedly limited experience, people who obsess about work all the time — the ones who are answering their e-mail at 2am — may spend more time working, but are often less productive than people who have found a healthy balance.

But hey, Jason Calacanis is a multi-milionnaire serial entrepreneur… and I’m not….

What do you think?

But the real value of twitter (and I guess other micro-blogging/short message broadcast services like Jaiku and Pownce) isn’t about individual messages — it’s about the cumulative stream of messages: what that reveals about you and the people you’re connected with. I love it.

In the short time I’ve been using Twitter I’ve realised that it really can add tremendous value in lots of ways:

Some of twitters strengths

• you to feel more connected and in touch with the people around you
• it helps strengthen your relationships with the people you already know
• it’s a great way to hook up with like-minded people you don’t know
• you can follow thought-leaders and innovators in your field, see what’s on their minds, and gain tremendous insight from that
• it puts your finger on the beating pulse of your industry — if it’s happening people are talking about it on twitter, and linking to valuable resources on the web
• it’s a great way to harness groundswell to promote new products and services through social media (as witnessed recently with @patphelans remarkable Twitterfone launch) — see Pat’s Twitterfone launch summary on his blog.

I’m sure there are plenty more. Of course it’s also a big distraction and potential time waster… but I’m working on that .

But now the subject of Twitter Spam has reared its head, with the publication of a new Twitter Black List.

Which begs the question, is spam really going to be a problem on a service that’s fundamentally based around opt-in? You only see the tweets of people you choose to follow, and you can opt back out again at any time if they start posting lots of spammy tweets. From my admittedly limited experience you don’t need a blacklist to spot potential twitter spammers — you just need a soupcon of common sense.

When someone on twitter follows you, resist the guilt reflex to follow them back, and check their profile and their twitter-stream to see if they have anything interesting to say. If they do, great, if not… or if you see a lot of spammy links, don’t follow them… simple.

Where’s the problem?

Danny Sullivan posted a terrific summary of the twitter spam issue over on his Daggle blog recently. It’s definitely worth a read.

One thing in Danny’s summary — about Twitter’s @replies confused me a bit though.

Danny says:

@replies. By default, you will only see messages from people who call you out using your name (like @dannysullivan) if you are following them. This means you’re initially safe from unwanted messages — no one you don’t know can show up in your Twitter stream. But some change the default to see @replies from anyone. I do — and it’s a great way to meet new people you aren’t following. If they say something interesting, catch my attention somehow — I’m like great! A new person to follow. But it also means potentially, people you don’t know can get into your Twitter replies tab or if you use a tool like Twhirl (love it, recommend it!), then they’re potentially even more in your face. Yeah, there’s a “spam” potential there, and hopefully it won’t grow. If someone is abusive, you can block them individually. See this on Twitter for more about @replies.

Now, I interpret the Twitter Support page on @replies a little differently from Danny. I think the @reply settings on your Twitter profile relate to @replies SENT TO OTHER PEOPLE by the people you follow. The options are:

• You receive @replies sent from the people you follow only if they’re sent to other people you also follow. (this is the twitter default setting)
• You receive @replies sent from the people you follow to any user regardless of whether you follow them or not. (this is my preferred setting and a great way to find new and interesting people connected to the people you’re already following)
• You don’t receive any @replies sent by the people you follow to anyone other than yourself.

You will ALWAYS receive @replies directed at your particular username from anybody (i.e anyone who types in @yourusername), regardless of your settings and regardless of whether you follow them or not. Your Twitter @reply settings will dictate whether you see replies sent from the people you follow to other people… if you follow that!

To test this I just created a new user (not following anybody and not followed by anybody) and sent an @reply to my main account. It got through perfectly, as did the reply I sent back in return.

So — is the fact that ANYBODY can @reply anybody else, without the “Follow” opt in a good thing, or a potential loophole that spammers could exploit in the future… comments please!