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Maintaining Subtlety in Social Media and Affiliate Marketing

The development of social media has been a huge boon in the world of affiliate marketing. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter make it easier for affiliate marketers to reach out to larger audiences, often with a noticeably smaller time commitment. However, some marketers fail to understand that simply logging in to a social network will not ensure success.

Social media is a tool that can be used to make great gains in the field of affiliate marketing. But as in any type of tool, the misuse of social media can bring about some terrible results. Unfortunately, a number of affiliates are privy to a variety of mistakes while advertising on social networks. Over time, seemingly small mistakes can cost affiliates big time.

While audiences are able to look past certain mistakes, there is one thing that they are rarely willing to forgive: excessive enthusiasm. This concept may initially seem counter-intuitive. Aren’t affiliate marketers supposed to remain positive at all times? The answer is yes, affiliates should maintain a positive outlook in their dealings with present and future customers. But there is a big difference between displaying a positive demeanor and browbeating audiences with a message.

There’s an old cliche that bears repeating: “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” This cliche certainly applies to affiliate marketing. Two different affiliates can provide the exact same message and get completely different results. The content of the message is not nearly as important as the delivery. And the right amount of subtlety is everything when it comes to providing a decent delivery.

The problem with social media is that it leaves less room for mistakes. There is a lot less room for recovery in a Tweet or a Facebook status than there is in a blog post. On Twitter, you only have 140 characters available to get your message out there. There is little room for mistakes. While a direct and concise message is a necessity on Facebook and Twitter, it does not give you license to be brash. This will only turn visitors off of your site. Instead, you’ll have to work all the harder to craft a message that is both direct and subtle.

Subtlety is most needed when inserting links into text. On a blog or website, it is easy to get links in the right place without giving visitors the wrong impression. This is a little harder on a Twitter feed, where there is less room to work. Instead of turning your Twitter account into a big advertising feed, simply use the site to post links to your blog or website. Use the Twitter or Facebook page to introduce the topic that will be covered on the blog. If visitors like what they see on your blogs, they’ll be more willing to click through the ads.

A modicum of subtlety is helpful in any business, but this is especially true for affiliate marketing. Don’t just fire off random links and tell visitors to click on them; provide some sort of material that will interest them. Social media works best with affiliate marketing when it is used as a tool for gathering audiences. Use that tool carefully and you’ll find yourself with a targeted audience that is willing to listen to what you have to say.

Make Your Blog an Interactive Social Media Hub

Bloggers often feel that it is sufficient to provide regular and timely content to their readers. What they often overlook is the need to blend their social media networks into their blogs. While it may be great to have well written content, unless people are finding, reading and sharing it, you might as well be talking to yourself when you blog.

Why Social Media Matters

There have been numerous accounts of how Google’s Panda update impacted blogs, writing sites and even high-powered websites. Many of these sites screamed that their content was original, timely and relevant. However, Google went a step further and rated content based on how much traffic it was able to attract. Today, bloggers who fail to share their content on their social media sites will typically find their traffic staying at the same levels for days, weeks or even months at a time.

Incorporating social media

Bloggers often feel that incorporating their social media activities into their blogs means they are going to have to learn how to do all types of fancy programming and that it has to be time consuming. This is no longer the case since social networking sites have made it easier than ever to link blogs to social media accounts. There are several options available, some depending on the platform that the blog is created on including:

• Plugins – WordPress platforms work best with high-quality plugins. These are generally created by independent programmers and available for a small fee or donation to the developer. These plug-ins vary from those that will allow readers to share content with others to those that will automatically notify social media sites of new posts.

• Badges – Many of the popular social media sites offer users the ability to obtain code directly from the site and insert it into individual blog posts or along side-bars. These badges link the readers directly to the bloggers social media sites. These are especially good for those who maintain fan pages on Facebook, Groups on LinkedIn or have an active Google+ account.

• RSS Feeds – Perhaps one of the most overlooked tools for bloggers is the RSS feed. These feeds allow bloggers to do numerous things including (a) setting up an interactive newsletter, (b) making a “sticky” post of social media feeds or (c) feeding new posts directly to social media accounts.

