TB: Can you tell us a little about how Marketcircle got started?

AJ: Marketcircle is actually version 3.0 of the company and let me explain what I mean by that. Originally, when I started Marketcircle, I started it as a dotcom, where we built a web platform that allowed people to negotiate the price of an item, and we had built the system and had people transact and everything on the system, but by the time I got to the appropriate venture capitalists, the internet bubble burst.

And so we weren’t able to get the funding or anything like that, and I had to make a decision, whether I had to close the company down or whether I would return the money to friends and family that had invested in the company. And that was just a couple hundred thousand dollars, but it was strictly friends and family. So we decided, myself and my Chief of Engineering, Mike, that we would pay people back, rather than close the company down. It was a manner of honor, I guess. And so, we did consulting work, for awhile to be able to a.) keep the lights on and b.) actually pay some of those folks back. However, we didn’t like doing consulting work too much, we always kind of had a product idea in mind, and even though I started the company myself, Mike joined on, just a few months after I started, so the company kind of grew from both our ideas and so we were trying to figure out how we would do this.

But we still needed to get the consulting dollars in and what we did, was we built Daylite, one of our current products as a technology showcase, to show people, hey, look at our technical prowess, hire us to build applications for you-still part of the consulting gig. With that particular application, one thing led to another and we started selling the application, and finally in 2004, late 2004, it became our sole source of income. And then we added another product in 2005 and now we’re about 26 people and that’s where our company is at-and that’s the 3.0 version of our company.

TB: Since you’ve certainly been on a journey to take Marketcircle from that first start up to a business that did consulting to having products, did you have a business background before you got started?

AJ: No, not really. I was a programmer. My passion was always building things. And I was doing it in software. So my work prior to starting Marketcircle, I did consulting for about 9 months or so as a sole consultant, and then prior to that I was employed by various different companies, doing pretty heavy duty software. So I was always the technical guy. And so, no, I had no business background other than observation, and so that was a little bit of a learning curve for me. Still is.

TB: How did you start picking up that business knowledge? Did you use any specific resources or just on-the-job training?

AJ: Here are some of the things that I did. Number 1 is I observed people. I did this from very young actually. Just whenever there was a business or business-owner that I was exposed to, let’s say I was working at a coffee shop while going to school, and I knew the owner very well, family, I went and observed what they would do and I always had an interest in it but more from an observation point of view.

So that helped, in that I tried to observe other people and also read. A lot of reading. Read a lot of books, got tips from some books. I would read on the web. Whenever there was a success story or something like that I would try to read, to understand the business aspect of it, and I would get a feel as to what kind of decisions I should be making, things I should be spending my time on. And it’s been difficult, but that’s where I attribute where I’ve gotten to, to mostly that.

TB: So would you recommend that somebody interested in building a start-up; is it okay not to have a business background? Do you think that it’s…?

AJ: I think that there are a couple things that you have to be aware of. I think yes, do it. But, you gotta start somewhere. And the thing to do is to try to keep things simple, try to find good people in terms of accounting, and software so that they can help you with some of that stuff. You have to be careful in who you select as somebody who helps you on the accounting side, you know being a consultant or whatever, so that you don’t get in to trouble on that particular side. The other one, is that once you have that piece, everything else you can kind of read up on and learn on and so on and so forth. There are a lot of good resources out there, that really can help as long as you invest the time to learn that stuff.

TB: You’ve mention that you now have 26 people that work at Marketcircle. How did you decide when was the right time to bring in more people and how did you decide who were the right people to bring in?

AJ: I’ll answer the when of it after, but who, you know, this is, it’s a difficult and time consuming thing. You really have to make sure, especially at the beginning, that you’re getting in people who will really help. I don’t care so much about their degrees or their experience. What I care about is their desire and an honest aspect of their personality. There are a lot of shifters out there. And you hire the wrong person and you can really go down the tubes, especially in the beginning, when you are 2 or 3 or 4 people.

So you gotta look for honesty and a true person-somebody who isn’t out to screw people. And I would choose that over experience or college or academic knowledge any day. Because the person who has that desire and is an honest person, and a good person, yeah, you might stumble a little bit at the beginning, but if the desire is there, they’ll learn. If the honesty is there, you don’t have to worry so much about politics, backstabbing, and all that kind of stuff.

So, that’s really key with the first few people because once you have that base, then you can expand. And for example, hire somebody that is, shall we say, less than honest and you find out later on, they’re a bit shady or they don’t have the company’s best interest in mind, then it’s important that you try to get rid of them as soon as possible because that will haunt you and bite you. And so the next question is when, right? So, when is tricky. Tricky in the sense, do you have enough money to be able to sustain a salary? Will the work that they do bring it to sustain their own salary? That kind of thing. And then finally, it’s you realizing ‘I can’t do this by myself.’  I can’t focus on the right things if I’m always focused on the small things. I need to be focused on the big things for the company, so I need to get somebody.

