The iPhone and AgileMarketers.com

The iPhone and things like it will play an important role at AgileMarketers.com. I'm figuring out the exact formula that works best for me today. Eventually, it will be the front-end for apps.

But for starters, I will post pictures and blog posts from the phone, from the notes application, into Blogger. That gives me HitTailing from my phone, which in itself is pretty amazing. At very least, this approach provides quick idea capture.

It's easy enough to tap out messages like this, then forward them as email. The trick is to include a photo, which I can do if I started out from the iPhone photo albumn app. Ironicallally with no cut and paste, I see no way to combine a post from notes with a photo from albumn, and send it as a single email.

Still, I'm going to incorporate the iPhone into Agile Marketing as much as I can, as I believe that mobile pocket computing is an important trend. When you think about the fact that I made this post without a computer, it's really amazing.

The same should be true for monitoring systems, alerts and the like. The iUI interface that iphone.facebook.com is using looks promising. I wish apple would release something. Happily, I'm about to get very close to programming again. I look forward to using the most modern Ajax and Agile programming techniques.

Cheap Laptop and Windows Grief

Until the iPhone has an offline RSS reader, I will be using my subway downtime to blog. It seems I have line-wrap issues, which I have to go back and edit in Blogger. Ugh! Still worth it.Anyway, the $269 laptop I got yesterday died, and I swapped it off for one that is $120 more, bringing up to just over $400 after tax--very close to what a new Acer laptop would cost after mail-in rebate from Radio Shack, or the price of 2 OLPC's, assuming you donate one.

Still, I don't have the time, and just have to bite the bullet and do it. I don't look forward to installing another 88 critical updates, after the Microsoft Installer, then another bunch to patches to IE7, and even more if I accept Media Player 11, then even more to patch Office, but not till after installing Windows Genuine Advantage.

Even for me, a Windows fan and lover of VBScript, this is ridiculous. Now, I see why Vista was necessary. XP has been patched into oblivion. It seems that the system's architecture should strike a better balance between security and ease of use without requiring investing an entire night into innocuoation. Its so bad that deleting temp files and doing a defrag and full system backup have to be the last step.

The iPhone in comparison can do so much less than a laptop, but I see where they're going with it. Technology won't acheive its promise until it serves us more than we serve it.

Sent from my iPhone

Agility Vs. Hacking

The whole concept of agile programming, which I'm playing off of for
the field of marketing, is being catapulted to the front of our
awareness, primarilly by the Ruby on Rails agile programming
framework. I'm doing this post to put the term agile in perspective.

Agile implies the fact that you don't know everyhing you need to know
at the outset of a project. Often, the first step of a project is thw
creation od a requirements document. But with easier programming
platforms, and the removal of the danger of committing to code too
soon, some magical effects happen.

First, the ACTUAL problem domain owner can do the work, eliminating
all the inefficiency of communicating to a non-invested programmer.
All the important nuanced details that make all the difference, but
which are usually lost in communication are not lost. The vision can
be more directly realized.

Second, fear disolves away. Agile frameworks create a ready, fire, aim
approach that we've been trained to despise, because of the inherent
risk of wasting time, money, and other resources. But when you're told
your mistakes won't be held against you, but are rather encouraged as
part of a "zero'ing in" process, then you can be playful and
experimental, right in the implementation stage.

In the past, such a shooting from the hip approach would be frowned
upon as hacking. But today, hackers have become so much more
efficient, and able to turn their rapid productivity skills into
personal fortunes in the Web 2.0 world, that everyone else now wants a
piece of that action. Ruby on Rails walked into a perfect storm.

Anyway, now that you don't need a computer science degree to be an
effective programmer, and Marketing people are the biggest customers
for such apps, the time has come for Agile Marketing.

Sent from my iPhone

Agile Marketing = First Writing Suggestion

Here I am on the subway again, blogging from my iPhone. Their grammar
and punctuation correction really is all that. Very appropriate for
building up those 100 initial posts required for HitTailing.

Within four days of launching the site, it was on the first page of
Google on the targetted keyword--answering the venerable question if
how long it takes to get into Google: 4 days.

