A lot of companies claim to be values-driven. They publish their values and use them in marketing messages. However, this does not necessarily mean their values guide decision-making and behaviors company-wide on a day-by-day basis.

To know for sure, you can investigate whether leadership practices and company policies are aligned with their published vision and values. But there’s a simpler and quicker way to tell: pay attention to your own experience as a customer.

Here are five quick ways you can tell if an organization is really values-driven.

1. Employees remember what the company’s values are.

Ask three employees what the values of the company are.

• Can they quickly recall them?
• Do they repeat the same values?

I recommend that companies choose no more than five values because you want your values to be forefront in people’s minds, and it’s hard to remember more than five.

Interestingly, Zappos is so totally focused on their values that they have listed ten values that employees actually remember. Check out this great video of Zappos employees talking about their company’s values.

2. Employees can describe specific activities and behaviors that demonstrate what the values look like in action.

Ask the employees to give you examples of how the values they listed are lived in the company –what behaviors or actions do they see that exemplify each of the values?

It’s not enough to just have a list of values. The same words can mean different things to different people. Values like “teamwork” “innovation” or “ownership” need to be clearly defined so they are understood by all and can be implemented consistently.

I recommend including 4 or 5 descriptors to give meaning to the words. For example, one company I worked with defined “ownership” as:

When making decisions, ask “Is it good for the customer and is it good for the business?”

Empowering one another to push decision making to those closest to the customer whenever possible

Enabling everyone to feel ready and committed to stepping into a leadership role when opportunity presents itself

Being results driven through measurable success

Taking responsibility for success of both individual departments and the whole team

Providing descriptors like these enables employees and customers to have clear conversations about what should be happening. And it provides a way to determine whether the values are being lived consistently.

3. The company’s values are visibly integrated into how they do business and are not just something extra they do on the side.

It is common knowledge that since its inception, Ben and Jerry’s has built a reputation for caring more about people than profit, providing leadership in social and environmental responsibility. And although the company was sold to Unilever in 2000, CEO Jostein Solheim recently provided reassurance that the essence has not changed, stating

“The world needs dramatic change to address the social and environmental challenges we are facing. Values led businesses can play a critical role in driving that positive change. We need to lead by example, and prove to the world that this is the best way to run a business. Historically, this company has been and must continue to be a pioneer to continually challenge how business can be a force for good and address inequities inherent in global business.”

So far Solheim has kept true to his word. If that changes, we consumers will quickly know.

4. The company’s public message matches your own experience as a customer.

My advice to companies is Don’t make a claim and then miss the mark, consistently. We consumers resent it and you actually lose credibility.

Recently in an attempt to resolve a problem with AT&T, I was forced to call customer service five times. Each time I heard this exact phrase at the end of the conversation: “My goal is to provide satisfying customer service. Can I help you with anything else?” Obviously they hadn’t helped me in the first place or I wouldn’t have been forced to call five times on the same issue. When the customer service representative repeats the same canned phrase at end of each conversation, regardless of whether the issue was resolved, the company loses credibility.

McDonald’s wants to change its image by promoting a new initiative “to help children and families make nutrition-minded choices.” What are they going to do? They’re adding apples to the Happy Meal. As a consumer, I have to say that just doesn’t do it for me.

In the early 60s, AVIS coined the famous tagline: “We’re only #2 in rental cars, so why go with us? We try harder.” In his April, 2011 article, Alan Armstrong makes the following point:

Lately AVIS has re-adopted part of that tagline, but only part of it. They’ve dropped the important pre-cursor and kept the memorable ending, “We Try Harder”.  The trouble is, “We try harder” is only believable if your market perceives that you really do try harder. In order to believe that, they have to see you as an underdog. It is very difficult to convince the customer that AVIS, now about the same size as Hertz, will really try harder.

5. Use your own personal experience to identify the real company values.

Anyone who has flown on Southwest Airlines can tell you without reading their ads that having fun is one of their core values.