Today, webmasters must prepare their blog and social media campaigns carefully in order to draw attention to their websites. Whether a business is providing services or products, all of the pieces must be carefully integrated for maximum success. Not too long ago, many business owners felt that having a website to display their products or services was enough. Today, this is not the case as users are growing more demanding and Google as well as other search engines are putting a higher emphasis on the value of social media.

Navigating the Tricky Terrain of Affiliate Marketing in Social Media

Affiliate marketing may be a simple concept, but like anything that’s worth doing, there are subtle complexities behind its successful execution. The explosion in growth of social media has made affiliate marketing easier than ever, technically speaking. You now have a broad diversity of platforms that you can utilize to achieve your aims–but this is all the more reason to tread carefully. Remember, the operative word in social media is “social.” And if there’s one great truth about affiliate marketing, it’s that the instant your motives are recognized as purely financial, all bets are off. Here are a few tips to help you navigate the tricky terrain of affiliate marketing in social media.

Stick with what you know. One of the most effective inroads to successful affiliate marketing is by working with companies that offer services or sell products that you actually know something about, and can discuss with authority. In other words, if you have a music blog or a website dedicated to the discussion of contemporary music, it makes a lot more sense to become an affiliate for Amazon.com than, say, an online merchant that specializes in wholesale medical supplies. This underlines the importance of staying relevant when picking your affiliate partners.

Stand behind your partners. This doesn’t mean that you have to take a blanket approach to the support of your affiliate partners. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you have to start using the products and services of the companies you’re engaged in a partnership with. But it does mean that you should do your homework. Never enter into a business relationship with any person or company that you’re not completely confident in, and that you wouldn’t want your brand associated with. Doing otherwise could come back to bite you.

Be up front. The last thing any of your Twitter followers or Facebook friends want to find out is that you’ve been hawking other people’s wares in exchange for a commission, and not because you were making an honest recommendation out of the kindness of your heart. If they do, they’re likely to un-friend you fast. This kind of reaction by your online followers might seem petty–but in the world of social media, pettiness has a tendency to rear its ugly head from time to time. Be aware of these dynamics. More importantly, be sensitive to them by disclosing your affiliations clearly.

Don’t let your affiliate marketing goals take over. There’s a delicate balance that has to be achieved in order to really make affiliate marketing work for you. The reason that it works so well for some people is because they have the ability (whether instinctive, taught, or picked up along the way) to pull it off without turning their website, Facebook page, or Twitter feed into the equivalent of a commercial feed. In order to accomplish that, you’ve got to keep a good amount of humanity and personality in your social marketing profiles. If all you ever do is fire off links to irrelevant services and products, your audience will tune out.

Fall Back Into Returning Shows and Returning Hosts

Internet marketing radio series Market Edge and international marketing series Strike Point will be returning back to the WebmasterRadio.FM lineup full time with new episodes starting in October.

Market Edge, hosted by Digital Influence Group CEO Glenn Engler, will be going back to a bi-monthly schedule starting October 4th at Noon Eastern Time with Todd Turbo Watson (the Social Media and Search Marketing Manager for IBM Software) and David Cooperstein (Internet Strategist and Marketing Thought Leader for Forrester Research) on October 18th.

Strike Point will be returning with host Mikkel deMib Svendsen being accompanied by new co-host Jason Duke ( Director of Strange Logic).

Duke, who has served as a fill-in host from 2006-2007, is well known as a worldwide search leader who has advised and consulted with The BBC, Forbes, News International, multiple gaming and gambling businesses as well as the British Government.

As returning hosts go, Dush Ramachandran (who previously hosted the Affiliate Marketing Today series) will return to WebmasterRadio.FM as the host of a new radio program called the Entrepreneur Effect. The series will air every Wednesday at 6pm Eastern and 3pm Pacific starting on October 12th.

Digital Influence Group CEO Glenn Engler to Host New Episodes of Market Edge

Glenn Engler, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Influence Group, is taking over from former host Larry Weber to become the new host of “Market Edge”.

New episodes return Tuesdays at Noon Eastern and 9am Pacific, beginning with its first new episode Tuesday August 2nd. Glenn will discuss the future of marketing and financial services with Michael Lacorazza, the head of Advertising and Brand Managment at TD Ameritrade on the new episode.

