Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

From what little observations I’ve made lately, it seems that everybody wants to be in marketing these days. People I meet at school want to be in marketing because they don’t want to be stuck pushing pencils behind a desk in a four times four feet cubicle, and online it seems that everyone and their mothers are giving people marketing advice. It really does seem that marketing is a trendy field to operate in.

Now I’m by no means a marketing expert, but I do have some experience with internet marketing. I’m pretty sure that I could, if given the proper amount of time and quality material to work with, get any blog or website a steady flow of traffic. Of course, that doesn’t say much about me except that I have a decent grasp of what it takes to market something online. What I want talk about in this post however, is what qualities that characterize an expert in the field of marketing. My experience is limited however, even though I have some experience with online marketing and is a student of the field at University level, so I might miss with this swing I’m taking here. But hey, that’s why I have comments enabled on this blog!

• Creativity - One of the most important traits if you want to be a good marketer. You should be able to think outside the box, and find new ways to promote your service or product. Being book-smart is all good and well, but how will you be able to sell more than your competitors if you’re just repeating the steps they’ve already taken, or will be taking to promote their products?
• Being an early adopter - Closely connected with the first point on creativity, especially when it comes to online marketing, you should be able to spot potential ways of utilizing the latest services and technologies to market your website, service or product to a new clientele. This is particularly useful in gaining terrain compared to your competitors, and always being one step ahead can obviously help you gain valuable shares of your target market.
• Well connected - Possibly the most recognizable trait of a good marketer, online or offline, is that the person is extremely good at making new connections. With this in mind, there’s no wonder that early marketing science lectured that being a good marketer required certain personality qualities, more specifically being an extravert. Of course, in recent times it’s become well established that you can certainly have a successful career in marketing without being that guy that talks to every girl at the bar, but knowing people still helps.

And that’s all you get for now. Yeah, this is one of those dreaded split pieces of writing, where you have to wait a day or two for the second half of the article. The reason of course, is that I want to lure as many of you as possible into subscribing to my RSS feed, just because you want to make sure you don’t miss out on the rest of the things that characterize a marketing expert.

In the meantime however, I would like your opinions as well. I’m sure there are many of you out there who are better versed in the art of marketing who have more qualified opinions than I do, and I want you to share your voices with the rest of us. Post a comment, let us know what you think are important qualities in marketing!

After being a member of Pownce for a while, I’ve noticed that some of the friends requests I get are from people with hundreds, if not thousands of friends already. I’ve never been much of a fan of the phenomenom that raged the internet at its peak when the MySpace hype broke out. However, the nature of Pownce got me thinking, and it struck me that by having a lot of friends, you can reach out to a lot of people. And could it be, that within a vast pool of random faces and profiles there are a lot of new connections just waiting to be made?

I honestly don’t know, because I have never thought about it this way before. I’ve always thought that you should make the connection first, then become “friends”, or contacts or whatever that certain social network might call it. I’m going to make an attempt to find out however, so now I’ve just set out on a mission to make my list of friends over at Pownce as large as possible. I’m wading through a myriad of profiles, and adding most, and hopefully I’ll be able to turn some of them into nice acquiantances!

I’ll be sure to keep you updated on how it goes. Oh and as long as we’re on the subject of Pownce, I just got a fresh batch of invites if anyone’s insterested. Although I do suspect that there’s hardly any shortage of them these days.

Two of the blogs in my feedreader recently wrote articles about how you should try to achieve a status as a monopoly, as this will in turn lead to greater profits. I first saw an article about it over at Dosh Dosh, and then a spin-off article over at NetBusinessBlog. Anyone who has taken business 101 and seen the price and demand model for a monopolist will know that this is not wrong, mainly because you will have complete market control.

While the idea of a monopoly online is good, it’s practically impossible actually establish one. There are certain fundamental requirements that must be in place for a monopoly to arise, and in my humble opinion it’s nearly impossible to reach these online. The most important factor is obviously complete market control, and this is where most websites will fall off the radar immediately.

There is an infinite number of markets on the internet, and one would think that it should be possible to be the sole supplier in one small, obscure market, but in reality it hardly is. No matter what type of product you supply to your customers, there is a 99,99% chance that somewhere out there on the internet will be able to deliever a perfect substitute, should you for some reason not satisfy your customers. And if there isn’t, you can be quite certain that as soon as you’ve paved the way and started making money, someone will step in and want a piece of the cake.

I shouldn’t even have to mention the case of online publishers. No matter how quick you are with news thanks to great contacts, or how extremely well written your content is, thanks to the nature of the internet and free flow of information, someone will always tap into your marketshare by rewording and republishing your information.

In order to establish a true monopoly, you need to be in control of something that is extremely valuable / expensive, so much in fact that it is impossible for someone else to get a foot in to your market (think railways, telephone landlines and similar, and even then you don’t have any guarantees unless you actively work to stop potential competitors from entering your market), and quite frankly that isn’t possible online. Just look at Google, they arguably have the best, most intelligent search engine algorithms of all the search engines, but yet they are nowhere near a monopoly.

Of course, the fact that you’ll never become a monopoly shouldn’t discourage you from working on improving your market position. The articles I referred to in the start give some great tips on how you can approach this matter, but I just thought it was worth pointing out the inaccuracy in claiming that you will actually be able to create a monopoly for yourself on this glourious thing known as the internet. Of course, if anyone disagrees with my claims, I’ll be happy to hear your arguments!