When we sell to small businesses-our software is sold to small businesses-so we interact with a lot of small business owners, and a lot of them, they start out by themselves, but they have difficulty letting go so they have this apprehension of hiring somebody because they don’t want to let go. But then that holds them back because they can’t focus on the bigger picture, because that is dealing with the minutiae. So you have to realize that you have to be able to trust somebody, with some of the things at least. So that when is a combination of factors. Number 1: mentally, you decide that you need help. Number 2: Having a system to make sure that there is enough money there for at least a few months salary. Number 3 is when they come in, they better earn their keep. So bringing them in, let’s say that you just have a couple months worth of salary cash stored up, within that few months, they better get up to speed and be generating enough to cover themselves at least.

TB: Would you say that there is a learning curve that goes along with managing people, just like the rest of the business knowledge for a start up?

AJ: Absolutely there is. And in hindsight, I would say that that is a very important skill, in the sense of setting habits. You know if you bring people on board and you don’t set the expectations such as, you know, we need status updates, we need to be on the same page, we need to communicate, and instilling that later on when the habits have been formed is much more difficult. So, when you bring somebody on, communication is key, and set that expectation, and updates are key, and set that expectation.

TB: So, how are you planning for the future at this point? Are you looking for more expansion, more product?

AJ: In terms of expanding for the future, we are always looking at growing our revenue base and that can mean a couple things. It could mean expanding our existing products to reach larger audiences. And it could also mean, adding additional products. We’re looking at both those things. But in terms of the management aspect of it, where I find the most difficulty is having a plan in place, letting go of more and more things so that I can focus on bigger and bigger things.

It’s the same problem as when to person-shop, but on a different scale. So you always encounter this problem up to a certain point, I guess, and then it becomes second nature. I’m not there yet. So I find there is a certain mentality when you’re one of three or four people and that is a slightly different mentality than when you’re 5-10, in terms of that, and after that gaps become bigger and bigger so it’s easier now for me than it was say, last year to let go of certain things, and that is something that I always have to work on. Did I answer your question? I’m not sure I answered your question.

TB: I think that’s good. How do you decide where to pursue? If you have an idea for a new piece of software, how do you decide whether it is best to focus your energy on that or focus your energy on your existing products?

AJ: This is very difficult actually. And I would say that I haven’t done too well there. There’s the continual argument that we got to make our existing product better so that we can a.) defend against competitors or b.) keep our customers happy, etc. And then there is when you are starting a new product, putting a new product out takes a lot of energy. It’s like a rocket–it expends the bulk of its energy on lift off.

And so adding a new product is similar. And once you add a new product, are you spreading yourself too thin? That inertia to launch a new product is daunting sometimes. And so that holds us back–the continual battle between improving the existing product vs spreading yourself too thin. Even when you do add a product, it has to be a product that makes sense, so when people come to you, you can cross-sell. For example, with us, we sell to the small business market on the Mac. It wouldn’t make sense for us to do a third product that is totally consumer based, because it’s a whole different audience, our marketing has to be different, our attention and focus has to be a little bit different versus if we brought on a third product that is in that space that we can sell to our existing clients because of integration, et cetera. That makes it a lot easier. You follow what I’m saying there?

TB: How do you differentiate your products from other software that’s available for Mac?

AJ: What I’m finding is that the concepts that you have, as long as they’re fleshed out, you will likely find an audience. And so, for example, with Daylight, when we compete, our concepts are a little bit different than what other’s might compare us to. In that case, these concepts differentiate us and how we’ve implemented those concepts. We can’t compare apples to apples per se in that particular situation. In the case of Billings, our second product, that is vertical so it is easier to compare because there are more competitors that do very similar things. In that case, it is excellence of the product. So, for example, Billings won design awards, we’ve added the iPhone companion, which we’re expanding all the time, we’ve gotten a Mac Word Eddy etc.

So we’ve put a lot of attention to detail, so we differentiated ourselves in terms of what the product can do and how well it can do it. And after all that, service also differentiates, people contact us, we have the appropriate staff to handle their questions, or what have you, so there is a comfort level there, that it’s not just a company that is a kind of fly-by night kind of thing. Those kind of things help us differentiate our product, but it is a.), the concepts can be different and can find an audience that likes those concepts and continue there and b.) in terms of our Daylight product and in terms of our Billings product, there are direct competitors, so in that case, we differentiate ourselves with excellence.

TB: Is there a moment when you know that a product is successful or when the company as a whole is successful?

AJ: That I think is a question of your own expectations. For some people, where we are right now, we’ve done well, for myself, I don’t think so. I keep moving on and I want to keep moving on. So I think that’s kind of a self-everybody kind of has to have their own criteria of what is successful or not. I, for example, I think we can do a whole lot better, other people, they hear our story, they get our details and they are impressed with what we have been able to achieve. So it is a personal thing.

TB: That’s all the questions I have, except for one last one. What advice would you give to somebody who is starting a start-up right now to really succeed with it?

