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Inside AdSense: 5 Principles of User Experience, Part 3

Inside AdSense: 5 Principles of User Experience, Part 3

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The Kampala Post: How to Make Money Online with ebay Referrals

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iPhone 4 Tech Specs

		White Black
1		8GB
2		Height: 4.5 inches (115.2 mm) Width: 2.31 inches (58.6 mm) Depth: 0.37 inch (9.3 mm) Weight: 4.8 ounces (137 grams)
		GSM model: UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) CDMA model: CDMA EV-DO Rev. A (800, 1900 MHz) 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz only) Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR wireless technology
		Assisted GPS Digital compass Wi-Fi Cellular
		Retina display 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display 800:1 contrast ratio (typical) 500 cd/m2 max brightness (typical) Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating on front and back Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously
		5-megapixel iSight camera Video recording, HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second with the front camera Tap to focus video or still images LED flash Photo and video geotagging
		External Buttons and Controls Connectors and Input/Output
3		Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter Talk time: Up to 7 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM) Standby time: Up to 300 hours Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi Video playback: Up to 10 hours Audio playback: Up to 40 hours
		Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz Audio formats supported: AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), HE-AAC, MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, 4, Audible Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV User-configurable maximum volume limit
		Video out support at up to 720p with Apple Digital AV Adapter or Apple VGA Adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Component AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Composite AV Cable (cables sold separately) Video formats supported: H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile Level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format
		Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz
4		iPhone 4 (GSM model) 3G network - 850/1900 MHz: M4, T4 2G network - 850 MHz: M3, T3 2G network - 1900 MHz: M3, T35 iPhone 4 (CDMA model) M4, T4
		Viewable Document Types .jpg, .tiff, .gif (images); .doc and .docx (Microsoft Word); .htm and .html (web pages); .key (Keynote); .numbers (Numbers); .pages (Pages); .pdf (Preview and Adobe Acrobat); .ppt and .pptx (Microsoft PowerPoint); .txt (text); .rtf (rich text format); .vcf (contact information); .xls and .xlsx (Microsoft Excel)
		Three-axis gyro Accelerometer Proximity sensor Ambient light sensor
		Apple ID (required for some features) Internet access6 Syncing with iTunes on a Mac or PC requires: Mac: OS X v10.6.8 or later PC: Windows 7; Windows Vista; or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 3 or later iTunes 10.7 or later (free download from www.itunes.com/download)
		Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C) Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C) Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
		Language Support English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese Keyboard Support English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese - Simplified (Handwriting, Pinyin, Wubihua), Chinese - Traditional (Handwriting, Pinyin, Zhuyin, Cangjie, Wubihua), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Emoji, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic/Latin), Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese Dictionary Support English (U.S.), English (UK), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German, Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
		iPhone 4 Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic Dock Connector to USB Cable USB Power Adapter Documentation