But the targetted term was agile marketers, the same as the domain,
and not the more popular present participle form: agile marketing.
This us the FIRST HitTail suggestion issued for this brand new site,
and illustrates the importance and meaning of HitTail writing
suggestions.

So, a day or two later, I accept it as a writing suggestion, and work
it into the headline of a new blog post.

BAM!

Sent from my iPhone

Laptop for $269

Laptop for $269
I'm in NYC and needed a new laptop quick. I've wanted to do that $400
OLPC charity deal, or maybe even that Asus $200 competitor.

But I knew I'd have to load Excel files and give PowerPoint, and
didn't want to wait. So after avoiding being ripped off from one of
those fancy electonic stores with a killer window display, I Googled
refurbished laptops NYC. I immediately found a place downtown, The
Little Laptop Shop, with its phone-number ready to tap. I called,
verified that they were open to 7:00PM. I went over by subway, bought
one, a 500MHz Pentium M Compaq Armada, for $299. For me, Google
default search even controls who gets my local business--especially
now with the iPhone.

I'm now on my way home, tapping out this blog post on my iPhone. Now,
that's agility!

Sent from my iPhone

Versus the Daily Grind

The daily grind is the enemy, making intelligent people average, and average people into virtual no one's. The trick is to deliberately take time apart and away from the daily grind to think, brainstorm and evaluate.

Don't let your mind or body acclimate to this time away. Mix it up. Be unpredictable, even to yourself, as a means of breaking out of your rut-worn paths.

HitTailing from my iPhone

This latest post is from the notes app in my iPhone. Part of agile marketing is blogging frequently, so as to build up the critical mass of content as required by the HitTailing process. And that means putting our downtime, such as riding the subway, to work for us. So, post to your blog from email from your phone. Don't be scared of short posts.

The Smoking Gun and Sales Funnel

OK, it’s now time to proceed full-steam ahead. I wanted to nail down a “smoking gun” example for everyone out there to see before I started doing promotional things all over the place (like StumbleUpon), which cuts into the 100% accountability of what’s responsible for what, which we currently have.

Right now, we can be pretty assured that by virtue of using Blogger, and it’s built-in default ping system, we were able to launch a new website on a custom domain (not hosted by Blogger), and have it picked up and included in Google default search results in only 4 days. But truth be told, I’m also running the Google Toolbar, with PageRank call-to-mamma features turned on, so that’s another vector by which Google could have become aware of the new site. Also, it might be as simple as a log of every new blog created in Blogger, regardless of custom domains. So even now, we’re only dealing with about 99% accountability, when whatever minor factors conspired to catapult a previously non-existent site to the top of Google (on an admittedly obscure term) in 4 days.

But now, it’s time to work on the iterative process that vibrates between what you know, and what you do.

What you know is what comes back in the form of your Web log files, and tracking systems such as Google Analytics (which I haven’t even logged into yet), HitTail, and search engine result pages (SERPs), such as a Google search result page.

What you do are those experimental proactive things, such as adding new content, building links, and participating in social networks such as StumbleUpon and Facebook.

Truth be told, once I saw the fact that I was being found in Google on the primary targeted term, “agile marketers”, I couldn’t resist submitting to StumbleUpon, a surefire way to start the in-flow of traffic.

But I don’t want to waste the traffic. I’ve got some other urgent projects to attend to—namely, my sales funnel.

I’ll be talking about sales funnels a lot on this website. I have an admittedly sales-centric view of the world, completely buying into the Peter Drucker notion that the mission of every company is to get and keep customers. Everything else is details in support of that mission. So, defining what a sale is early on is urgently important.

And because I don’t actually have a physical product, or even a service yet, I will define my product right now so that it’s easy to “convert customers”, and I can again produce a pure sales funnel example, with lots of smoking gun events.

How Long Does Google Take to List Your New Site?

The Agile Marketers site will remain primarily a blog site while I get it jump-started. This post answers the seminal question of “how long does it take to get into Google”. The diagram below shows you that you can go from non-existent website to top of Google on a targeted keyword in… 4 days!

Urgent: Google Analytics and HitTail

I didn’t take my own advice, because I decided that I did plenty yesterday, and could add the HitTail and Google Analytics code this morning. But it’s a step that needs to be done. And I’m doing it Saturday morning before I get on with my day. It’s that urgent.