AJ: I would say number 1, you have to balance, you have to be willing to be tenacious. At the beginning, like I mentioned earlier, launching a company or a product takes a lot of energy. It’s like a rocket in that it expends most of its energy at the beginning. So as an entrepreneur, as a person starting up, you need to be, first off, you need to just do it and once you’re doing it, you just have to keep going at it and just not let go. And whenever there is a challenge or a problem, go out there and try and find the solution. So that finding a solution could be through your friends, asking people, could be through Google, could be through Twitter, if you are decidedly tenacious, you want to be tenacious, you want this to succeed, you will find a way.

TB: Well, thank you very much for talking with us.

In either case, here are four mistakes that you’ll never want to make when working in PR.

1. Showing Up Late

Never be late. Let me repeat that: never be late. Whether it’s an appointment with a contact, a lunch date, a conference call, or an industry cocktail party, make sure you’re on time.

This isn’t a college party – showing up “casually late” doesn’t work. Every minute you’re late for your meeting will seem like ten to whoever is waiting for you.

If you are running late, make sure you call, text, email, Facebook, Twitter DM, or send a pigeon on your behalf to inform the waiting persons. Show them the courtesy you’d expect yourself.

Don’t be afraid to show up early, but don’t show up 45 minutes ahead of schedule. This will make things awkward for the people you’re waiting to see, and may make it seem like you have nothing better to do (or this is the only company that has given you the time of day).

2. Being a Textbook Talker

Scenario – you’re a waiter serving a bunch of tables at a middle-class restaurant and you have two tables. Table one is a group of four elderly women eating salads. Table two is a group of college guys ordering wings and beer.

Would you talk to these people with the same tone, mannerisms, and choice of words? Probably not.

The same applies when talking to other people and businesses. If you’re talking in person, it’s a bit easier to judge someone’s personality. If you don’t already know the person, it’s best to be professional. If you find out they’re a casual, humorous kind of person, be the same. If they’re something else, respond appropriately.

You can often pre-judge how someone will interact with you based on the company they work for – think of a Facebook employee vs. an employee of a law firm. But be very, very careful. Nobody has a one-dimensional personality. Someone can be a joker one moment and deadly serious another, depending on the circumstances.

Given today’s world of social networking, you can dig a bit (Twitter, Facebook if it’s public, LinkedIN, Flickr, etc.) to learn more about the person you’re going to contact. Have a common interest (i.e. cars), great! Bring it up in your first point of communication:

“Hey! Thought I’d reach out and contact you as a fellow sports car enthusiast, AND someone in the iPhone development community.”

This increases the chance of hearing back enormously. Even if they won’t be talking about your product or services, at least you can develop a relationship that may benefit you somewhere down the road.

3. Overtly Asking to Be Featured

Instead of saying:

“Hey, I was just wondering if you could review our product on your website”

Try something like:

“Have you heard about our product before? I’d be happy to send you some free stuff so that you can check it out.”

It’s generally best to avoid directly asking for coverage when reaching out to a media contact. First develop a relationship, find out if they’ve heard of or used your product/service, and then, and only then, see if they’re interested in writing a review.

It’s a bit of a touchy subject, but asking for a review can be made to seem less selfish (for lack of a better word) by doing things like:

• mentioning the benefit for them to review it (i.e. it’s something you and your audience would benefit from using)
• offer to include a giveaway (this helps the reviewer – contests generally increase web traffic and reader comments)
• point out similar media outlets that have already covered your product/service
• mention awards you’ve won or testimonials from other credible sources so that it seems like they’d be missing out if they didn’t cover you (i.e. if you’ve been on FOX then CNN would be missing out if they don’t talk about you)

4. Write Like a Kindergarten

When children start writing, their garbled spelling and mixed up sentences can be cute. It’s not cute, however, when you send a PR contact an email or letter full of typos and poor grammar.

The BIGGEST mistake you can make is to misspell the name of the person you’re contacting. Terrible. A close second is spelling the name of the company they work for incorrectly. With Google and Wikipedia at your fingertips, there are NO excuses.

Make sure to NEVER spell your own company name and product names, or services incorrectly, and never spell something two different ways in the same email. I’ve seen two and even three different spellings for things in the SAME email far more times than you’d imagine.

But What If I Screw up?

We’re all human, and we all make mistakes. The way you deal with your mistakes is what will leave a lasting impression with your contact.

A short apology and a bit of (humorous) self-bashing will usually do the trick.

Remember, when you’re doing PR, you’re not just representing your company – you’re representing yourself. You never know when you’ll run into old contacts in your future.

You can see a video of my 5 minutes on YouTube or embedded just below:

There are a lot of other great videos to watch, you can see lots on the main Ignite Show website. My personal favourite is Eugene Lin, speaking about his path to building a killer iPhone App in iPhoning My Way to Retirement $.70 at a Time:

The Ant Fable

Having trouble viewing the presentation? You can also see it on SlideShare.net.