And indeed, on the careers page of their Website, Southwest Airlines recruits specifically for people who “want the freedom to be creative, dress casually, and have fun on the job.”

Recently a friend told me of an experience that clearly demonstrates their values: during takeoff the flight attendants announced they were tired and didn’t feel like serving the peanuts and pretzels that day. They had decided to roll them down the aisle during takeoff instead and passengers were welcome to help themselves. And that’s exactly what happened. Passengers grabbed items as they rolled by and had a great time tossing them to each other.

If you complain about the flight attendants’ creative antics, they will not be reprimanded (as long as safety has not been compromised). Instead, you will be told you’ll be missed if you decide to fly on another airline in the future.

It’s not very difficult to tell if an organization is really values-driven. What has your experience been recently? Have you observed any values-driven companies in action?

Corporate culture IS marketing in a digital economy.

Aardvarks are really good at one thing: eating bugs — sometimes 50,000 in one night! No other creature on the planet can match their appetites. Star performers in their own corner of the jungle, when they tuck a napkin under their aardvark chins, they produce impressive results, just like your hardworking employees can in their jobs.

Too often, however, in an attempt to do the aardvark and the organization a favor, a decision maker will insist the aardvark fly like an eagle. There are no flying aardvarks. You can certainly throw an aardvark out of an airplane midair, but you won’t end up with a flying aardvark. Being destroyed doesn’t motivate your employees, not the one who just failed or those who witnessed the crash.

But how do you know the difference between an aardvark and an eagle? How can you recognize those who can and will engage in the critical but difficult work of creating strategy? Whether making a hiring or promotion decision, based on the individual’s proven record of success, ask yourself the following:

• Does this person understand how to separate strategy from tactics, the “what” from the “how”?

• Can this person keep a global perspective? Or does she or he become mired in the details and tactics?

• Do obstacles stop this person?

• Can he or she create order during chaos?

• Does this person have the ability to see patterns, make logical connections, resolve contradictions and anticipate consequences?

• What success has this person had with multitasking?

• Can this person think on his or her feet?

• Can this person prioritize seemingly conflicting goals — to zero in on the critical few and put aside the trivial many when allocating time and resources?

• When facing a complicated or unfamiliar problem, can this individual get to the core of the issue and immediately begin to formulate possible solutions?

• Is this person future-oriented and able to paint credible pictures of possibilities and likelihoods?

• How do unexpected and unpleasant changes affect this person’s performance?

• When in a position of leadership, does this person serve as a source of advice and wisdom?

The core competencies that drive a particular organization may differ, but the ability to think analytically and dispassionately remains constant. The overarching question is this: “When acting in a strategic role, has this person typically performed as needed?” If the answer is “yes,” the person probably has the innate talent to be a strategic thinker and will just need to improve requisite skills to support the talent. If the answer is “no,” don’t gamble by putting this person in a more demanding position. As valuable as the aardvarks of the organization can be, virtually all organizations need more eagles, strong critical thinkers who can learn from mistakes and make bold decisions.

It's a shame that so many eagles have to endure aardvark activities throughout the majority of their career in order to 'rise' to positions within US companies where their natural inclinations are finally viewed as assets.

Staggering: the two categories of sweetners and added fats/oils equal more than HALF the calories that the average American consumes each day. And we *wonder* why there is an obesity epidemic???

Just as there exists a very fine line between brilliance and insanity, there also exists a fine line between passion and many negative traits such as narrow-mindedness, narcissism, fanaticism, delusion, and even paranoia. For instance, there is a big difference in a leader who is passionate about their business, and one that is emotionally over-invested in their business. Passion which is balanced by perspective and reason can reveal purpose, but passion absent those filters can just as easily impede purpose.

Healthy passion for one’s business actually brings focus and clarity of thought, which serve to accelerate growth and create sustainable success. However being emotionally over-invested in one’s business can lead to irrational decisioning, prideful or ego-driven actions, the use of flawed business logic, and poor execution. These are the regrettable and completely avoidable precursors to unnecessary loss and/or failure.