Why?

You’ve got to establish and assert control over your data acquisition feedback loop ASAP—the reason that everything you do has the extra chance of being effective.

You see, you do everything FOR A REASON. Agile Marketing is a scientific process, where we start with observation. From our observations, we create a hypothesis. From that, we make predictions and design experiments. We look for reproducible results, which improve our hypothesis, improve our experiments, and move towards a forever-more-effective website.

And at a point coming very soon, many of those reasons will be coming from information divined from your analytics. Other will be coming from your log files.

But first, a few more words on modern “accessible” analytics (like Google Analytics and HitTail) vs. log file analysis.

In the early days of Web Trends, analytics and analyzing log files was the same thing. But in these days of hosted analytics services that use JavaScript and the “1-pixel gif” Web bug tracking image trick, it’s much easier (and cheaper) to offload all the complicated stuff to a hosted service, like Google Analytics and HitTail. Simply let THEIR computing power and special formulas offload the challenge of analyzing your own log files locally.

There are other approaches in which your log files are directly used to generate analytics, but they are either expensive high-end enterprise applications, like WebTrends and Omniture. Or they are totally free open source products like AWStats. And in either case, you should be a career Tech person to incorporate the process efficiently into your life.

For everyone else (agile marketers), just bump the complicated stuff over to Google and HitTail.

And go for instant gratification now, using HitTail.

Later, I’ll walk you through Google Analytics. After that, I’ll do our first programming project, the spider-spotting—the one thing where you WILL be using your log files.

But for now, let’s get some immediate feedback, and get you addicted to the data-flow. Data addiction is an important step in agile marketing.

So, as I stated in yestereday’s post, get your tracking code for Google Analytics and HitTail. Here’s mine (with the numbers X’d out):

<script src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js\" type=\"text/javascript\">
</script>
<script type=\"text/javascript\">
_uacct = \"UA-XXXXXXX-X\";
urchinTracker();
</script>

<script src=\"http://XXXXX.hittail.com/mlt.js\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>

You install this code typically right before the close-body tag. With Blogger in FTP-publishing mode, this means editing your template, and simply finding the </body> tag, and pasting this code immediately above that.

Then, re-publish your entire blog, which at this time should still only be a few pages, and will publish quickly. As your FTP-managed blog gets bigger, it will take longer and longer to publish. It’s a pain, but worth it.

Now, for the instant gratification.

Here’s the magic bit:

The Blogger program automatically “pings” blog publicity services like Weblogs and Blo.gs. So, with your first few posts, even the ones when it was on the BlogSpot domain, have been announced to the world. All your new blog posts on your custom domain will be making attempts to draw in traffic for you through Blog search tools, such as Google Blogsearch (in particular), and Technorati (after a little more work).

And HitTail shows you the hits from your Web visitors in real-time. So, if Google Blogsearch knows about your site (which it does, because Blogger is owned by Google), and you have it set so that anyone can read it (which you do, because publishing with FTP requires it), and you have the Blogger configuration set to “ping” your posts (which you do, because it’s the default), then your blog can already be found in Google (albeit from a special blog search tool), in a matter of HOURS after you launched your site.

Compare this to the weeks or months that other chumps waste waiting to “get into Google”.

Yes, we start realizing the benefits of buying into Google’s various services, such as Blogger, right from the start. It gives a “regular” website the fast-track into Google Blogsearch results, and indirectly, a potential back-door into Google default search results.

So once the HitTail tracking code is installed, simply close all your browser windows, open a new one (to force your browser session to reset), go to Google Blogsearch, perform a search on the exact same phrase you used in one of your headlines (DON’T VISIT YOUR SITE FIRST OR THE HIT WON’T GET RECORDED).

Find your site in the Google Blogsearch results. Click on it to visit your site.

Now, go log into HitTail and go to the Search Hits tab.

You’ve established and controlled the direct cause-effect chain of acquiring Web visitors, with a finger on the pulse of what’s going on. You hardly even needed a technical bone in your body.

Welcome to the data addiction.

Welcome to agile marketing.

Agile Marketers Website Now Live

OK, as of this last step, the blog that was previously on agilemarketers.blogspot.com is now on www.agilemarketers.com.