Once you decide what you want to share with your customers, you need to choose a tool that makes email campaigns a pleasurable experience. Luckily, there are no shortage of good options in this area. Here are some tools that have enjoyed success this century.

AWeber

Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.

Whether you’re looking to get your first email campaign off the ground, or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants to dig into advanced tools like detailed email web analytics, activity based segmentation, geo-targeting and broadcast split-testing, we’ve got just what you need to make email marketing work for you.

MailChimp

MailChimp will help you manage and grow your mailing list, design beautiful emails, get into the inbox, and track your campaigns.

Free + Easy = People Power.

Emma

Create, send and track your email campaigns in style.

Meet Emma, the email marketing and communications service that’s taken a unique approach to web-based software. We think it should be easy to use (goodbye, cluttered interface). It should be made for you (farewell, generic templates). And it should even be fun (see ya around, support phone queue).

It’s all about email marketing in style, and it’s why 20,000 small and midsize businesses, non-profits and agencies have chosen Emma to power their email newsletters and campaigns. And we’d love to help you.

sendloop

Sendloop is a professional yet easy-to-use email marketing and mail list management service for any kind of online/offline businesses.

Newsberry

Send and track email newsletters: join the thousands of companies who trust Newsberry for the email marketing success.

iContact

The Email Marketing Service That Allows You to Easily Track Sends, Opens, Clicks, and More!

StreamSend

StreamSend is the most comprehensive and cost-effective permission based e-mail marketing suite available, and it is our honour to provide this powerful email marketing suite to marketers, entrepreneurs and online retailers around the world.

CampaignMonitor

Email marketing software for designers and their clients.

Send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. Earn a tidy profit by letting your clients send at prices you set.

Campaign Monitor is one of the more popular services out there, but it’s aimed more at professional web designers. And they are so confident in their product that they allow their customers to rebrand the Campaign Monitor package and offer it to customers of their own. Great support and a flexible API make this possible.

And many of their clients have taken advantage and offer their own email marketing packages built on the Campaign Monitor engine. Some email marketing tools can be a bit intimidating to start using, so these companies have attempted to make it a little easier for the end user: some focused completely at ease-of-use or doing the design, some are focused at a niche market.

Check out these other services that may suit your needs.

AshWebMail

AshWebMail is built to give you the tools to succeed in email marketing. This means that every feature we build and decision we make is focused on one thing – helping you rock at email marketing. Happy rockin’!

Breeze

Breeze lets you create and send amazing email campaigns. And it’s really, really easy.

Broadcast

The cost-effective way to reach your target audience.

It’s simple – we do the design, you add the content, manage subscribers and track the success of your campaigns using Broadcast’s built in reporting facilities. No installation, no setup, no fuss.

MagicMail 2.0

Create stunning email campaigns as easy as 1-2-3.

mail&go

Create and deliver fantastic email campaigns. It’s so easy you can just mail&go.

ScoutMailer

The easiest way to manage your camps, councils, troops or crews e-mail mailing list.

ScoutMailer is a super simple web application designed to make it easy to send e-mails to your camp, council, troop or crew. Send messages, manage your list and monitor the results. It doesn’t get any easier than this!

Selectmailer

Selectmailer – quite simply the best, easiest and most measurable e-marketing tool! Selectmailer is being used to send tens of thousands of attractive HTML email newsletters every day.

Are you connecting with your customers as well as you can? Your users and customers should feel like the know you personally. Any of these great tools can help you to show the human side of your company or product and make your users feel more at home.

So when should we go full steam ahead with our idea even after hearing all the negativity—and when should we pause and evaluate the idea?  The answer depends on who the naysayers are.

1. Student Proving a Professor Wrong

Fred Smith was a student at Yale University in the 1960s. For his Economics class, he wrote a paper describing an idea he had about using the hub-and-spoke model to make the delivery of mail and goods more efficient.

His professor—Challis A. Hall Jr—read the paper and barely gave it a C.

But Fred didn’t let that discourage him. He went on to create Federal Express (now FedEx) and revolutionized the postal industry.

Why didn’t Challis A. Hall Jr see the potential in Fred’s idea? Because he was a college professor who didn’t run a business—FedEx’s core market. Hall didn’t see the benefits of getting important mail delivered a day early.

2. LolCatz? Are You Kidding Me?

A few years back, if you told me that you were going to start a blog with funny pictures of cats with captions in broken English, I would have called you crazy. But yet, today LolCatz is one of the most popular blogs in the world. Today, the LolCatz and other funny blogs in the entire ICanHasCheezeBurger.com network receive more than 218 million page views a month!

So why didn’t I see the value in it?

You see—I’m not its target audience. I’ve never held a 9-to-5 office job where people pass on silly stuff just to get rid of their boredom. I couldn’t predict how well it would do. You’ve got to ask that question to people who will find it useful—those who will form your core audience.