Weber, Chairman of Digital Influence Group, debuted the series in January 2008 and geared the show as a platform for the innovators and trendstters who are taking us to a new age of social media, e-communities and the blogosphere.

Some of the high-profile industry luminaries that have appeared on the program have included:

LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman

Beth Comstock, Corporate Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at GE

Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”

Market Edge with Glenn Engler will bring on guests with perspectives on social media and digital marketing, that will help us gain insight into the unique opportunities and challenges facing marketers and thought leaders today.

“Our listeners will benefit from hearing Glenn’s unique perspectives on social media and digital marketing, and from gaining insight into the unique opportunities and challenges facing marketers and thought leaders today, across a broad range of industries.” said WebmasterRadio.FM co-founder Brandy Shapiro-Babin.

Twittaholics Unanonymous

Yesterday I posted a Twitter message about how my recurring addiction to campaign analytics was causing me a measure of personal distress. Addiction is not the sort of thing one wants to talk about in public. In most circumstances, addictions are highly debilitating. It’s pretty easy to spot the addiction when you find yourself referring to referral stats three to six times per minute. For what it’s worth, I haven’t checked stats at all since I began this paragraph. ’scuse me for a sec…

OK. Thanks for your patience. In case you were wondering, I just had to check a few numbers and found I am pretty happy with them. A new wave of Tweets was issued a few minutes ago and several outstanding members of our small legion of followers have taken the time to reTweet them. That happy circumstance confirmed, I can feel my heart rate receding back to its normal rate of 60 someodd beats per minute. I am resisting the urge to look at the landing page stats until our team-meeting later today. Having people around me when I look should serve to dampen my pie-eyed child-at-Christmas reaction to numbers. I am a mature professional web marketer and I can exercise self-control when I need… I need. hmmmm. OK, ’scuse me. BRB.

What most surprised me yesterday about what could only be interpreter by my followers as a Tweet for Help was how many respondents actually sympathized with me. I figured they would despise me for morphing into the low-down stats addict I seem to have become. It seems they too are statistically addicted to campaign stats and they gleefully reached out to my message about campaign stat addiction (at least, according to my stats). Informed minds love company it seems.

In rare cases, such as with the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson, embracing our addictions can be a path to success. For web marketers, knowing who is doing what, when and where, and then being able to ascribe correct values to the next questions, why and how is critical. For instance, I am pleased to know that nearly 70% of those who have responded to our Tweets live in the United States. Another 8% live in Canada. Those are the folks most likely to buy the service we’re selling.

Furthermore, I have happily created spreadsheet after spreadsheet detailing data about what times draw the greatest response and which messages prompt the most action. My brain is practically salivating at the thought of gathering enough data to start creating line graphs. mmmmmm….. line graphs make the world a better place.

Unfortunately, I can’t expect to have enough data to make a remotely useful or even interesting line graph a few more days. There’s something to look forward to thought the prospect of a weekend suffering delayed satisfaction syndrome is daunting. It’s ok. In the words of the great Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I’m already a pro. I can deal with any weirdness thrown at me by my lack of useful line graphs. I’ll have enough data soon enough. Until then, I can satisfy my urges with little peaks at the raw numbers. Just a short glance, mind you. I do have real work to do.

Increasingly, our society is rightly starting to view addiction as a disease rather than a personal weakness. To tell the truth, I don’t really feel much dis-ease when I comb through campaign stats. I feel rather good actually. It’s the obsession I have an issue with. Perhaps that sort of obsessiveness is useful to my employers. They seem to think it is at any rate. But it is a relatively beautiful day here and I am spending way too much of what could otherwise be free time examining stats. At least they’re good ones.

Google Buzz Kills Personal Privacy

Google Buzz, as introduced, is a privacy nightmare for users. There is a lack of information on how information is used and shared, there is also a lack of instruction for users on how to control their own information. Here’s my short experience, the one I wish I outlined on Webcology yesterday.

When I first opened Google Buzz, I saw that I was auto-following ten people. I was shocked to find my auto-follow list included a journalist who has once previously tried to scoop me, workers at a former client, an ex-girlfriend and stunningly, my ex-wife. These folks were part of my initial Buzz stream. I rejected most of them immediately while noting to myself rejection notices might be sent to those I rejected.