In this day and age it seems that the number of RSS subscribers a website has becomes increasingly important for its status. Particularly when it comes to blogs, it has become the flavor of the month for judging its popularity. This trend has undoubtably been aided by the fact that large, popular blogs such as for instance Techcrunch publicly display their feed subscription numbers. Thus it has become a way for bloggers to give their new readers an indication of how popular their blog is by indirectly saying “Hey look, xxx people already subscribe to this blog, so it is worth your time“.

As a result of this, most blog spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to boost their subscription numbers and “luring” people into the subscribing to their RSS feeds. The natural question that arises when we spend so much time trying to convert our visitors into RSS subscribers is whether or not it’s really worth it? There are some obvious drawbacks, especially when it comes to monetizing. A large portion of the blogs out there offer full feeds, which essentially means that they make it possible for their subscribers to read their content without actually visiting their blog. While there are ways to monetize your feed as well, such as including contextual ads, it has been proven time and again that these ads are hardly as lucrative, nor do you have the same options as you do when monetizing your actual blog.

This taken into perspective, it is hard to see just why we spend so much time trying to build our feed subscription base. As I’ve spent some time thinking about this, I’ve discovered that this coin does have a flipside as well, just like most others do. I’ve already mentioned the fact that a large number of RSS subscribers helps can give your blog social proof, and help convert new visitors into regular readers. And that it is just what RSS subscribers are, regular readers. Once a reader decides to hit that link and subscribe to your feed, he or she makes a conscious decision to stick with your blog, and see what you have to offer in the future.

Unlike other, traditional visitors, even though they might bookmark your blog, it is extremely likely that someone subscribing to your feed will read your future articles, and that is where the true value of an RSS subscriber lies. Even though you might not be able to make as much money on each RSS subscribe on average as you can from a traditional visitor, an RSS subscriber is potentially much more valuable to you in the long run. As I’m sure you remember, I wrote about the importance of valuing your regular visitors in a very recent article, and RSS subscribers are part of a group that you should definitely value highly.

If you want to make to make the most out of RSS readers however, the true value is in getting these people to visit your blog, and not just read your articles through a feedreader. How can you do this? Well, believe it or not, it starts with your design. If it’s clean and readable, people will always be more likely to visit your blog. Secondly, if you are able to create interesting discussions on your blogs, they are likely to come in to make their voice heard. Although the silent majority will rule on most large subscription base, it can certainly encourage quite a few to actually visit blog.

In future posts I will be investigating how you can encourage more people to actually subscribe to your feed. Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with different methods, and I have found some to be more useful than others. If you want to know my tips, why don’t you just subscribe to my feed, just to make sure you don’t miss them? You know you want to!

My previous post about the importance of connecting with your readers caught a little wind in the sails over at StumbleUpon, one of the most useful social sharing services, especially when it comes to promoting and sharing your own content. Since the blog hadn’t had any traffic from Stumble earlier this month, I thought that it would be a nice opportunity to take a look at the numbers and see how well the visitors that Stumble send you actually convert.

What I will be looking at here is the direct influences the influx of visitors through Stumble has had on my feed subscription numbers, so this little experiment is hardly scientific, and there is plenty room for erroneus conclusions. On the other side however, my subscription rate had been more or less stable for over a week before the Stumble influx, varying with no more than a couple of subscribers from day to day.

So what are the results? Well, I’ll start with the numbers. Since the article first got picked up by Stumble on Friday, it has sent 1540 visitors to this blog. Not too bad at all. By yesterday, the traffic slowed down and went back to normal, so it is fair to say that those that would be subscribing to my feed after finding the site through Stumble would have done so by the time Feedburner calculated the stats for Sunday. By then, the number of subscribers to my feed had increased with a whopping 10 subscribers! Yes, it’s true, out of 1540 visitors, 10 of them decided to subscribe. If we break it down, it means that it would take me 154 visitors from Stumble to gain one new subscriber.

Of course a wide variety of things will affect these numbers. The first impression of the blog counts of course, the quality of the article they are sent to will make a difference. If they like it, they are obviously more likely to subscribe, and vice versa. Another thing that can matter greatly is whether or not the actual article they are sent to matches their interests (which is where the importance of accurate tagging comes in).

Overall, the conversion numbers are a little disappointing, but around what I expected. The most important question however, is it worth trying to bring visitors in from social media sites like Stumble in order to boost a blog’s popularity? Absolutely, especially if you’re in the early stages of promotion. Just remember what I mentioned in my previous article about connecting with your readers to quickly build a following, and if you are persitent and do it right, you can be on your way to success within no time with the help of social media and some good old fashioned networking.

And just as a little PS at the very end for some extra motivation, remember that this little experiment does not take into consideration those people that don’t necessarily subscribe to the feed, but still return to read new articles. Of course this brings up another interesting question, which visitors are more valuable to you as a publisher and a blogger, those who subscribe to your feed, or those who visit your blog directly? Well that is something I will be discussing in my next post, so be check back for that.

Update: I just noticed an interesting article relating to this subject, how to capitalize on StumpleUpon traffic over at ProBlogger. Take a look, it’s well worth a read!