Action Summary:

• Don’t heed advice from folks who don’t form your target audience. Who you wouldn’t expect to take out their wallets and do business with you.
• Don’t listen to naysayers – especially if they are a part of your family or friend circle. They don’t have the right perspective.
• Call up 5-7 of your target audience and test your idea with them – and them only.

A Few Questions To Ask Your Target Audience

• What do you do now to solve [the problem you solve]?
• What is the exact process you follow to achieve [the end result]?
• What was hard about it?
• What was easy about it?
• What is the one attribute of it you wouldn’t change?
• Would [your idea] help you do it in a better way?
• What type of a person do you think would benefit most from [your idea]?
• Would you tell your friends about [your idea]?
• Where do people like you hang out – online as well as offline? (Helps you find where you can start promoting your idea…)

Public relations is an important part of every business, and it’s usually a good idea to involve experts when dealing with such an essential aspect. Let’s look at what’s involved with outsourcing this important part of your business.

To start, let’s look at some pros and cons:

Pros

• Less work: If you’re constantly busy and don’t have time to write emails and make phone calls, outsourcing PR may be a good idea. You may also feel your time is better spent doing what you do best, i.e. design, engineering.
• Particular skills: A PR company that has skills you or your team don’t have means they can do things you aren’t capable of (i.e. Google Adwords, although you can find specialized companies to do this).
• Relationships: If the PR company you’re thinking of hiring has a solid relationships with the media in your industry niche, they’ll be able to reach out to people you may have a hard time getting through to: For example, if they have an in at CNN, they may be able to get you featured in the Business section: If you’re a new, unknown company to CNN and you try to make the contact yourself, you probably won’t hear back from them.

Cons

• Cost: PR companies aren’t cheap – and if they are, they probably wouldn’t do much for you anyway. The money you spend on a PR company could be spent on advertising, networking events (trade shows, dinners, etc.) or additional employees, among other things.
• Tracking: If you don’t have the time, the means, or the knowledge to properly track the effectiveness of your PR company’s efforts, you may be pouring money down the drain. Google Analytics and Mint are good tools for monitoring web statistics. The iPhone application Ego can be used help you keep track of Google Analytics, Mint, and Twitter (as well as a few other popular services) when you’re mobile. You can also setup Twitter Searches to track word of mouth, and monitor Twitter from your favourite iPhone app (mine being Tweetie).
• Image: Because your PR company will be trying to persuade media folk to review and promote your product or service, you need to ensure the PR people are in line with your company image. If you’re a cool, young, hip company, all you need is your PR company to contact a blogger by beginning their email with “Dear Sir or Madam”. It may sound trivial, but aside from the fact that it can deter potential responses, it can change how a media contact will shape its review. If your contact with the media is super professional, their reviews are likely to be too. Just make sure your PR company is on the same page and that you know how it’s talking to the media.
• Strangers: Would you rather talk to a stranger or somebody you know? If you think a media contact has at least heard of your company before, he or she would probably rather hear from you than PR Company XYZ. Media folk usually would rather speak to someone on the inside as opposed to someone on the outside.

Of course there are plenty of other things – for example, if you can’t write very well, you don’t want to be emailing important media contacts yourself. People don’t respond well to improper grammar and typos (nobody’s perfect but if an email reads as though a kindergarten kid wrote it with chalk on your driveway, it’s not going to get a response).

Already have one?

So you already have a PR company – what to do? Monitor, monitor, monitor. Going purely on trust in this industry is not a good idea. Even if a PR company has a proven track record, it doesn’t mean they can do the same for you.

Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to understand. If you don’t already have it on your website, it’s probably the first thing you should install. From there you can explore other tracking tools (as mentioned above), but if you aren’t seeing the numbers you’re looking for, you need to speak up. If your web traffic doesn’t growing month over month, year over year, there’s a problem.

Make a list of things you want your PR company to achieve for you (or carefully examine the list they provide) and make sure it’s delivering on its promises each and every month.

No money for a PR company?

That’s OK! I recently wrote an article about making first contact with the media – that’s is a good place to start.

If you make a quality product or provide a service that is of great value, it shouldn’t be too hard to get noticed. If you can make the best product in your industry, you can sit back and watch the traffic flow.

PR isn’t everything but it needs to be done right.

As I sit and type this, it’s nearly three in the morning. Working late, once again.

Or am I? What IS working late? Is working late just working past 5:00 pm – or is it working for a certain amount of consecutive hours in a row? Or is “working late” just a term we often use when we think we should be elsewhere, i.e. with the family?

In today’s day, business happens 24/7. If you’re a startup company – or any company for that matter, you probably can’t get away with 9-to-5 hours.

Of course, you may have “office hours” of 9 to 5, but there is always work to be done outside these hours.

There are many reasons for working outside the “typical” (or as I like to say, “old-fashioned”) office hours.

Some of these include:

• Email: Email happens 24 hours a day. Unless your company reaches only your local community, you’ll probably have customers and business contacts in different time zones. I often e-mail or send instant messages to contacts outside of “office hours”, because these are the times most convenient for the people I’m trying to reach. It’s not efficient to email someone and wait an entire day, only to need to ask them another question. Time is money.