I’m not entirely sure how Buzz made these connections but I am sure that most of them are ones I would rather be left in my shadows. I’ve always harbored the paranoid suspicion Google was tracking email connections but since that is sort of evil, chances are they wouldn’t go there. Heaven knows I would if I was them but I’ve never claimed to consistently opt against evil. The data available is simply too fascinating not to if you have the chance. The most unimpressive aspect of Google Buzz is that the connections Google perceived are so old. Many of them come from a part of my life I moved beyond almost a decade ago.

I have an extremely open life. I feel personally secure about my digital footprint and have cleared the majority of memorable skeletons from the closet of my personal life by either making those skeletons public knowledge or disavowing the vices and communities that created them in the first place.

Nevertheless, given the nature of social networks, the potential of exposure of a lot of information about my life to others is inevitable. Given the lack of control granted by Google or personal permission granted to Google by me, I’m shutting Buzz off before it does me damage. Clearly it can cause me professional headaches and personal heartaches. I need neither.

For the record, none of my sources appear to have been exposed but they easily could have been. That very much concerns me as I’ve promised perpetual anonymity to more than a few of them. As for my ex-wife, I think she’s a wonderful person. She and I have no problems with each other, at least none I am aware of. Though either of us would be happy to have a friendly conversation with the other, neither of us really want to know about the others day to day life. We’ve both moved on, and I suspect both of us would agree that is a very good thing.

For the most part, I gave up worrying about personal privacy sometime between the rise of the security-state after 9/11/01 and 8/19/04, the date of Google’s I.P.O.. Even so, Google Buzz has left me with a bitter taste and a desire to migrate my email usage away from the convenient but privacy porous Gmail system.

Google gives you a way to turn Buzz off. Scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail page. A small link on the second line from the bottom in very fine print reads, “Turn Off Buzz”. If you care about your personal privacy, do it now.

Bah Humbug! Yahoo to kill MyBlogLog in 2010

Three years after they bought it for $10 million, Yahoo is planning to shutter the popular blog-pollination social platform MyBlogLog. According to a story published in this morning’s ReadWriteWeb blog, sources at MyBlogLog confirm their project will cease to exist sometime in January 2010.

Built to display the faces and profiles of blog readers, MyBlogLog was one of the first social network platforms that saw nearly universal adoption amongst bloggers and blog readers. Capable of capturing valuable information about site visitors, MyBlogLog had a virtually unending number of other applications it could have been used for had only Yahoo devoted focused energy on further development. Instead, MyBlogLog was left to languish into dysfunction.

The loss of MyBlogLog might not be too spectacular, considering the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter however when it was first introduced to the blogging ecosystem, MyBlogLog was a means of virtually meeting those who took the time to visit your website or blog. Imagining the potential well of demographic information about actual site visitors, now lost, is heartbreaking.

For observers of Yahoo, the shutting down of MyBlogLog is just another sign of the waste inattention brings. For the last two years, Yahoo has been suffering the atrocities of atrophy. 2010 is likely to be an even more difficult year for the purple giant as it struggles to shed its skin as it moves towards its eventual absorption by Microsoft.

Goodbye MyBlogLog, it was nice to have sort of known who you were.

Three New WebmasterRadio Shows Debut in August

August is a busy month here at WebmasterRadio.FM. Along with our full scale coverage of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Conference (complete with a full-scale SearchBash party), WebmasterRadio.FM has three new shows debuting this month.

WordPress developers and bloggers will be pleased to note, world renown WordPress expert, Joost De Valk hosts “Press This!”, a show featuring exclusive interview with fellow WordPress developers, topics such as WordPress hosting and SEO, and news on the latest plug-ins and updates. “Press This“ premieres August 4th and will air every Tuesday at 5pm Eastern/ 2pm Pacific.

For email marketers we have, “Inboxed”, an e-mail marketing program recently added to the network offering best practices for email marketing strategies. “Inboxed“ is hosted XY7 and Rapid Response Marketing CEO Kevin De Vincenzi, Marketing Director Jon Fondy and and email marketing expert Adam Young. The program airs Wednesdays at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific.