Delbarton Prep leaves Hoboken blessed and full of gifts

Abbot Giles Hayes in no way resembles Santa Claus. But for hundreds of Hoboken parents and grandparents, he and his Delbarton elves might just have come from the North Pole instead of Morristown.
And instead of a sled, he used a huge truck to transport thousands of toys, gifts, clothes, bedding, housewares and gigantic cans of chili all of which were set up in the Our Lady of Grace School hall last Sunday. For several hours, some 30 Delbarton Prep students along with their fathers, faculty and alumni, some of whom live in Hoboken, transformed a gymnatorium into its own retail store. Except no money was exchanged.
April Harris, the founder and director of In Jesus’ Name Charities (IJNC) based in Hoboken, was the real Mrs. Claus who reached out to her network of need, including Hoboken residents who suffered damage from Sandy.
For three hours, the guests were greeted by the IJNC volunteers and Delbarton dads and escorted by their own Delbarton student donning a Santa cap. The student led the guest to each aisle where they could select items suitable for their needs.
After an average 15 minute tour, they were ready to depart and provide their children and family with a happy Christmas.
“This is a way of teaching and living the values truly embodied at Christmas,” said Hayes, the head of the storied monastery that houses 40 monks who not only run the prestigious Delbarton Prep, but also staff parishes and perform other pastoral services throughout the state.
Today, they educate 540 students on hundreds of pristine Morristown acres. But they are not isolated from the real world of hard knocks and poverty.
For nearly 20 years, the gifts brought to Hoboken this year were driven to Appalachia, and the team of students, staff and parents would spend a week distributing them. After Sandy ravaged New Jersey, they decided to help the residents of Hoboken, hard hit by the storm.
“I like the idea of contributing back to the community,” said Steve Parowski, an engineer from Franklin Lakes, on his first service project. His son, Michael, 17, a junior and member of the football team, said he was happy “to help the less fortunate.”
The students received no credit for their time that day, but they made an impression on all the guests. “I am getting feedback from the families who surprised me by saying how wonderful the young men treated them and what a nice experience it was being helped and guided by the Delbarton teens,” said Harris, who founded In Jesus’ Name 32 years ago after tragic fires in Hoboken killed many people and displaced scores.
She is a Jersey Journal Everyday Hero. She and her husband, Bill, are both Third Order Franciscans, live simply, and infuse their charity with the spirit of St. Francis. Her ministry depends on volunteers from the Hoboken churches and United Synagogue.
Their space was totally destroyed in the storm and they simply have bare walls and floors. But Harris and her crew got through the busiest time of the year, Thanksgiving, by providing turkeys and the food items for a meal to hundreds, and found time to feed anyone who lived alone at a local restaurant on Thanksgiving Day.
Delbarton also sponsors missions in Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana and does lots of medical missions like Operation Smile, said Hayes, who entered Delbarton as a student 60 years ago and has never left. He was elected Abbot in 2005. Delbarton’s good will left an impression on every one. “It isn’t easy to put just divergent cultures together,” observed Harris. “The families left feeling treated with dignity and left feeling blessed.” And that’s the best Christmas gift any one can give or receive.

Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing

The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask. In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won't just help with SEO, but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site.

#1 - Install Visitor Analytics

Nothing can be improved that is not tracked. Keeping these immortal words of wisdom in mind, get your pages firing analytics code before your first visitor. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, and customization options abound (for most sites more advanced than a basic blog, I'd highly recommend at least using first-touch attribution).

Google analytics, or any other package (see some alternatives here), needs to be placed on every page of your site and verified. Do yourself a favor and install in a template file you can be sure is on every page (e.g. footer.php). GA's instructions will indicate that placing the code at the top of the page is key, but I'm generally in favor of leaving it at the bottom to help page load time for visitors (though the new asynchronous GA code is pretty fast).

#2 - Set Up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts

Both Google & Bing have webmaster tools programs that monitor data about your site and message it back to you through online interfaces. This is the heartbeat of your site from the search engines' perspective and for that reason, it's wise to stay on top of the data they share.

That said, the numbers inside these tools are not always perfect, and often have serious flaws. The referring keywords and traffic data are, in my experience, far off what analytics tools will report (and in those cases, trust your analytics, not the engines' tools). Likewise, crawl, spidering and indexation data isn't always solid, either. Nonetheless, new features and greater accuracy continue to roll out (more of the former than the latter unfortunately) and it's worth having these both set up.

#3 - Run a Crawl Simulation of Your Site

No matter how perfect you or your developers are, there's always problems at launch - broken links, improper redirects, missing titles, pages lacking rel=canonical tags (see more on why we recommend using it and the dangers of implementing improperly), files blocked by robots.txt, etc.

By running a crawl test with a free tool like Xenu or GSiteCrawler, or leveraging a paid tool like Custom Crawl from Labs or the Crawl Service in the Web App (pictured above), you can check your site's accessibility and insure that visitors and search engines can reach pages successfully in the ways you want. If you launch first, you'll often find that critical errors are left to rot because the priority list fills up so quickly with other demands on development time. Crawl tests are also a great way to verify contractor or outsourced development work.