• Phone calls: If your business relies on phone communication, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth “taking the call”. Try sticking to particular hours – once your customers realize you’ll answer the phone at 3 am, it will become the norm.

• Sales: If you operate an e-commerce website, or sell anything 24/7, it pays to have someone available as close to 24 hours a day as possible. If you have a large enough volume, you may require a sales team during all hours. You may want to watch your traffic and sales quite closely.

• Customer service: If you’re selling to customers around the world, you have to be proactive and reactive to situations outside of work hours. Your “office hours” will not do anything to prevent an outraged customer from tweeting about your product or service at 4:00 am. If you’re small, try to do this as much as possible (monitor from your phone, etc.) regardless of the hour.

• Competition: More likely than not, you have a competitor that is either operating 24-hours a day. Stay ahead of the game by providing flexible hours, or at least being aware of your competition.

It’s not viable for every small company to operate 24 hours a day. Not only is it expensive, but it’s hard to find good employees willing to work night shifts (outsourcing to another time zone may work well here).

Do what you can for now – just make sure it’s top of mind as you grow.

So, how exactly do I NOT become a workaholic?

While it may be true that you have to operate during hours outside of the old 9 to 5, it doesn’t mean you need to work more hours each day.

Try spreading things out and taking breaks. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t respond to every email within five minutes. If you have the option to, do some of this work from home. Delegate work to others.

Did I mention take breaks? Not just half hour breaks, but days/week(s) off. If you over-work yourself, you’ll be miserable. And if you over-work yourself to the point of sickness, who fills in to maintain responsiveness and productivity?

If you’re a creative person, you may find yourself constantly thinking of ideas outside of “work hours”. It’s hard just to sit yourself at a desk and say, “I’m going to think of the next great idea”.

Many of my creative ideas come while I’m in the shower. It’s important for me to think about work outside of the office – it allows me to think from a different perspective.

Some people just disconnect when they leave the office. Sometimes I’m jealous of this – however, having business on the mind at different times in different places often sparks creativity.

The bulk of the successful people I know do not work for an 8-hour period and then call it quits – they’re always thinking and working.

Just don’t overdo it.

Embrace the new “office hours” – I think they’re here to stay.

The idea of ‘filler’ content is nothing new in publishing. Magazines, newspapers, even TV has filler, it’s the stuff that bulks up and fills out your editorial calendar. But online, filler content has the potential for a whole lot more than just plugging gaps, and it all rests on search traffic.

For most online publishers, search traffic makes up a reasonably large bread and butter base of visitors. On our Envato blogs, for example, search traffic generally makes up about 20-30% of visits. That’s a pretty substantial amount of traffic for us, but for some publishing sites those are some really low numbers.

You see there is a way to grow search traffic that has nothing to do with tinkering with the keywords on your articles, or even building link-backs. Instead it’s about publishing masses and masses of content, and that’s where filler content is taken to a whole new level.

Authority Domains, Page Titles and Quantity

Ever notice that when you Google pretty much any topic in the world, Wikipedia will appear somewhere in the top ten search results? That happens because Wikipedia.org is an authority domain. Search ranking algorithms take a slight shortcut in ranking pages and give very heavy weighting to domain names with a lot of link backs, even if the individual page itself is not that important. As it happens Wikipedia is a pretty good source of information on most topics, so this method of ranking works quite well in this example.

Now let’s say you Google “Where is Timbuktu in Africa?” and there is a page out there with those exact words in the title, Google again will give this a pretty high ranking for your query – after all it appears to be a perfect match.

Marry these two ideas together and you will see that if you could get an authority domain with tons of content with a variety of organic titles, you’d be open to receiving a lot, and I mean a lot of traffic. Of course there is also a good chance that you are creating what some pundits are calling information pollution.

Feeding the World’s Demand for Answers

In a recent Wired article ‘The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model‘, author Daniel Roth writes about how companies are using the mixture of Authority Domains and Quantity of Content to make some very big businesses.

Sites ploughing out enormous fields of content have been around for a while, from grand-daddy names like About.com to more modern Stackoverflow.com type sites. Sometimes they are driven by a fairly traditional publishing model, sometimes entirely by user generated content. But they all share the same general ethos: pump out a lot of pages with a lot of subjects on a big domain.

DemandMedia, the focus of Roth’s article, takes these ideas and applies them to publishing at a whole new level. It does this in two ways. The first is in the sheer scale of the operation. At their current size Demand publishes over 100,000 articles and video clips every month. By next year the company plans to step this up by a massive ten times to around 1 million pieces of content per month. To give this some context, Wikipedia has around 3 million English articles at present, in total.

The second part of Demand’s operation is to make the process of choosing what content they produce a whole lot more scientific and systematic. Using an algorithm that processes search trends and ad rates, then combines them with what rankings are attainable based on competition for terms, the company is producing not just a lot of content, but a lot of content that people are actually looking for and that advertisers will pay to place ads on.