“Search Cowboys” is a program that covers news on search engine marketing, social media and other related subjects. Based in Europe, “Search Cowboys“ will have a special interest in Search in Europe, and they will also feature bloggers from around Europe. The program is hosted by European search engine marketers Bas van Den Beld and Roy Huskies, premieres August 20th and will air every Thursday at 1pm Eastern/ 10am Pacific.

A Sunday Lost to Mental Meanderings on Media

There’s no beating the feeling of waking to a lazy Sunday morning, especially one that demands no urgent work, phone calls, a quasi-mandatory dinner with the parents or anything else but my own private exploitation of the diminishing personal space I call my life. Yesterday was one of those mornings. Even Hypertext the Cat could sense I wanted to luxuriate like she does all day, an appreciation that stopped her from waking me by batting at my head as she does most mornings. Two interesting things happened in quick succession yesterday morning to dispel any luxury I might have felt at having a lazy day of quiet contemplation. The first was a special report on citizen journalism by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The second was an instant message from Chicago based web analytics management consultant, David Dalka relaying comments on “saving the media” from a former University of Chicago professor (now US federal-court judge) of his, Richard Posner. Both events happened within minutes of each other. Clearly the universe was conspiring against the concept of me taking a day off, even on a lazy Sunday.

I listened to the CBC show over morning coffee while trolling the half-dozen or so online newspapers I frequently read. The show probed the value of online journalism vs. traditional journalism, falling heavily on the side of traditional news gathering organizations. It was a smart and well researched episode, one Canadian listeners have been conditioned to expect from our federally funded broadcaster. The CBC was one of the first major media outlets to take advantage of the Internet to widen and grow its international audience. The corporation continues to use the Internet to distribute its high quality of national and international news though in recent months it has suffered sever funding cutbacks, an ironic equalizer that brings the CBC’s budgetary problems in line with those of commercial broadcasters and other news gathering organizations. There is simply not enough money coming in (whatever the source) to cover the enormous costs associated with professional news gathering and high quality reporting.

During the CBC broadcast, David Dalka forwarded the URL of a blog post from a former University of Chicago professor of his who is now a federal court judge, Richard Posner. Posner writes on media, society and IT. Like many other public policy thinkers, Posner is deeply concerned with the sustenance of a professional media, considering it one of the bedrocks of a democratic society. A few years ago, Posner predicted the current financial state of the mainstream media. Yesterday’s post postulates a solution, making webmasters receive permission to link to stories in the traditional news media, likely with payment attached. Before dismissing the idea as ludicrous, consider that others see this as a valid revenue model as well, most notably Barry Diller, head of IAC corporation and his arch-rival Rupert Murdoch, owner of NewsCorp.

For experienced webmasters, the idea of paying for a link that brings no commercial benefit is so obviously silly it is easy enough to dismiss however, news aggrigators such as Google News and Yahoo! News do see commercial benefit from stories researched, written and published by traditional news gathering organizations such as television, radio and newspaper reporters. It isn’t the presence of paid-search advertising that attracts me to Google’s news aggregator though it is those pay-per-click links that monetize thus sustain the service. What attracts me are the stories, none of which have been researched, written or originally published by the news aggregators. One can fully understand the frustration of major publishers and broadcasters watching their bottom lines push them into positions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

It used to be said that publishing a newspaper was a license to print money. Local businesses and services had to advertise their wares somewhere and the daily paper was one of the places most adults in a community would look at least once per day. Similarly, local television and radio were advantageous mediums for advertisers, allowing the traditional media to charge whatever rates they felt necessary to sustain news gathering operations. In many cases, those operations spread across the globe bringing a diversity of well researched opinions on virtually any international issue or event. Today, foreign bureaus are long gone from most news rooms and even the biggest news organizations such as the NYTimes, CNN, the Globe and Mail and the Times of London are pulling back on their commitments to find, research and report stories about international affairs.

I am old enough to remember a time when newspapers published multiple editions per day in order to keep the general public as well informed as possible. In my family, it was not unusual for two editions of the same newspaper to be brought into the house each day, one delivered early in the morning, the other coming home from school or work with myself or my father. While I recently moved to a city blessed with four major daily newspapers, most other communities I could have chosen to live in are not as fortunate. In the city I moved from, the single daily newspaper ceased publishing on Mondays to save money. In Denver, a city I visited less than two weeks ago, one of the major dailies stopped publishing altogether a month ago.

