Can a person have both a personal life and success? Please share your thoughts.

In spite of all the opportunities that social media has created, its demands have tested the lives of many individuals involved in the space. Social media has popularized the notion of sharing everything, and mobile has done nothing but make the process easier by allowing for constant connectivity.

We’ve seen people such as Scott Stratten, Amber Naslund, Matt Inman, Chris Brogan, and others, all build successful brands for themselves merely through social media channels. As pioneers in the industry, many of these individuals got their start by constantly communicating with users.

One of the perks of social media is the ability to communicate with others on a personal level. The problem is that many individuals have now grown into Web celebrities, which makes it extremely difficult for them to maintain that same level of communication while also managing large workloads.

Matt Inman, known for his popular site The Oatmeal, is starting to realize this challenge. According to him, The Oatmeal is both successful and profitable, but on the other hand, his personal life is struggling. For example, his car insurance was recently terminated because his focus was on his work. There are some areas that he wants to maintain control of, but he admits that he does need help with other aspects.

“The content, the creativity, I feel, will always be mine. I always want to control that,” he said.

Chris Brogan also offers a picture into what success really is in this video:

With this information in mind, one can’t help but wonder if finding a balance is even possible. If this is true, would you be more apt to choose a personal life or success?

A lot of moral corruption can be accomplished in 140 characters or less, it would seem. Or maybe it’s just too easy to talk to freedom-loving infidels that might pass on a mind-expanding link.

Whatever the reasoning, as captured at Joi.Ito.com, Twitter is persona-non-grata…er, networka-non-grata. An attempt to access the social network is met with this notice:

"We apologize, the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates."

But that’s no reason for the folks at Twitter to despair. As Mashable’s Mark Hopkins points out, being banned in an intolerant country just means you’ve officially arrived:

"You know you’ve really made it as an online entity when an entire country bans your site. In terms of a rite of passage, it’s just after the wide-spread adoption and critical mass stages (which of course is followed by random companies banning you, and mainstream newspapers writing about studies on how inefficient the economy has become since your company’s existence)." 

And let’s not forget proposed legislation and school board fights. Congratulations, Twitter!

Moderator: Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM

Speakers: Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc, Thomas Grant, Director – Internet Marketing Solutions, Unica Corporation, Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics.

Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc was the first on to speak, he went on to describe six types of analytics as they’ve grown more and more important over time.

Traditional SEM: Impressions, clicks, and conversion.

Making use of modern analytics entails mixing the traditional with newer analytics such as impression, click, site interactions with content with content, and conversion.

Universal Metrics: Bounce rate (those who leave after 1 page), time on the site per visitor, page view per click, "metrics, analytics," "success events, or "KPIs" refer to the same things.

Conventional Retail Metrics: orders, revenue, conversion rate (orders/clicks), cost per order (cost/orders).

Modern analytics: Technology has led to the advent of analytical measures such as Average order value, visit yield, average retail, cart creations, cart conversion rate, cost per cart creation, checkouts, checkout conversion rate, cost per checkout, monthly unique visitors, average time on site, days since last visit, return visit frequency, advertising cluck rate, revenue per page, ad impressions, ad clickthrough rates, and subscriptions.

Lead generation metrics: leads initiated, total leads completed, lead conversion ratio, lead completion ratio, and cost per lead.

Financial vertical metrics: Applications initiated, applications saved, applications completed, application value, and applications approved.

Then it was the turn of Thomas Grant, Director – Internet Marketing Solutions to share his ideas. He talked about the evolving marketing channels, which entail a mix of both offline as well as online aspects, he acknowledged that a lot of conversions take place offline.

Further, he went on to discuss how his company Unica makes use of "Enterprise Marketing Management" and softwares to deliver value in terms of marketing efficiencies, customer dialog precision, and accountability across all channels.

He further described how the marketing system of record was cyclic.