Even with over $300m in funding and a reported annual revenue of over $200m, that amount of quantity is going to be difficult to produce with particularly high quality or compensation levels. Unsurprisingly video clips are shot on budgets of $20 and articles get $15. Copy editors come in at $2.50 and fact checkers at just $1 per article.

It’s hard to imagine that these kind of rates attract a lot in terms of quality. But of course, that’s not the name of the game for DemandMedia.

MediaGlow, Aol and a Friendlier Version of Quantity

While I’m impressed by Demand’s ideas and success, they aren’t the most inspiring vision of where web publishing might go. A slightly friendlier alternative is offered by the aging internet giant Aol.

While their dialup business has been slowly rattling through its death coughs, the company has had the good sense to make a plan for the future. Beginning with their insightful acquisition of Weblogs Inc in 2005, along with its very successful stable of names like Engadget and TUAW, Aol has been slowly building their roster of niche publishing sites into an empire, all sitting under the MediaGlow sub-brand.

Where Demand is building mass niche content on the cheap, Aol is taking an economic but only moderately so route. Hiring from the increasingly large pool of talented but redundant print media workers, Aol has been building a very large roster of writers and editors.

The results speak for themselves, nearly 70 million monthly visitors over 80 niche publishing brands and the elevation of this model to underpin the entire Aol strategy as it spins off from parent company Time Warner.

Where DemandMedia is the poster child for quantity, Aol and MediaGlow lean slightly more towards quality, but certainly don’t exemplify it. On the one hand, Saul Hansell—formerly of the NY Times and now AOL’s programming director—was quoted as saying “Aol is just as much as journalistic organization as the New York Times,” (source) but on the other Aol is reportedly trying to buy DemandMedia competitor AssociatedContent. In his post The End of Handcrafted Content, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington laments both approaches and implores publishers to search out new ways of profiting from a quality focus in online publishing.

Quality vs. Quantity – Psdtuts+ vs Tutorial Aggregators

Though I have no experience of publishing at the size of either Aol or Demand, I find the quality vs quantity issue interesting because when we launched our flagship tutorial site Psdtuts+ two and a half years ago, this was exactly the dilemma it faced.

Though Psdtuts+ is far and away the largest Photoshop tutorial blog today with around 2 million visitors a month, it certainly isn’t alone. In fact there are tons and tons of tutorial sites around, so many so that there is a class of meta-content sites called Tutorial Aggregators that exist to funnel all these tutorials to the reader.

The best known aggregator is a site called Good-Tutorials.com and at the time when we launched Psdtuts+ it was already pretty large. I remember wondering if it was such a good idea to be in the rather expensive business of producing long, quality tutorials, when it was possible to get huge amounts of traffic with a mostly automated aggregation system where other people had to do the heavy lifting.

Equally pertinent was the question of whether there was even a market for good quality tutorials where masses of hobbyist material was already abundantly available.

Within a few months of launching however it was very clear that there is a market for quality and it can be profitable. Given that there is only so much information a person can take in, I believe they will generally prefer smaller amounts of higher quality content than buckets of average quality.

A couple of years on and Psdtuts+ has outgrown the aggregators—though they still send substantial traffic—and thanks to advertising and subscriptions it’s even profitable. It’s also one of a growing number of great tutorial sites posting hand crafted, long, detailed and laborious tutorials.

I don’t know if the Psdtuts+ lesson holds true in every type of publishing. But it certainly makes me optimistic that there is room on the web for both quality and quantity operations. It is a pretty big web after all.

Of course a quality AND quantity site… now that would be a thing of beauty!

They may not be aliens, but they aren’t your next-door neighbor either.

So how do you go about contacting a new media contact for the first time? Do you follow them on Twitter and send them a DM? Do you email them? Make a cold call? Or do you simply just show up in person, and knock on their door?

Depending on the industry you’re in, the first medium of contact can differ. If you’re contacting someone in the web or tech industry, chances are an electronic form of contact will work best. Sometimes though, an old-fashioned handshake can work best.

Do your best to determine the most appropriate method of contact – after all, do you really think it makes sense to send a tweet to the 60-year-old contractor down the road? No.

Who can I contact?

Before you start contacting people, you need to figure out the appropriate people and companies to target.

For example, if you’re a small iPhone developer that has just released its first application – do you think it makes sense to contact CNN? How about Macworld, or TUAW?

I wouldn’t go as far as to say you should never contact any of these companies – you’ll need to use your judgment again. If your application has been picked up all over the place (i.e. featured in the App store or in an iPhone commercial, or already covered on some equally popular websites), you may have the leverage you need to contact some of the bigger names.

One way to leverage something like this would be to put it right in the subject of an email, i.e. The Netsetter App: Featured in Apple’s Latest iPhone Commercial. This will greatly improve your chance that the person on the other end of the line will even give you the time of day to open the email, let alone read it.