Are we any less informed than we were a generation ago? In some ways yes, in others not nearly. Perhaps the best example of this contradiction comes from the streets of Tehran where a sizable portion of the population risked violence, arrest and continued harassment to protest what they believe to be an election stolen by hardliners in their government. As the protests grew, the Iranian government moved to expel foreign journalists though a few were somehow able to remain and report. For most of us, news from Tehran was relayed straight from the streets via the social networking application Twitter and the burgeoning citizens’ TV portal YouTube. While the veracity of such reports can rarely be confirmed, it is easy enough to argue we in the west would have known far less about the democracy movement in Iran without citizen journalists with access to web technologies.

Another example is recalled from a few years ago when CBS news carried a story on the National Guard record of former President George W. Bush. The story was supported by papers said to have come from the Texas National Guard showing the former president had neglected to even show up for the weekends he was supposed to serve while avoiding fighting in Vietnam. The papers CBS relied on were forged, a falsification uncovered by bloggers. Dan Rather was forced to resign as anchor of the CBS News team over the incident. In this case, citizen journalism worked to vet a falsity which would otherwise have been reported as fact.

At the same time, the quality of critical analysis of events in Tehran, Washington, London, Beijing, Ottawa or Timbuktu is eroding rapidly. While we can read broad strokes, we are left without the fine touches only a professionally edited writer with dozens of unimpeachable sources can offer. Because most citizen journalists are writing about topics they feel passion for, we lack the clarity of the dispassionate observer. This is good for issue identity groups but very bad for democracy as a whole.

Sadly, it all comes down to money. While many will suggest if the newspapers don’t want people or news aggregators to link to their stories, they should simply not publish on the web. That’s a rather silly suggestion considering a growing percentage of the audience is increasingly using the Web exclusively to get information. The problem for Internet publishers is complexly simple. Ad revenues derived from Internet sites tend to be far lower than those drawn from traditional mediums. That’s why the medium-market news organizations are unable to properly serve their markets any longer.

Is the idea of paying to link to traditional news gatherers a good option? Probably not. The web doesn’t work that way, at least not today. While Posner’s comments are less than useful and more than insulting to a University of Chicago grad worrying about the respect his or her degree might receive when their professors make foolish comments, at least someone is trying to brain their way through this mess. More of us should as well. We need good journalism as badly as we need a freely accessed Internet. As one commentator on the CBC said yesterday, “I doubt we’ll see any citizen journalists devote their time to civic agencies, boards and commissions. The next fifteen years will be a heyday for corrupt municipal politicians without a free media covering their actions and decisions.” He may be right but I’m not thinking about corrupt local politicians skimming or swaying millions of dollars. I’m more concerned about major information corporations and the billions of dollars to be made off the distribution of knowledge to a global society.

Those sorts of thoughts get me thinking about what we are trying to accomplish with WebmasterRadio.FM and how the experiment is working from a media for the masses perspective. We have an unwritten responsibility to provide honest, reliable and timely information which I think we’re managing to exceed. There are no real rules governing what we’re doing on-air beyond the common rules of nicety, respect and decency.

WebmasterRadio.FM is a pioneer in the online space. Until WebmasterRadio.FM hit the scene five and a half years ago, there was no radio format content dedicated to the business and people of B2B marketing. We made a radio network devoted to webmasters and the business of doing business online. We’re likely an example of the near future, the micro-focused media.

Because we draw a surprisingly diverse but reasonably specific audience, WebmasterRadio.FM is able to exist serving a set of rather large niche communities. The number of people involved in the B2B (and now, B2C) markets we cater to is enormous and will continue to grow rapidly. You know how there seems to be a print magazine for literally every topic you can imagine? The ability to broadcast digitally created content via the web allowed us the ability to ape those magazines via podcast to the online B2B and B2C worlds.

Our advertisers tend to like that sort of thing which stands to reason considering the groups that listen to us tend to be most likely to consider our advertisers’ offerings. Niche marketing on a macro scale.