1. Analysis— 2. Planning— 3. Designing & product— 4. Execution— 5. Measurement and repetition of the process.

In all this Web Analytics have acquired core importance, which make use of KPI dashboards & reports, frictionless ad hoc analysis, granular, visitor level insight to take critical management decisions.

Next up, it was the turn of Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics. Google has been at the forefront of Web Analytics, the Version 2.0 was launched in May 2007. She discussed the various new features from the software and how they are valuable.

The new features are:

Internal Site Search: It can get you answers to question such as What keyword phrase was searched? Who searched? When is was searched? What pages are visitors searching most frequently? And even What page did they began searching from?

All the data got from this information can be very useful to do an in-depth analysis about visitor’s behavior. This data can definitely take analytics to the next level, by understanding what the visitor is looking for after reaching the site, it can help you to update content, layout, structure etc to improve your site’s performance.

Event Tracking for Rich Internet Applications:

This feature comes in the wake of the issue that Flash, Ajax and similar media types do not show up in the analytics. So with this feature, the problem should be solved.

Tagless Outbound link tracking: With this feature you’d know where the surfers go once they’ve visited a website, or it’ll help you to know the "exit destination." To implement this feature they’re developing a new JavaScript tag called ga.js. Since its based on an OOP model so it would be optional.

It’s being developed in a way that it offers the following benefits, It is a Smaller Source File and runs Faster, Professional developers should find it easy to read, It would automatically detect the server protocol, whether its http or https, and would consequently eliminate the security issues involved. And it would offer a Faster download for non-secure pages.

Currently the Urchin software version 6 from Google is in beta, it should cost $2995, you could also get it for free if you’ve purchased the advanced support earlier.

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Send $2,000 to Dell, which both manufactures and sells the Google Search Appliance, and you’ll get a yellow piece of hardware in return.  You’ll also likely be listed on a page of “Mini Customer Success Stories.”  Some of the companies named there obviously aren’t in it for the link – what does the Arizona Federal Credit Union care about search engine rankings? – but others probably are.

Barry Schwartz points to Neutralize, which is in the business of search engine marketing.  And more than one company’s name ends in “.com” – it’s hard to believe they didn’t notice what they were getting into.

That’s not to condemn this practice – I find it more odd than objectionable, and Schwartz doesn’t believe any nofollow tags are necessary.  He points out, though, “I think Matt would think otherwise.”

Whatever anyone thinks, a change in the near future is unlikely – Schwartz also points out that Scott Woodard documented this practice about six months ago.

Sure it is easy to earn yourself a quick $40 or whatever by promoting it, by dropping text links all over the place such as this one:-
Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

Or you can use some other creatives such as a nice sidebar widget (might not show in a feed reader)

Amazon’s Success Is At Least In Part Their Affiliate Program

For years affiliates have been driving traffic to Amazon. They don’t get the benefit of recurring or lifetime commissions, the affiliate program is effectively make a sale on the visit or get nothing, but because the products were mass market, some people made a fair amount of money from Amazon, and many still do.

Will Kindle Kill Affiliate Sales Of Books?

If it is successful, it could certainly have an effect.

People who buy Kindle will be the mass consumers of information, the people who buy a lot of books, especially people who have taken training to read faster such as I did at Rich Schefren’s Acceleration 2 Seminar, assuming Kindle has the features to allow faster reading.

These aren’t your "one book for Christmas" types, these are people who buy 20 books because they are going on a trip somewhere, or researching a specific topic over a few days.

Kindle Is A Direct To Amazon Sales Cycle

Amazon is cutting out the middle man. Just because you might make a $40 sale now, those people who buy the device for $400 are quite possibly no longer going to generate affiliate revenue.

It is quite possible that such people go to Amazon direct, but they are also the kind that might be influenced by a review of one book somewhere on the web, go to Amazon following an affiliate link, and buy 20 related books.

I have been monitoring the discussion around Kindle, I know Robert Scoble has mentioned making money from people reading his blog on Kindle (30% ?) but that seems like it might be only a select few. We are not going to see "Subscribe On Kindle" buttons on the vast majority of blogs any time soon.