Values and integrity need to underpin passion for effective leadership

Interesting stats about how college students are using their digital devices to study, how it affects their education and well-being.

Nice infographic packed with relevant research on how Americans behave based on their social media usage.

“First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?

And so when someone says, “We don’t have enough money for this space probe,” I’m asking, no, it’s not that you don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of money that you’re spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.

You remember the 60s and 70s. You didn’t have to go more than a week before there’s an article in Life magazine, “The Home of Tomorrow,” “The City of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow”. All of that ended in the 1970s. After we stopped going to the Moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.

And so I worry that the decision that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow’s gone. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, and the rest of the world is going to pass us by." Neil deGrasse Tyson

The US spends the most money per student, securing a 99% literacy rate yet we are in the lower third of the tables for Math, Science test scores.

What this infographic does not show is that the US has consistently spent the same amount per student for more than the past decade AND not much has changed in terms of our global position on math & science. Which begs the question about how the US spends their money per student and the ugly truth emerges about the ridiculous amount we spend on administration versus teachers and learning support materials.

Most profitable businesses in 2011 and those seeing the highest revenue increases over 2010 are not the same.

Detecting counterfeit money is more art than science. Despite sophisticated measures by the government, technology advances faster for criminals to take advantage of small business owners and consumers.

Waffle House, a chain of, you guessed it, waffle houses, stands out as a business that is well prepared for natural disasters and supply chain disruptions, so much so that FEMA director W. Craig Fugate coined the term “Waffle House Index” as an indicator of preparedness.  Waffle House addresses disaster planning from a number of different angles, so it’s instructive to take a look at the company’s operations and identify some key common denominators. Any business that bounces back quickly from a disaster is a resilient one and resiliency is a key tenet of sustainability. So what can your business learn from Waffle House?

Communicating with Employees in a Disaster

As noted elsewhere on Triple Pundit, communication is a top marker of solid disaster planning. This holds true on a macro level, regarding effective government emergency response. It is also essential for individual businesses. Walter cites Panos Kouvelis, a professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, who stresses that Waffle House checks with employees before a disaster hits to make sure they know who is available to work in the affected area. Reporter Jeff Hullinger of Atlanta-based 11-Alive TV expands on that thought, noting that Waffle House has been known to reach out to employees with four-wheel drive vehicles to help ferry supplies, and it brings in employees from outside the disaster area so local employees can take care of their families and property. The lesson here is to make sure you know what your employees can do in an emergency – and make sure they are motivated to do it.

Operating on a Shoestring

Another important feature of disaster planning is the ability to operate at less than full capacity. According to Kouvelis, Waffle House will open with a limited menu when necessary, and that actually forms the basis of the “Waffle House Index.” If a community hit by disaster has a Waffle House open with a full menu, the index is green. Open with a limited menu means yellow, and closure means red, indicating that the community is in serious trouble. Referring back to Mr. Hullinger again, Waffle House waitresses have been known to show up for work even when local public safety officials can’t make it, so if your local Waffle House can’t open then you know things are pretty bad out there.

Employees as a Resource

Knowing what kind of vehicles your employees drive is one way to catalog the kind of extra help they can provide in an emergency. Knowing that your employees are trained and educated to respond is another way. When the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan this spring, businesses were able to weather energy shortages by calling upon their employees to conserve energy by taking simple measures like using the stairs instead of the elevators. Here again Waffle House shows the way, with a focus on energy and water conservation measures that includes simple measures like turning off lights in unused back rooms.

Disaster Planning Help from FEMA

FEMA recommends a couple of disaster planning toolkits that can help you measure your preparedness and take steps to make improvements.   The American Red Cross Ready Rating Program is a free self-assessment program that promotes long term improvement through yearly membership renewals. ReadyBusiness offers handy downloadable brochures, checklists, and other materials including advertising.