Our show hosts are experts their fields, business leaders but not trained journalists. Our audience, for the most part, doesn’t need us to provide a lot of journalistic content beyond the top-of-hour newscast. Our audience is looking to hear voices they can relate to from their business, marketing, PR or technological standpoints. That’s what we deliver and that’s why our audience numbers are growing so quickly. Such is the nature of popular niches.

This brings us back to the topic of the mainstream media and the importance of settling the money trap the mainstream media model has become. Conflicting problems are inherent in the mediums used to publish content.

For traditional broadcasters and print publishers, getting information to consumers is expensive and labor intensive. Advertising rates were priced to cover the costs associated with each medium used to communicate with the public. TV and radio relied on local, regional and national advertisers to sustain their operations while newspapers could rely on local businesses and voluminous classified ad sections. For generations, the ad-driven model worked as a tightly regulated and difficult to access business that ostensibly served the public good.

The Internet has obiviously destroyed the foundation supporting the traditional media business model. The Web has eliminated many of the labor, material, and distribution costs of getting information to the people. It has also (almost) eliminated the concept of information boundaries. There is a lot of content to place ads around online and virtually no limitations to entry for new content publishers. In a classic example of the laws of supply and demand, advertising rates online are far too low to sustain large news gathering operations.

WebmasterRadio.FM feels the pinch doing our form of news gathering. We feel it is our responsibility to cover large marketing conferences, events and conventions because those are the places where virtual-world news makers and industry leaders meet in person. It’s expensive to gather news in person but even in a virtual world, that’s the best way to get the job done.

So what to do about citizen journalism, the failing foundation of an out modded model, and the inability to figure out how to pay for professionals? Who the hell knows…

WebmasterRadio.FM does a great job of webcasting and making podcast content available for download to a definable set of diverse niche communities. We’re experts, and we make what sounds to me like good talk radio for our audience, we’re not journalists in any real sense of the word.

Aside from the content, what makes us interesting from a media perspective is that we’re one of the few online radio stations who are actually making a successful go of the advertiser business model. That’s why I suggested earlier that the WebmasterRadio.FM network is actually a pioneering venture in the web space. We’re demonstrating a working ad-revenue model as webcasters and podcasters. We’re a likely example of how to make media work in the new-world web environment.

That doesn’t put food in the bellies of traditional journalists and that’s what these meanderings were all about to begin with. Sundays rock eh?

Restraining content is an option but it is an odious one. The web is about getting and distributing information for free. Free is good but free often means no pay. Creating better copyright rules and giving content creators means to exercise their rights sounds like a good idea but even the brilliant compromise of the Creative Commons licensing experiment doesn’t put food in the bellies of most content creators.

Writers used to find refuge in newspapers. Not so much anymore and blogs don’t pay the bills. I find prolonged attempts to think how newspaper publishers solve a problem like Craigslist can make one’s head feel funny after a while so let’s not even go there.

In a world where quantity defines the part of problem, quality becomes part of the solution. The other part of the problem is the perceptual divide between the virtual and the real sides of the world we live and work in. Quality content can attract good online advertising revenues if distributed to the right communities. It’s all about targeting. That’s a lesson the mainstream media will have to learn but one it takes at steep peril because the mainstream can not be directly targeted online. Whatever the Internet mainstream is, it is too big and too factionalized into micro-interest communities to be truly definable, a major strike against traditional news gathering operations operating online.

The people need to stay reasonably sharp if our thousand year old experiment in western democracy and personal liberty is to survive and prosper. We all need to be well informed on general news items as well as on our personal interests and professional specialties. The job of keeping us well informed has traditionally fallen to the free media which, as any publisher or broadcaster will tell you, is far more expensive than it is free. To keep itself honest, reputable media has developed a well honed system of checks and balances including editing and the right to respond for readers and news subjects. That model is broken and the issue has come to a head.

I wish I had words of deep wisdom beyond noting how WebmasterRadio.FM’s ability to fill the needs of several niches is wonderful and cool and probably an example of the model we’ll see more of in the future. I love what we’re doing and think it is good for the web marketing industry but I’m going to miss being as generally well informed as I am and I worry about who, if anyone, is going to attend the next civic planning meeting on my behalf.

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