• I would have expected Amazon to provide a lot more information on Kindle to Affiliates and what it means to them if there was a money making opportunity (not just selling the device).
• I would expect residual earnings for selling a device which will provide a residual income for Amazon.

How does this launch affect other players in the ebook market such as Clickbank?

I keep reasonably close tabs on the affiliate marketing industry, and I haven’t seen anyone rejoicing the introduction of Kindle. Have I missed something?

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

The question for the social media world that comes to mind is:

Hello, Classmates.com??? Are you listening??

Remember when Classmates.com was relevant? They could’ve/should’ve been the social networking site of the free world. And they still have a chance. They had 40 million members by the end of 2006. (My high school graduating class has 224 people listed on Classmates.com, but only 8 are on Facebook.) But every time you turn around on Classmates.com (or heaven forbid try to learn something about someone, their hand goes out asking for $15 for “Gold” membership).

I remember that business model for the web. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was a long time ago. Classmates.com needs to take the small dollar needle out of their vein (and I’m sure it’s not easy) and find a way to leverage their huge base of information in a new way. I believe they’re trying, but little incremental changes are unlikely to get them there.

There’s at least anecdotal evidence that Classmates.com’s window of opportunity is closing.

In June 2006, comscore reported that Classmates.com had slighter HIGHER numbers of unique visitors than Facebook. Classmates.com was #2 to MySpace.

By February 2007, Hitwise was reporting that had fallen to 8th, behind Yahoo360. Ouch.

Classmates.com, if you’re listening… It’s time for the big change. Find the VC, build the sales force and make the change. It might be a “risk the company” type move, but doing nothing is far riskier.

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Download As A Podcast

These successful Dugg stories or videos, etc. are what I want to discuss with you today. Were it not for Liz Strauss, I would not have had the inspiration to write this (she’s a real expert on this topic), so thanks to Liz for spurring me on here.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to trick Digg users into digging your crappy content. If your content is crappy you stand little chance of getting dugg, I mean unless you have some hot pics of a geek girl in various stages of undress, lying in front of an extreme network connection or other appropriately IT-geek-fantasy pics. It’s either quality content or nudy pics… There is no way to win at Digg without either.

Must Have Great Content

This goes along with the ‘don’t have crappy content’ point, but it’s even more important. Don’t market ANYTHING EVER that isn’t absolutely fabulous. First, it’s a waste of time. Second, and more important, it can ruin your name. And, I don’t just mean your brand, which is extremely important, but even worse it can ruin the chances that anyone is ever again willing to look at your site, even after your content improves. What I mean by this is that if I see a link to your site and click it, if it’s bad, I note this fact. Now, if I later see your link, no matter what others are saying about how awesome it is, I remember that I’ve already seen it and it is not worthy of my time, so I’m not going to click through. Don’t ruin your chances of world domination by marketing unworthy content.

Now, what do I mean by ‘Great Content’? Well, here are some examples.

• The Web Entrepreneur’s Customer Service Toolbox: 100 Hacks and Resources
• The Top Ten Free Website Tools and Services
• 20/20 Stupid In America
• Flesh Mob At Abercrombie And Fitch

Note with each of these examples, you have something that is must see. In the case of the articles (not the video), you have something that’s so long and so useful that it’s too much to take in at one sitting. You are compelled to bookmark it, because it’s that good (and that long). Just reading some of these is a chore, because they take so much scholarly attention, but the content is so valuable to Digg readers, that they’ll bookmark it and Digg it. In the case of the video, it’s so good you want to pass it along to others. Viral marketing at it’s finest, for 20/20 at least…

Who Are You Looking To Impress?

Note that I specifically said ‘valuable to Digg readers’. Knowing your audience is vital here. Now’s the time to do some research. Not only are you specifically studying Digg readers overall, but you need to take time to study the Top Diggers. This used to be easier when there was a leaderboard, but a quick/easy way to find theme now is to study the homepage for a few days. Click on each homepage submitter’s name and check out their percentage of successful digs that made it Home.