Doing this last step of activating FTP as an available publishing option was a bit harder than I thought it as going to be. Publishing using FTP should have just appeared as an option under Template/Publishing. But in very tiny type that took me awhile to notice, it said that I had to change to the classic template and make it readable by anyone in order to allow FTP’ing.

I get the feeling that managing a blog through FTP’ing files is either being phased out, or is just significantly discouraged as a result of the amount of technical support difficulties it must incur for the Blogger team, considering it’s a free product.

My blog was already set to be readable by Anyone, but it was a bit tricky to find the “Revert to Classic Template” link, which resulted in the “FTP (publishing on your ISP server)” link appearing under Template/Publishing. Once it did appear, I was able to follow the FTP link and set up the FTP settings. I used the same settings that I had tested pretty well with CyberDuck. The “FTP Path” field remains empty, so that when you publish your blog, it becomes your new website’s homepage, in the spirit of EnGadget or BoingBoing.

Think we’re done?

Actually, this is where the quick action is actually required. Your log files are under your control now, and they’re probably not going anywhere. So, I’m not going to worry about doing anything with the just yet.

But rather, it's urgent at this time to get HitTail and Google Analytics into place.

There is virtually no activity on your site now, so the sooner you get tracking running, the more you will have the complete, whole image of what’s going on on your website.

REMEMBER, THE IDEA HERE IS TO KNOW EVERYTHING!

So, hop on over to the HitTail site and Google Analytics site. Create accounts, and get the snippet of code that has to go into your site. I'll probably put the details of this into the next post.

FTPing a Test File Into Location

The next step of putting a test file into location involves a text editor program (don’t be intimidated), and an FTP program (same thing—easier than you think). I’m somewhat new to the new Next-like OS X Macintosh, which is my home computer. I’ve been on PCs for the majority of the last 10 years (ever since the demise of the Commodore Amiga computer). So, I’ll be struggling along with this step, just like many of you. I don’t know the name of the built-in Mac text editor, and I don’t even know if it has a built-in FTP program.

OK, it turns out that the text editor is called TextEdit. Duhhhhh.

Now for bare-bones basic HTML. Follow with me now…

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>

Type that into TextEdit. Save As HTML, and name it index.html.

This is the absolute minimal code required to make a good HTML page. When put into a file named index.html or default.html, and put into the public HTML location of your Web hosting account, you’ve just created your first Web page.

This “bare bones” or “baby step” approach to doing these things will be typical of my style as we go. I don’t think that there’s anything so small, that it’s not worth documenting.

In order to do the FTP step, I found an open source FTP program for Mac OS X called CyberDuck. I set it up, and tried transferring my test file into location. It worked like a charm. So now, it’s just a waiting game until doing a refresh on my Web browser produces my page instead of the GoDaddy parking page.

OK, mission accomplished. I have "Hello World!" displaying on the custom domain on the new web host. There was the tiny nuance, that I had to set TextEdit preferences to create a new document as Plain Text rather than Rich Text Format (RTF). I had to re-transmit index.html into location, once I saved it properly.

Now, all I have to do is configure Blogger to transmit these files over there instead of on BlogSpot.

Why Use FTP With Blogger?

I went into the FTP control panel from the HostMonster control panel home page and set up an FTP account, whose home directory is the main public HTML directory. The important thing to take note of here is that I’m going as far as to make the main homepage of my site the files that will soon be transmitted into place by Blogger.

Why, you might ask, am I going through all this trouble of Web Hosting, when I could just use the custom domain trick on Blogger to get Google to host my site for free? For starters, I need access to my own log files. But maybe more importantly, I want to seamlessly mix my website proper with content published from a blogging system. This will, for the most part, alleviate me (you, in this case), from learning an excessive amount about search engine optimization (SEO) in order to be effective.

Blogging software does just about everything right for SEO by default. So by embracing blogging software as a primary content management tool on your new site, you’re ensuring that your content will be found, indexed, and included in search results.

OK, to bring the site alive, I have to make my Registrar (GoDaddy, where I registered the domain), point to HostMonster. I could actually also transfer the domain to HostMonster, and let them be my registrar too, but I’m just trying to plow through this right now, and don’t want to wait for a domain transfer. Waiting for DNS to propagate (more on that soon) is painful enough.

