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How to grow your traffic, add more tools and sell more ads.

You're Not That Interesting
Within 15 years, every single thing you say and see, and every place you visit, will be recorded. This will dramatically change your life, and in the process raise three fundamental questions: 1. Do we want the power to record and view every moment of our lives? 2. What are the consequences? 3. And most importantly, is a life well-lived, a life well-published?
What Makes A Great Salesperson In The Automated Age? Some Answers
I just finished the book "Talent is Overrated" by Fortune's Geoff Colvin. It makes two key points that can help us answer the question I asked in my last column; "What makes a great salesperson in the automated age? Persistence? Caring? Creativity? Insight?" If prices are set and orders placed in automated marketplaces, how do salespeople add value to the process and move the needle for their employers?
Woe The Digital Sale: Can I Get A Little Feedback?
Question from a seller of digital advertising: I always ask my current agency partners how my site is performing because I'm worried I'm going to get canceled from the plan. But they never seem to be able to share anything I can act on. How can I ever know if I'm in danger of being canceled?
Meeting Anari -- And Closing the Door On Ad Networks
Trust is all that binds us. Here's a story of a little girl who knows that -- a bridge to what I want to say about how, as an industry of online publishing, we are hemorrhaging trust. Users are figuring out more and more everyday that publishers cannot be trusted to protect users' rights to privacy.
Email Marketing (Is) For Dummies
How did the stupidest people in our industry all find their way into the same job? Email marketing has become a game of cheap, underhanded tactics at best, and criminal at worst: a dangerous concoction of blatantly lying to customers, creating purposefully confusing checkout processes with permission for email marketing auto-checked, and then gracefully ignoring the customer preference and marketing to them anyway. T
What Makes A Great Salesperson In The Automated Age?
More than a few of you cheered when I pointed out last February that automated media bidding and buying would not eliminate the need for salespeople any more than the advent of computer traded financial products eliminated the need for stock brokers. But did you think about the implications for sales management and sales skills in a world where the advertiser doesn't have to call you to get a price quote? Are the skills salespeople need or sales management should hire for, or develop in their sales team, different than they used to be?
Woe The Digital Sale: Switching Sides
I just got promoted to media supervisor at my agency job. I am starting to wonder about my career path and becoming a media director eventually -- but I'm also intrigued by the secret lives of salespeople. I wonder if I should start exploring sales side opportunities before I get too senior on this side of the business. Would my agency experience prepare me for this kind of position? And is it ever too late to switch sides?
Credibility Crisis
I think the business credibility crisis dominating the news will trickle into your daily professional lives inside an online publishing organization. This crisis can yield a great opportunity, however, if you play your cards straight.
Paid Content?
To charge for content or not to charge, that is NOT the question." People is the world's most profitable magazine. But People achieves its profitability by giving away more content to more readers than any other magazine. Yes, I mean People is giving away print readership. How can they make money when they give away so much free? What can we learn from this about making money in online publishing?
In Defense of Al Gore
Vilify. Then verify. That has become the raison d'etre for the media, with cheap, easy journalism that is downright formulaic: Step 1: Pray for a notable celebrity to have an allegation lobbed against them. The tawdrier, the better....