Take a look at this guy’s stats. He was a random click for me on the homepage. However, note how high his submit percentage is (45%). That’s sizeable. That means that roughly out of every 2 stories he submits, almost 1 makes it to the homepage.

Do your research. Make impressing these guys your aim. If these guys submit you, then you have a great chance of success. Your goal should be to get these guys to find your article, and it should be specifically to tailor it to what they are already submitting.

A Little Friendly Stalking Never Hurt Anybody

There are a few ways to go about this, but the easiest is to stalk these guys. Yes, I know that sounds horrible, but if it didn’t work, Netscape wouldn’t have offered to pay them to do what they do so well (which is, of course, the reason there is no longer a Top 100 list, but that’s another story altogether).

I’ve been on Digg for a relatively long time in web years (since early 2005) so I have built up relationships with some people that are helpful in this way. Please note that this is an example of how organic community involvement is vital to your success online, and by doing it the way I have done it (ie by actually taking part in the community) you gain validity. Doing it this way is better, as you will garner more success and still be able to sleep at night.

Off my soapbox and back to stalking school… For the stalking though, I’m not talking about creepy ‘I’m a crazy person’ stalking, but really just attempting to form a relationship with them.

First, it’s research time. Take a look at their last 20 Diggs. What are they submitting? Who are they normally reading? Do you see any patterns you can exploit?

Now, for the next action: Take part in those communities (blogs, forums, etc.) and identify who they are and make an honest attempt to gain credibility in that community. Later, take a second to reach out to them asking for nothing. That relationship just may turn into their becoming a reader of your site.

Shoot for making relationships with at least 10 or so top Diggers. I don’t consider this gaming the system, because you are just trying to get them to notice you, you aren’t at all spamming them or annoying them.

Again, you get one shot here, so don’t overstep and NEVER ask for them to Digg you. If your stuff is good enough, they’ll notice you. If not, then go back to the content-creating drawing board.

If it didn’t work ask yourself, “Is your content relevant to Digg readers”? Remember, they tend to like extreme science breakthroughs (medical, astronomy, physics, etc.), technology related content, Digg related content and sexy stuff. If your blog is not related to those topics at all, I wouldn’t waste my time and energy with Digg. It’s not worth the effort. Try broader sites like Netscape, or niche oriented ones like Lipstick. A quick Google Yahoo! search will garner you more social bookmarking sites than you can shake a stick at.

Monetize – What have you done for me lately?

You are probably thinking, ‘this is a lot of work’. Yes, it is a lot of work, but for some things it is worth the effort. You’ll need to calculate the ROI of each marketing campaign you run, and yes, this is just another marketing campaign. Your results, whether your aim is immediate money or long-term branding, are definitely measurable. If they are branding, it’s a bit harder, but just capturing the mentions, the comments, etc. in a spreadsheet will help you understand quickly if it was worth the effort.

Monetization tracking is even easier. I’ve never depended on Adsense on my sites for monetization, my money-maker has always been through direct consulting jobs. For my clients, however, the large majority have not been about ad clicks nor sales, but branding. They’d want a particular product to gain attention, a contest to gain traction or a specific area of their site to gain memberships and authoritative backlinks. Because we were careful to define exactly what we wanted, tracking the campaign was easy via tracking traffic, WOM buzz, sign-ups, sales, etc.

I promise not to bore you further with all this marketing talk, but I wanted to point out that the most important thing to remember when determining if all this is worth the effort is in defining exactly what you want to do from the beginning. With clear cut goals (ie I want to gain 5K views, 50 subscribers and earn $25 in advertising sales and I am willing to spend 4 hours on this effort), you can easily track your efforts and determine if this should get another try next month.

The Bottom Line

• Determine your goals
• Write or build to your audience
• Make it damn good
• Schmooze with the best

Odds are, you will not make hundreds of dollars on a Digg story, unless you know some hoodoo-voodoo that I don’t know (and some of you probably do). PPC monetization is rarely effective on Dugg stories. Digg is much more effective at making sure your content, product, video, etc. get attention, at Digg and around the blogosphere.