Business and Long Term Disaster Mitigation

Aside from factors within a business owner’s control, a number of crucial external elements can also come into play including land use restrictions, building codes and infrastructure. That’s why it pays for businesses to get involved in community decision making, not only at the local level but on up to federal policy. This is particularly true of federal energy policy, as dramatically illustrated by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe as well as the BP oil spill and other energy-related disasters. Waffle House recently took a step toward adopting a lower-risk form of energy by installing solar hot water heaters at one of its locations, and perhaps that’s the beginning of another stage in the company’s long term disaster planning and risk management strategy.

Every single business I've ever worked for would fail the 'Waffle-House Index" (an indicator of the readiness of the business to continue operations as normal after disaster strikes). Does your company have a plan? Do you know what it is?

When it comes to local commerce, the ultimate prize everyone is going after right now is how to close the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a local merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. If you know who is actually redeeming offers and how much they are spending, you can be much smarter about tweaking and targeting those offers.

Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deal sites have created enormous value by pushing the redemption loop the furthest. When someone buys a daily deal, for instance, that translates into cash for the merchant. But for the vast majority of their deals Groupon and LivingSocial do not track whether or not they are ever redeemed, much less the amount each consumer actually spends at the store or restaurant once they show up.

In order to complete the circle and track offers all the way through redemptions, it is necessary to either tap into the payment system or create an alternative way to track redemptions. Different companies are tackling this problem in different ways, but they almost all rely on a shift from emailed coupons to offers delivered through mobile apps.

Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim, who recently partnered with LivingSocial to power daily deals across his commerce network, sees a shift in targeting from broadcasting deals to narrowcasting them. “Blasting out a deal to everyone in New York is not targeting,” he says. “When you broadcast too much in any category, it is just a lot of noise. Email response rates have plummeted for everyone across the industry. What used to be 10% response rates even a year ago, now you are talking the 1% to 2% level.” The constant barrage of emails from Groupon, LivingSocial, and every daily deal copycat is creating user fatigue that is visible in declining response rates.

And that is why mobile is so appealing. If you can send deal notifications to people’s phones based on their exact location and nearby deals, you have the beginnings of narrowcasting. Later on, companies will figure out how to layer on ways to target by income, gender, and other factors as well.

Mobile and local commerce go hand in hand. In a few cities, Groupon is testing out Groupon Now and LivingSocial is offering Instant Deals. In both cases, the deals appear on mobile apps and can be redeemed instantly, rather than having to wait a day for the deal to go live, as is the case with their regular daily deals. The downside of these deals is that Groupon and LivingSocial cannot take advantage of their existing deal inventory and they have to actually provision participating merchants with iPhones and iPads so that they can accept the deals and Groupon/LivingSocial can track them. Yelp is doing something similar where you have to show a redemption code to the merchant from your phone.

Foursquare and Facebook are taking a different approach through their separate partnerships with American Express. Since AmEx is the payment system, it records deal redemptions along with the actual payments. Merchants and consumers don’t have to do anything different from what they normally do. Pay with a credit card and your deal is redeemed. Except it only works if you have an AmEx card and the discount is credited to your account later.

Google is trying to link Google Offers to its Google Wallet, which requires an NFC chip in your phone and an NFC reader at the merchant’s checkout. It has the advantage of working with MasterCard, Citi, and other large payment processors. But it also depends on a brand new technology that will take a long time to become widely available.

The key to closing the redemption loop is definitely payments. Investor Chris Sacca recently told Kevin Rose in a video interview the best reason why Twitter should buy Square is because Twitter has the broadest reach to distribute offers and deals, and Square has a built-in way to track redemption. This was just an off the cuff remark in a friendly chat (Twitter isn’t even in this business yet), but it makes sense.