On GoDaddy, I use their strange user interface, to checkbox the AgileMarketers.com domain, click it, then go into Total DNS Control and MX Records. The site’s responsiveness is terrible.

Anyway, in order to continue using the DNS (Domain Name Server) from your original registrar, while doing your hosting somewhere else, all you have to do is swap out a number.

First, in the HostMonster control panel, I look down the vital stats of my website, which runs down the left-hand side of their user interface. I see the term “shared IP” and this number: 74.220.207.159. That’s the IP where the site will reside, which happens to be shared with other sites. I won’t worry about that too much right now. There’s a line of thought that Google favors sites that don’t share an IP. But more on that later.

When I go into the Total DNS Control and MX Records interface of GoDaddy, I see that the first and only A Host record (your most important record) points to 68.178.232.100. So at it’s simplest, I’m just replacing 68.178.232.100 with 74.220.207.159. There’s actually a lot more to know and understand here, but hey, I’m not going to sweat it. I made the change and set my Time to Live (TTL) number to 1/2 hour, to expedite propagation. Now being that GoDaddy is such a major registrar, I expect I’ll see this change pretty quickly.

How do I know the change will have happened? Well, when I type in http://www.agilemarketers.com/ to a Web browser, it will be showing a “page not found” error, instead of the GoDaddy domain parking screen.

As my last step, I will make a sample html file on my home computer, and test my FTP access, by putting the file into location.

Next steps:

1. Create a test html page on my home computer.
2. Test FTP into my HostMonster account.
3. Try putting the file into location.
4. Wait until a visit to http://www.agilemarketers.com/ shows my test file instead of the GoDaddy domain parking page.

Choosing a Cheap Web Host for Agile Marketing

The next step in launching AgileMarketers.com is another self-imposed commitment mind-trick. There are a lot of things to think about with Web hosting. But I’ve got to simplify, and take the ready, aim, fire approach again. I can always adjust things later. So, I must not sign up for an excessively long hosting contract.

Someday, I’d love to run my own servers, as I love the hardware. HitTail was greatly made possible by having direct, draconian control over the hardware, and not having to adhere to any IT professional’s “traditional wisdom”. True competitive advantage comes often from logic that is contrary to common wisdom.

Or else, everyone would be doing it!

Think about that. The paradox of innovation is a huge lesson. The biggest prizes come from doing what other people are explaining to you are stupid or not possible—and often trying and failing until you prove yourself right. Examples abound, and thanks to the Internet, I’ll just give you one useful page, and leave the rest of the validation of that statement to you.

But I digress, as I often do. The point is, I’m just going to hop onto some cheap-enough and good-enough Web host that supports the programming platform and database stuff that I need. The rest will sort itself out over time. I may want to use Amazon Web Services, like their Computing Cloud or storage services. But there’s too much discovery there right now. I’ve got a pretty good idea how I would do this if I were doing this with my own hardware in a collocation site.

But I’m not going to pay for that right now. So, we’re talking about cheap Web hosting, that meets my criteria.

What’s my criteria?

Well, there’s not going to be anything about this site that we don’t know—starting with how long it takes for Google to discover it. That’s right. Monitoring for GoogleBot’s first visit is top on our list, so we can nail some cause-effect relationships, and never lose site of the iterative cycles that are going on with our site.

We want 100% control.

NOTHING SHOULD BE MYSTERIOUS!

So that means, moving our BlogSpot site to our own Web host where we have access to our own log files ASAP!

In my mind, hosting means about $5/mo. with full FTP, program execution, database, and log file capabilities. We’re in the year 2007. Computers fit on wrist-watches. We should get a lot for our money.

Happily, there’s a rabid-dedicated community of open source people attached to the programming language I plan on taking up (Ruby). And that community gives this wonderful list of criteria.

OK, I’m looking for a few other resources to help me decide. Knowing how these things work, I already know I’m probably being manipulated every which way by affiliates and SEOs. But after surfing around, cross-checking and cross-validating, I’m finally ready to take the plunge with what looks like the best deal for the money, and has the critical features of FTP access, log file access, Shell access, and Ruby on Rails support. This feature list really hit it home for me, exactly how much you can get for the money.