#4 - Test Your Design with Browser Emulators

In addition to testing for search engine and visitor accessiblity, you'll want to make sure the gorgeous graphics and layout you've carefully prepared checks out in a variety of browsers. My rule is to test anything that has higher than 2% market share, which currently means (according to Royal Pingdom): Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
There's a great list of browser testing options from FreelanceFolder here, so I'll just add that in-person testing, on your own PCs & Macs, is also a highly recommended use of an hour.

#5 - Set Up RSS Feed Analytics

Virtually every site will have some form of structured data being pushed out through an RSS feed. And, just like visitor analytics, if you want to improve the reach and quality of the feed, you'll need to leverage data.

Feedburner is the de facto software of choice, and it's very solid (though, good alternatives do exist). Getting your feed and the analytics to track and measure it is typically a very easy process because there's nothing to verify - you can create and promote any feed you want with just a few button clicks.
One important recommendation - don't initially use the counter "chicklet" like:
It has a bad psychological impact to see that no one has subscribed to your new RSS feed. Instead, just provide a standard link or graphic and after you've amassed a few hundred or thousand readers, use the numeric readout to provide additional social proof.

#6 - Tag the Actions that Matter

No matter what your site is, there are actions you're hoping visitors will take - from tweeting a link to your post to leaving a comment to buying a product or subscribing to an email list. Whatever those actions might be, you need to record the visits that make them through your analytics tool. Casey Henry's post on Google Analytics' Event Tracking will provide a thorough walkthrough.
Once action tracking is in place, you can segment traffic sources and visit paths by the actions that were taken and learn more about what predicts a visitor is going to be valuable. If you're pouring hours each day into Twitter m but seeing no actions, you might try a different channel, even if the traffic volume is high.

#7 - Conduct an Online Usability/Branding Test

Before a formal launch, it can be extremely helpful to get a sense of what users see, experience and remember when they browse to your site for a few seconds or try to take an action. There's some fantastic new software to help with this, including Clue App, screenshot below:

Last week, I set up a Clue App test for SEOmoz's homepage in 30 seconds and tweeted a single link to it, which garnered 158 kind responses with words and concepts people remembered from the visit. This type of raw testing isn't perfect, but it can give you a great look into the minds of your visitors. If the messages being taken away aren't the ones you intended, tweaking may be critical.
In addition to Clue, dozens of other easy usability and user-testing apps are now on the market. Conversion Rate Experts has a good list here and Craig Tomlin's got another excellent one here.

#8 - Establish a KPI Dashboard

No matter what your website does, you live and die by some key metrics. If you're starting out as a blogger, your RSS subscribers, unique visits, pageviews and key social stats (tweets, links, Facebook shares, etc) are your lifeblood. If you're in e-commerce, it's all of the above plus # of customers, sales, sales volume, returning vs. new buyers, etc.

Whatever your particular key metrics might be, you need a single place - often just a basic spreadsheet - where these important numbers are tracked on a daily or weekly basis. Setting this up before you launch will save you a ton of pain later on and give you consistent statistics to work back from and identify trends with in the future.

#9 - Build an Email List of Friends & Business Contacts for Launch

This may seem non-obvious, but it's shocking how a friendly email blast to just a few dozen of your close contacts can help set the stage for a much more successful launch. Start by building a list of the people who owe you favors, have helped out and who you can always rely on. If you're feeling a bit more aggressive in your marketing, you can go one circle beyond that to casual business partners and acquaintences.
Once you have the list, you'll need to craft an email. I highly recommend being transparent, requesting feedback and offering to return the favor. You should also use BCC and make yourself the recipient. No one wants to be on a huge, visible email list to folks they may not know (and get the resulting reply-all messages). 

#10 - Create Your Google Alerts

TheAlerts Service from Google certainly isn't perfect, but it's free, ubiquitous, and can give you the heads up on some of the sites and pages that mention your brand or link to you in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately, the service sends through a lot of false positives - spam, scraper sites and low quality junk. It also tends to miss a lot of good, relevant mentions and links, which is why the next recommendation's on the list.

