If you work the most important general skill you can acquire and develop is marketing. Whether you’re a grunt in the trenches or a CEO leading the way, knowing how to market is going to be your biggest asset.

When do you market:

1. You market your self to your employers when you’re looking for a job.
2. You market your offering to your customers when you’re trying to sell a product or service.
3. You market your leadership to your employees when you’re trying to build teamwork and sell a vision.
4. You market your personal attributes to your co-workers when you’re trying to build consensus.
5. You market your productivity to your boss when you’re looking for a raise or increased responsibility.
6. You market your business to your investors or bank when you’re raising money.

When you market you need to know who you’re talking to, what they want and need, and how to communicate that you’ve got the goods. This analysis is the driver of all your business.

This is a short synopsis of advertising and the Internet.

There are a few direct ways to make money on the Internet. Subscription to services, sale of goods, and advertisements. For pure online plays, in other words businesses that are in the business of information, it’s either subscription or advertisement to monetize content.

As time passes, fewer and fewer companies can survive based on the subscription model. People want free access to online information. Today, advertisers provide a means for the average person to freely access online content.

This is why we see the domination of Google, a company that makes 99% of its revenue through advertising… $11.6 billion in 2007 to be exact. Advertising networks drive the monetization of today’s Internet. Content exists, people want it, producers and publishers rely advertisers to sponsor their content.

Here are some figures…

• There is $26.53 billion spent on advertising for Internet, mobile, video games and digital out-of-home
• Total Internet advertising is projected to to reach $61.98 billion in 2011, surpassing newspapers as the nation’s largest ad medium.
• Marketing segment is a $254.01 billion industry

The advertising market seems to be bubble proof and Web 2.0 proof. Regardless of the *what* and *how* of the medium, it’s going to be sponsored by advertising until there is a cultural shift or another clever way of monetizing eyeballs on digital content.

In an effort to capture this revenue, ad optimization is the game. Advertising networks such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft among many others are working on providing the best click-through and conversion rates to keep advertisers paying and keep content publishers paid.

Contextual targeting, recommender engines, consumer behavior tracking, and now social networking are the means for optimizing advertisements online today. Making sure the right person is looking at a relevant advertisement keeps this market growing. Undoubtedly there will be other methods of creating optimized advertisements in the future.

I have been interested in the ideas of User Generated Content recently. Yes, I know it’s a concept that’s been around for a while and it’s being more and more formalized with the Web2.0 “thing.” But, let me try and draw some concepts out of it. Let me know what you think.

There is a scale of user generated content, and where your service is on the scale means different things. Here’s how I think of it.

Contributed content type.On one end of the scale is metadata on the other end is original content.

Metadata is about the categorization and ranking of data. Services like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us. The content is not generated by the community. The community provides metadata around the content such as ranking and categorization. The content being ultimately consumed is not generated by the community, the final consumed content is external to the community. 

On the other side is original content. This includes blogging in all its forms and services like Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Original content is where the target consumption is generated by the community. Often times, such as the case of YouTube, the community generated content also includes user generated metadata.

Dynamic nature of the content. Content generated by a community can be very dynamic or very static.

Static contentis characterized by content that is generated once and never changed. This includes most type of content that is generated by communities. Ranking systems, photo sharing, and video sharing. The target consumed content is very static, only the metadata is dynamic.

Dynamic contentis characterized by content that is in continual flux. A wiki such as Wikipedia is a great example, where the target consumed data is always changing through community modification. It can change slow or fast, but the target content changes. Potentially, some social networks can fit into this category as the target content to be consumed is a user profile and people are continually updating their profiles with new information and messages.

Governance of content and community.There are two sides to governance and control of a community. On one side is totalitarian, with a strong centralized administrative group. On the other side is community governance.

The overall trend is moving towards community governance. With user reporting systems and the ability to change content at the forefront of many new web applications. There is still a central administrator to most user contributed content web communities and that may never change. Craigslist is a great example of community governance. Even MySpace with the ability to report a message as Spam utilizes community governance.

Direction of communication.It is often said that Web1.0 is a one way conversation and Web2.0 is a two way conversation. User generated content follows a similar concept. With user generated content the conversation is characterized in two ways: One to many or many to many.

With user generated content the community is both the source and the consumer. Either it’s one user providing content to the community or it is a collection of users generating the content for the community. Static content is one to many, dynamic content is many to many.

The world of user generated content is exciting. It decentralizes the generation of content and provides inherent mechanisms for editing and governance. It empowers users to direct their own experiences. It can be the ultimate in democracy of content.

A mental strategy for marketing and presentation. This article will focus on how you develop software, web sites, press releases, pamphlets, or marketing copy. Basically, anything you present to the world and want to draw users into.

When offering a new application, a new web site, a new service offering, or anything else you want to drive users to there are three concepts to remember, fortunately they all start with the letter “E.”

1. Entice
   • First you must entice the user to check your offering out. There’s a lot of ways to do this, think of what works best for you. Offer something for free, coupons, a trial, an interesting tag-line, stellar graphics, pose a question, point out that you can fix a problem in the users life. The enticement has to be short, sweet, and to the point. You have to hook the users attention and you only have a few seconds to do it here.
2. Educate
   • So you’ve done a great job enticing the user, the next step is to educate your audience about what you’re offering. You have more time to do this, but don’t take more than 30 seconds up to a few minutes of the users time. The nature of your offering and audience will dictate how much user attention span you have here.

     If you have an offering that is compelling, solves a problem, and is scarce you’ll have more opportunity to talk to the user. If you have an offering that is in a saturated market place you’ll have less attention span.Don’t go overboard here, give the benefits and value proposition to the user as concisely as possible. List your features and benefits, provide cost information, testimonials, quotes, or links to further information such as white papers or case studies.

3. Engage
   • If you’ve gotten the user this far and your offering is compelling you’ve done a great job. Now’s the time to make a call to action. Sign up now, order here, do something, talk to a representative, get a free trial, try the demo. This is where you want to engage your user to an action. Let them explore your offering and learn more.

     Ask the user to make an investment of themselves, even if it’s only a few minutes of their time.Remember to continually engage the user. Give the user opportunities to try different things, learn different aspects, and interact. At this point the user probably wants your offering and they’re making sure it’s something they can actually use. The more engaging your offering the more the user will invest. A positive investment of time and research in your offering will give the user an emotional connection to go with you.

These may seem common sense, I think they are. But it’s the type of thing to keep in mind when writing code or writing copy. If any “E” is weak you’ll lessen your chance of closing the deal and gaining the user. And, of course, having a great offering is the prerequisite to all of this!

Good luck with your ventures!