So what do you do if your application wasn’t in Apple’s latest TV ad?

You start small. Contact bloggers who run personal (often not-for-profit) blogs. Try to find one in your user niche of users, rather than one reviewing other iPhone applications (in this example).

For instance, if you were releasing an application similar to Photoshop Mobile, you’d want to go after designers, photographers, and other creative people – as opposed after a more general website like TUAW.

Individuals running smaller (but popular) blogs are often looking for new content to write about, and are always looking to meet new people. The same can’t always be said about the larger “company” websites – they may see your contacting them as purely a selfish request for traffic (even if it’s not the case).

So I’ve found a cool, independent blogger – now what do I do?

There are usually three ways to get hold of a blogger: a contact form on their website, Twitter, or by sending them a direct email. Some may list their contact phone number. Don’t use it.

I’ve personally networked with approximately two hundred bloggers/media folk in a period of 3 or 4 months – without picking up the phone once. Again, this isn’t the case for every industry, but in general, people don’t want interruptive phone calls.

Personally, I find it’s best to avoid using Twitter as your initial form of contact. It doesn’t hurt to follow the contact, but avoid sending them a “Hey, my name is _____ and I wanted to share _____” tweet, or DM.

Contact form or direct email?

Generally, I’ll opt. to send a direct email instead of submitting a contact form, because it offers more flexibility and the ability to store a record of the outgoing communication.

Below are a few important things to consider, when contacting by either method.

Drop-down options

Not all contact forms allow you to enter your own subject line. Oftentimes you’ll have to choose from a drop-down menu of some sort. If you’re choosing an option from a drop down menu, make sure you choose the most appropriate option – not the option that they’re likely to be most interested in (i.e. don’t choose the “Hire me” option just so they look at it first). If you do this, you’ll lose all credibility.

Communication history

Sending your target an email means you’ll have a copy of your outgoing message. You won’t always receive a copy of your original email if you get a response, so if possible, it’s best to send them an email.

As you start hearing back from people, you can keep track of what works – and when you don’t hear back, you’ll know what’s not working.

Subject line

As mentioned earlier, try to use something catchy here. By catchy, I don’t mean using exclamation marks, caps lock, or including X amount of lottery winnings in the subject line. You’ll want to mention something familiar or appealing to the recipient – this may require some research before sending your message (more on that later). Keep your subject line as short as possible, and capitalize the beginning of most words (except and, the, etc.).

I’ve applied some of what I’ve learned from Adwords optimization to subject lines, and it works. You’ll notice noticeably higher conversion rates when using initial caps for every word in your Adwords text ads. Since this is not advertising, and you’re emailing a writer, don’t get too crazy with this.

The Golden Rule

We all receive junk mail and shady business propositions everyday – if you don’t, consider yourself lucky!

If you receive junk mail daily, you can use it as a learning tool. I can’t count how many 800-word emails I’ve received that I delete before reading; emails starting with “Dear Sir or Madam”, or messages containing wallpaper-sized graphics go to my trash almost immediately. Whatever bothers you probably bothers other people – don’t send people the type of mail you yourself mark as “junk”!

Signatures

If you’re sending a direct email, make sure you’ve thought about your signature.

For a long time, I had a signature explaining the company I worked for and the products we sell. This transitioned into a hybrid of the aforementioned along with my email address, Twitter name, and AIM account. Then it dawned on me – why would I need to include my email address when I’m sending them an email FROM THE SAME ADDRESS? This isn’t 1995. In addition, if the person wants to find you on Twitter, I’m sure he or she will have no problem doing so (if your name is John Smith, maybe it doesn’t hurt to include your unique Twitter ID). And AIM? If they haven’t ever spoken to you, why would they want to chat with you on an instantaneous level?

I now have a simple signature that includes my name, and a happy face. I don’t always include the face, but sometimes I find it helps to make the email seem more personable. You definitely don’t want to include a .JPG or .PNG of an actual happy face, or your face for that matter – I once received a no-less-than-1024×768 headshot in the signature of a woman who had contacted me. If there is some sort of super urgency involved in your line of work, you could consider adding a phone number, otherwise I’d stay away from it – they’ll ask for one if they need to call you.

Do your homework

It’s extremely important to do your research before contacting someone. If you’re emailing a blogger in hopes of a review or giveaway, make sure they’ve written posts like that in the past. Read at least two or three pages of their blog, and scope out their Twitter account before sending them anything. Even better, watch/follow them for a little while before making contact – the better you know somebody, the easier it will be for them to relate to you in your first contact with them.

PR is all about forming meaningful relationships. Go beyond the product or service you’re trying to get them to talk about. Social networking makes this easier than ever – poke around their Twitter account, browse their Flickr photos, and read their “about” page.

Find something in common and don’t take without giving.

You probably wouldn’t invite an alien into your home right away – but with a little background information and a shared hobby or two, you may consider it.