#11 - Bookmark Brand Tracking Queries

In order to keep track of your progress and identify the sites and pages that mention or link to your new site, you'll want to set up a series of queries that can run on a regular basis (or automated if you've got a good system for grabbing the data and putting it into a tracking application). These include a number of searches at Google, Twitter and Backtype:

The queries should use your brand name in combination with specific searches, like the example below (using "seomoz" and "seomoz.org"):

• Google Blog Search mentions
• Google Blog Search links
• Google Web mentions (past 24 hours)
• Google News mentions
• Twitter Search
• Backtype Search

You can add more to this list if you find them valuable/worthwhile, but these basics should take you most of the way on knowing where your site has been mentioned or referenced on the web.

#12 - Make Email Signup/Subscription Available

Capturing the email addresses of your potential customers/audience can be a huge win for the influence you're able to wield later to promote new content, products or offerings. Before you launch, you'll want to carefully consider how and where you can offer something in exchange for permission to build an email list.
One of the most common ways to build good lists is to offer whitepaper, e-book, video or other exclusive content piece for download/access to those who enter an email address. You can also collect emails from comment registration (which tend to be lower overall quality), through an email newsletter subscription offering (which tend to be very high quality) or via a straight RSS subscription (but you'll need to self-manage if you want to have full access to those emails). Services like MailChimp, ExactTarget, Constant Contact and iContact are all options for this type of list building and management.

#13 - Create Your Site/Brand's Social Accounts

Social media has become popular and powerful enough that any new site should be taking advantage of it. At a minimum, I'd recommend creating accounts on the following networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google Profiles
• YouTube (if you have or will have any video content)
• Flickr (if you have any graphics or images content)

And if you have more time or energy to devote, I'd also invest in these:

• Quora
• Slideshare (if you have any presentations)
• Scribd (if you have any document content)
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Any industry specific social portals (e.g. in software, this might include places like StackOverflow, Github and Hacker News)

Setting up these accounts diligently is important - don't just re-use the same short bio or snippet over and over. Spend the time to build fleshed out profiles that have comprehensive information and interact/network with peers and those with similar interests to help build up reputation on the site. The effort is worth the reward - empty, unloved social accounts do virtually nothing, but active ones can drive traffic, citations, awareness and value.
BTW - Depending on the size and structure of your site, you may also want to consider creating a Facebook Fan Page, a LinkedIn Company Page and profiles on company tracking sites like Crunchbase, BusinessWeek and  the Google Local Business Center.

#14 - Connect Your Social Accounts

If you've just set up your social account, you've likely added your new site as a reference point already, but if not, you should take the time to visit your various social profiles and make sure they link back to the site you're launching.

Not all of these links will provide direct SEO value (as many of them are "nofollowed"), but the references and clicks you earn from those investigating your profiles based on your participation may prove invaluable. It's also a great way to leverage your existing branding and participation to help the traffic of your new site.

#15 - Form a List of Target Press, Blogger and Industry People for Outreach

Depending on your niche, you may have traditional media outlets, bloggers, industry luminaries, academics, Twitter personalities, powerful offline sources or others that could provide your new site with visibility and value. Don't just hope that these folks find you - create a targeted list of the sites, accounts and individuals you want to connect with and form a strategy to reach the low hanging fruit first.
The list should include as much contact information as you can gather about each target - including Twitter account name, email (if you can find it), and even a physical mailing address. You can leverage all of these to reach out to these folks at launch (or have your PR company do it if you have one). If you tell the right story and have a compelling site, chances are good you'll get at list a few of your targets to help promote, or, at the least visit and be aware of you.

#16 - Build a List of Keywords to Target in Search Engines

This is SEO basics 101, but every new site should keep in mind that search engines get lots of queries for virtually everything under the sun. If there are keywords and phrases you know you want to rank for, these should be in a list that you can measure and work toward. Chances are that at launch, you won't even be targeting many of these searches with specific pages, but if you build the list now, you'll have the goal to create these pages and work on ranking for those terms.
As you're doing this, don't just choose the highest traffic keywords possible - go for those that are balanced; moderate to high in volume, highly relevant in terms of what the searcher wants vs. what your page/site offers and relatively low in difficulty.
See this post for more tips - Choosing the Right Keyphrases - from Sam Crocker.