Good luck, and as always, I’m Duzins on Digg. Let’s be friends

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The phone is code- named the "white phone" and is scheduled to launch in late October in Britain, Italy, Hong Kong and Australia, and will be introduced in 3′s other five markets later according to BusinessWeek.

The Skype mobile phone was created with software company iSkoot, which develops Skype software for a number of mobile devices. The phone has multimedia capabilities and high-speed data for mobile browsing. The Skype mobile features a button above the keypad, which is used for making long distance and international calls. The phone displays Skype buddies along with regular phone contacts.

VoIP on cell phones has not been a major trend. "There are a lot of reasons why mobile VoIP has not yet taken off-and they differ by region," says Stephan Beckert, a TeleGeography analyst. "In the U.S., a key reason is that mobile operators are deliberately trying to keep their customers from being able to use it."

Skype hopes that it will be able to capitalize on overseas growth by offering it mobile VoIP service in markets where the company has had success.

By itself, Dotspotter seems to represent a questionable investment.  It’s less than a year old, is not exactly popular, and, in the words of Mathew Ingram, has “a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils.”  Despite the success of TMZ, I’d rather have an office full of La-Z-Boys.

CBS may also have had its eye on Anthony Soohoo, though; Soohoo was a vice president at Yahoo, and is Dotspotter’s co-founder and CEO.  Perhaps this added incentive to buy will keep people from whispering about a bubble.

Either way, the Dotspotter purchase appears to be part of a trend.  As Valleywag noted, CBS has previously acquired Wallstrip and Last.fm.  It’s created communities, brought content online, and in related news, CBS’s “Entertainment Tonight” just signed a promotional deal with Ask.

CBS may or may not fully understand Web 2.0, but it sure is trying to embrace it.

WebProNews has been covering the Podcast and New Media Expo taking place in Ontario, California. You can catch our conference interviews at the WebProNews Video Blog right now.

McMahon emphasized a number of approaches that can help the modern podcaster emerge from the shadows and become a star. There isn’t a magic elixir one can take, unless one considers lots of work a tasty beverage.

A podcaster can’t stay inside the bubble of the podcast, according to McMahon. One’s target market should be the world, and not just those who own an iPod or other type of media player.

Podcasters who want more attention have to work for it. As they build their networks, it’s important to take advantage of what’s out there, without being consumed by spending too much time inside the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world.

McMahon said a targeted promo trade with a podcast show on a similar topic could have more impact. That impact will be needed for the podcaster with dollar signs in his eyes, along with stars.

Money making has to be a mission, but it can’t detract from the content creation side. McMahon suggested delegating the accounting and sales, so one can stay focused on the podcast.

That focus needs to include showing what separates the podcast from others. Middle ground is a harmful place to occupy; McMahon thinks the fans should love or hate the podcast.

(We’ll suggest this is the "Rush Limbaugh theory" in effect. Like or dislike him, he still makes a ton of money every year, but it’s the passion that makes even his detractors listen. – David)

Podcasters need to be driven, tenacious, and unafraid to promote themselves. McMahon said having a visual identity is crucial, as it provides recognition. It’s worth having a professional photographer do a shoot to get that image.

McMahon’s website demonstrated this, with a few images present in the content area and the sidebar of his blog. That recognition will help with community building for the podcast. Bigger audiences let the podcaster take more chances.

Even so, content has to come before marketing. People tune in for content. If their numbers rise or fall, the podcaster should never take that personally; metrics are best observed in a detached, professional manner.

Whatever their numbers, the audience should see one’s work emerge as a brand, and not just a show. That show can focus on a niche, or go very wide with its appeal. Be passionate, work hard at being a go-to expert, and gameplan for success.

Without a plan, one’s podcast endeavor will probably come to a stop. Just like this article.

WebProNews anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this report.