Again, don’t get too intimidated by the HostMonster feature list. For now, I’m just signing up for an account.

I decided to go with 12 months at $7.95, making $95.40 for the year. That’s about all I want to commit to, because I might be moving things onto my own hardware, or the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud by then.

HostMonster's sign-up procedure was very painless. I already had my domain from GoDaddy from yesterday. After the one-page sign-up form, it gave me a button to my control panel, which I followed. It then put me into a sort-of wizard procedure, educating me about HostMonster’s site management system, and the layout of the files.

OK this puts me right at the step where most non-technical people would have to go for help. I’ve got a domain registered with GoDaddy. I did that on impulse, because I wanted to snatch up the name quickly. After some research, I chose HostMonster as my cheap, yet capable Web host. And I’ve got a blog already started in Blogger, which currently resides in BlogSpot.

My next step is a bit of acrobatics, which is usually beyond the “traditional” marketer.

Everything else I’ve done so far is really a snap, nothing more than filling out forms and giving credit card information.

But here is where we separate the men from the boys.

A REAL Marketer in this new age—an AGILE Markerter can get through a bit of technical fuss. It will make you a more capable marketer. It will make you less dependent on what the Tech’s tell you. It will make you more all-around informed and educated.

And ultimately, it will make you a one-man-show (or woman, of course), if that’s the direction you want to go. And if you go the team direction, even better. Fewer people will be able to pull the wool over your eyes.

Next steps (don’t get intimidated):

1. Change the DNS setting so GoDaddy points to HostMonster.
2. Alter the Blogger settings to FTP the blog files into location.
3. Make sure everything is going where it needs to in order for the blog files to actually BE published (and at that point, the AgileMarketers.com site will TRULY be launched)

Being a Google Sellout Out of the Starting Gate

The first thing I do is decide to use Blogger and BlogSpot to get through the first baby-step commitment. Why? I could be better served by choosing SquareSpace at this point, to have a full website management suite at my disposal, in addition to the power of blogging. But I want to commit fast, and get myself to the next step. But there’s another, perhaps more deep-rooted and controversial reason. And that is the big “Google Question”.

It goes like this: how much do you use Google’s various services, and why? How much do you start drinking the Google kool-aid? Is it safe to drink? How deeply? Are there nuanced advantages of doing so?

I think the answer to this last question is “yes”!

As I said, it’s controversial. But I do believe that buying into every Google offering has some potential subtle advantage as to who becomes relevant on what topics, and how long it takes for your content to be discovered by Google (GoogleBot), included quickly into the supplemental results, and ultimately moved into the “core” database. Don’t get too hung up on this, but Google is starting to display a few of the behaviors present in a database that was once known as Inktomi, and drove Yahoo! search for many years. The system naturally resists new players getting into the game, because old trusted domains dominate the core database. New stuff is sort of poured over it like molasses over a globe. Most of it runs right off in short order (the supplemental index), and the small set of “made sites” remain made sites.

So, when we start out, we have to do everything we can to deal with that problem. And for me, that means buying into every advantage Google MAY have to offer, even if it’s imagined.

So, I start out using Blogger’s wizard to walk you through setting up a new blog.

I choose the default Douglas Bowman template, because it’s nice and simple, and unobjectionable. It will be easy to customize however I like it in the future.

And most important with Blogger, I can either make my custom domain point to Blogger, OR I can FTP my blog into any other website host that supports FTP or SFTP.

I also added Google AdSense (technically, just applied for review and approval), and made this second post. With this second post, I’m deciding to be a wholehearted Google sell-out out of the starting gate. I’ll use Google Docs to work on my documents (if I can break my Microsoft Word habit). I’ll use AdSense to start playing with actually making some money off of this site. I’ll start an AdWords campaign, and throw a few bucks into it to potentially get some cross-validation relevancy with my natural search results (theory being, that paid hits cross-validate natural hits, and further boost performance on both sides).

The main issue at this point is that the blog is still hosted on BlogSpot.

I want this to be a real site, with the custom domain.

I want this to be a site generating log files that I can directly access (more on that soon).