We are moving from a world of online ads that produce impressions and clicks to online and mobile offers that produce real sales. If the deal companies can figure out a way to actually measure those sales, it could open up local commerce in a massive way that makes what they’ve done so far look like child’s play.

There is real user fatigue happening right now. Email response rates are pathetically low. Even Facebook and Twitter are being impacted with lower click-thrus. People are tired of all the 'blah blah' instead of the digital, personalized local commerce future that was promised to them (and some companies are consistently delivering) more than a decade ago...

Bob Lutz in his recent book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters makes the point that GM was doing fine until in the mid 1970s the MBA-trained finance guys took control of product development from the "car guys," who were engineers and designers. The result, he says, was inferior cars and a decline in the firm. He believes that CEOs and the top management should not be bean counters but rather should be a "product guys."

The poster child for his view was Roger Smith who was an MBA-trained accounting and finance specialist. During his ten year tenure as GE's CEO during the 80s, Smith made breathtaking strategic and operating blunders. He invested in robotics that did not work, created a disastrous reorganization that resulted in cars so similar they were a joke (remember the Cadillac Cimarron?), mismanaged some ill-conceived acquisitions, built up enormous debt, and on and on. GM's share went from 45% to 36% under his watch. A role model, on the other hand, was Steve Jobs, with no degree but deep computer expertise, who spawned a string of product successes brilliantly executed.

I think Bob is an impressive executive (ironically he does have an MBA although it was in the pre-quant MBA era; Berkeley-Haas is proud to claim him), but I disagree with his suggestion that background, product knowledge, or management style (he advocates an autocratic style) are predictors of CEO performance and behavior. Lou Gerstner did not know anything about computers when he brought IBM back from the near dead and Allan Mulally had no background in automobiles when he took over Ford. And I don't believe that having an MBA or being in finance necessarily means that you are short-term focused or insensitive to customer demands.

Instead, in my view, a gifted CEO needs two qualities, and I believe that these come with birth, and not training. They are executive talent and strategic judgment.

Executive talent. Executives need a broad range of talent; excelling on a few dimensions is rarely enough. A truly gifted CEO should have a good feel for selecting, motivating, and evaluating people; developing and selling a strategy; creating an inspiring culture; developing an organizational structure and management process that work for the strategy; fostering cooperation across silos; understanding and using financial measures; and an understanding of how marketing, branding, finance, production, distribution contribute to strategy. With the right talent and DNA, a CEO who is missing background in some of these areas will quickly pick it up.

Strategic judgment. Some people just have a flare for good judgment — whether it is an ability to identify issues, distill facts, or develop instincts to make sound strategic decisions — and others simply do not. This too, in my opinion, is something you are born with. In my field, I see many who have deep experience in branding but relatively few that have a strategic flare. It can be improved but it cannot be created.

Worst products in Apple's history were under the watch of MBA/CEO after Steve Jobs stepped down in the 90s. Once he resumed leadership, Apple has been innovative and crushing Wall St expectations.

Engineers and 'product people' are design thinkers. We are born this way, not trained or created.

Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:

• Commissions / Affiliate links
  
• Advertising networks
  
• Selling your own ads
  
• Paid content
  
• Sponsorships/Grants

Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.

Commissions / Affiliate links

Affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.

Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.

Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.

You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.

Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.

Advertising networks

Most news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.

The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.

Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.

Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.

Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:

"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."

If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.

Design to maximize online ad revenue

Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.

For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.

If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)

Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.

Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:

• Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
  
• Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
  
• Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.

Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.

Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.

Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.

How much traffic do you need?

With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?

To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)

How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.

Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.

Selling your own ads

If you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.

First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). Make Money also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.

You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.

Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)

Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)

If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.

Paid content

Given the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.

If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)

Sponsorships/Grants

Supporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.

In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.

The University of Iowa provides some guidance and a collection of links on grant writing in general, including links to many organizations which grant funds to researchers and publishers.

Good tips to earn money for freelance writers / journalists / PR folks

Loved the stat about highest number of collect phone calls from AT&T.