And I want this to be a site where I can run Ruby programming code (A LOT more on that soon).

Next step?

Choose a cheap web host, sign up, adjust my DNS setting from GoDaddy to resolve the website there, and move this blog over there using the FTP or SFTP method.

Welcome Agile Marketers! The Journey Starts Here.

Welcome to AgileMarketers.com, a new website by Mike Levin, the creator of HitTail, intended to show a website going from zero too wonderfully successful in two years, and to let all of my new HitTailing friends in on the action.

That’s right. These first few words are the first steps on a long journey, which I know will be full of ups and downs, uncertainty, moments of inspiration and clarity. I invite you along to follow this journey, on which I’ll be studying the business sales & marketing greats (Drucker, Demmings, Cialdini, etc.), inventing a few Web 2.0-ish products and services along the way, and offering them on this site. With a little bit of luck, perhaps it will become a viable business that lets me someday choose my own lifestyle, and join the ranks of those I admire, who have (and still are) shaping the world for the better.

As time progresses, I hope that this will be a place for modern marketers to assemble and share ideas and techniques to reach your audience and compel compliance, in the most modern, cheap and effective ways possible.

Yes, there is the underlying “evil” fact that Marketing is the science of compelling people to bend to your will, and the compliance professionals who practice it are often profiteering off of an unwary and easily manipulated public. The truth is, that I can only I hope to be guilty as charged, as that would mean I succeeded. So, for me to continue forward on this path AND have a clean conscious, I’ll be sure to infuse my work with plenty of redeeming qualities (such as disclosing every technique I use). To help me keep on track, I will often point out the Marketing heroes, who I think have the world’s greater good in mind, and I try to advance their causes, and perhaps make the world a better place.

Can this all be done through Marketing, and particularly through the new brand of Marketing I’m advocating, of “Agile Marketing”? What is agile marketing, and how precisely do we start? Is this just an excuse to further promote “the cult of the amateur”? Or is there something to this “ready, fire, aim” approach that’s so enticing about the Internet?

Yes. Yes, there is. Why?

Amateurism plus agility quickly turns into professionalism by speeding up the alternation between playful experimentation and critical judgment. A rough idea can rapidly become a polished idea, right before the eyes of a participating audience, and if you add “micro-payment donations” to provide incentive, then the process can create wealth too (a hint of what’s to come).

Success or failure of a brilliant idea is all in the execution, and execution is “iterative” using agile methodology. I plan here to precisely document and expose that methodology in a sort of performance art act.

Huh?!?!

OK, don’t get too hung up on the gobbledygook of programming and art that I’ll be infusing into this marketing discussion. I’ll do that now and again. It’s my personality and writing style. I’ll try to start slow, but I WILL be bringing more and more programming into it as we go—and whether you’re currently a programmer or not, you should care.

But before you turn tail and run, hear me out.

Everyone has the capacity to be a programmer, whether you’re a tween, a teenager, a corporate executive, a work at home mom, or a migrant worker. All you need is to be literate. Programming is easier than you think, and probably something very different than you think—giving a set of nearly verbal instructions, so your work can carry on without you having to do every step personally yourself. Programming is like having a free employee. Programming is liberating and amplifies your personal ability. Programming sets you above your peers capability-wise, and lets you do things that the takes the uninitiated 100 times longer.

It’s the difference between participating in an affiliate program and making chump-change beer money, and retiring at 40.

One thing I plan on doing here is initiating you to that new-age agile programming world… hence, “agile” marketers. Sales has been allowed to have “Sales Engineers” for a long time now, and it’s about time that Marketing had it’s own highly capable technology soldiers—which for the sake of this website, I’ll call Marketing Engineers.

I’m clearly at the playful experimentation phase of this endeavor with this post, and I’ll hit it hope by introducing various concepts of Robert Cialdini, one of the marketing guru’s I’ll be referring to a lot in this site. Let’s start with commitment and consistency. To ABSOLUTELY FORCE myself to commit to this endeavor, I’ll make a tiny commitment—making a blogspot website.

This will actually host this blog post, and let it lose into the real world, until such time, as I do the follow-up pieces that will make it a real site.

Welcome aboard.