#17 - Set Targets for the Next 12 Months

WIthout goals and targets, there's no way to know whether you're meeting, beating or failing against expectations - and every endeavor, from running a marathon to cooking a meal to building a company or just launching a personal blog will fail if there aren't clear expectations set at the start. If you're relatively small and just starting out, I'd set goals for the following metrics:

• Average weekly visits (via analytics)
• Average page views (via analytics)
• Number of new posts/pages/content pieces produced per month
• Number of target contacts (from item #15) that you've reached
• Social media metrics (depending on your heaviest use platform, e.g. # of Twitter followers if you're a heavy Tweeter)
• Any of the key items from #8 on this list (your KPI dashboard)

And each of these should have 3, 6 and 12 month targets. Don't be too agressive as you'll find yourself discouraged or, worse, not taking your own targets seriously. Likewise, don't cut yourself short by setting goals that you can easily achieve - stretch at least a little.
Every 3-6 months, you should re-evaluate these and create new goals, possibly adding new metrics if you've taken new paths (RSS subscribers, views of your videos, emails collected, etc.)

#18 - Plug in the SEOmoz Web App

I know this one's a bit self-serving, but I'd like to think I'd add it here even if it wasn't my company (I recently set up my own personal blog and found the crawling, rank tracking and new GA inegration features pretty awesome for monitoring the growth of a new site).

The SEOmoz Web App has a number of cool tracking and monitoring features, as well as recommendations for optimizing pages targeting keywords, that make it valuable for new sites that are launching. The crawl system can serve to help with #3 on this list at the outset, but ongoing, it continues to crawl pages and show you your site's growth and any errors or missed opportunities. Tracking rankings can let you follow progress against item #16, even if that progress is moving from ranking in the 40s to the 20s (where very little search traffic will be coming in, even if you're making progress). And the new GA integration features show the quantity of pages, keywords and visits from search engines to track progress from an SEO standpoint.

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Using this list, you should be able to set up a new site for launch and feel confident that your marketing and metrics priorities are in place. Please feel free to share other suggestions for pre and post-launch tactics to help get a new site on its feet. I'm looking forward to seeing what other recommendations you've got.

Every Marketer Should Be Technical

There's been a lot of talk of roles like growth hackers, marketing ninjas, and technical marketing in the past year. Regardless of whether or not you subscribe to these labels, technical skills are becoming a requirement for success in online marketing. The marketers who know SQL, can write code, leverage APIs, and perform quantitative analysis will be the most desirable and productive individuals in our industry. Those without these skills will find it increasingly difficult to find ideal career opportunities.
I've prepared this guide as an overview to the technical skills that are most helpful in online marketing and included a directory of resources to help you get there.

Growth hacker, growth cracker; the labels don't matter, but the skills do!

There's been plenty of discussion in the past year on the importance of growth hacking, who is and isn't a growth hacker, and if growth hacking is really just marketing. Although I appreciate this conversation, I think we're overlooking what's most important.
Instead of focusing on what those who do technical marketing call themselves, I'd rather we explore what it means to be technical and help each other develop those skills. Refer to these marketers however you like; what really matters is what we're capable of as professionals.

Can a marketer be technical? Of course. (And developers can be phenomenal marketers, too.)

I started my own career as a developer and slowly became more focused on marketing as the years progressed. I worked as a developer when Netscape Navigator was popular and Yahoo was #1 in search. However, I was a pretty lousy developer, slapping things together with table tags and transparent gifs. I was fortunate enough to keep my job because that's how most of us did web development back then.
I'm actually more technical now as a full-time marketer than I ever was back then because I've been fortunate to continually be exposed to, work with, and do work that requires technical skills. And that's really only because it was a matter of necessity in the organizations I've worked in. So, if an unfocused individual like me can do this, anyone can.
Better examples can be found in the phenomenal marketing and technical skills of individuals like Richard Baxter, Vanessa Fox, Wil Reynolds, Alex Schultz, Tom Critchlow, or Michelle Robbins. All of these individuals have different stories of how they developed their capabilities, but I'd bet they all share a passion for staying up late, tinkering, and hacking away at their work, with a strong desire to always be developing new skills. (As a side note, I feel so fortunate to work an industry with so many individuals like this, and it's been an absolute pleasure to learn from them.)
Developers can be remarkable marketers, too, and some of the best marketers I've known work as developers first and foremost. The one difference is that a lack of marketing skills is not likely to prevent an engineer from being successful at their work. Marketers, on the other hand, are going to have a much more difficult time doing their work without some semblance of technical skills, which brings me to my next thought:

Generalist/specialists are the new minimum viable professional

For generations, professionals have been pressured to be either a generalist or specialist. The generalists were the managers who oversaw operations, and had a holistic view of how marketing was accomplished, but were less capable of doing the work themselves. Generalists relied upon specialists who knew how to write, design, code, or analyze. And for generations of marketing, this worked just fine.
But, this trend just doesn't cut it anymore. To be successful nowadays, you need have both a breadth and depth of skills. You have to know what to ask for and how it's done. Without both of these capabilities, you're prone to be less efficient than a colleague or competitor who does.
This is especially pronounced in the startup world, where budgets are constrained and companies can't afford to hire both managers and specialists. And this trend explains why the growth hacker meme is so popular in startup communities. You have to be able to do everything to hack it at a startup.
I like refer to these individuals as generalist specialists. These are individuals who have both knowledge of marketing channels, methods, and techniques, but also have the specialist technical knowledge to understand what's possible and what's not, and to do the work themselves.

Know what to ask for, or just do the work yourself

Perhaps my favorite reason to develop these skills is the ability to communicate better with everyone in your organization. If you know what's possible, then you'll know what to ask for when you work with developers, designers, and analysts. And in many cases, you'll be able to just do the work yourself.

What is a technical marketer capable of?

Stated simply, a great technical marketer can devise, develop, launch, and analyze their marketing campaigns with little or no assistance. The example I've prepared below is fictitious, but by no means a panacea. I happen to be using a fictitious marketer at Incase, a company I randomly chose, but whose products I really like.
So, let's take a look at the process and capabilities a technical marketer would use to manage their efforts.

1. Find something to improve

A technical marketer can review their efforts and find and prioritize opportunities for improvement. In this case, our marketer has decided to try to increase repeat purchases.

2. Devise a strategy

From there, they need to determine how they are going to accomplish that.

3. Forecast the improvement

The next step is to estimate the efficacy of the campaign to see if it's worth their time and effort. It looks like it is!

4. Pull customer list from database

The marketer would then use SQL to query their database for the appropriate users to generate an email list.

5. Wireframe the email, and write the copy

From there, they would create a simple wireframe and draft the email copy.

6. Design and code the HTML for the email template

Next up is creating the HTML template, first using an image editor like Photoshop, and then developing the HTML and CSS.

7. Instrument end-to-end tracking

The marketer will then ensure that there is end-to-end tracking in place, and likely place a few test orders to confirm it's all working properly.

8. Launch the campaign

It's time to send the campaign and wait for the results. Meanwhile, our fictitious marketer enjoys a bland, but reasonably-priced American beer.

9. Evaluate the results

A few days later, the marketer collects analytics from the various systems, combines them in Excel, and calculates the quantitative impact of the campaign.

10. Automate for ongoing success

The marketer determines the campaign was successful enough to do it each month and develops a script will automate the process.

11. Correlate those that receive email with purchases

Ever the ambitious individual, the marketer then performs some statistical analysis to determine if those who receive email campaigns have a higher propensity to make purchases on the site. 

12. Rinse and repeat

After a successful campaign, the marketer begins all over again, armed with additional experience on what sort of campaigns are successful, and is better prepared to be successful in the future.

What does it take to get there? Here's a recipe to develop your technical skills.

The capabilities demonstrated above show a fictional marketer who is able to run a successful campaign with little or no assistance from others. So, how do you get there? Primarily, by jumping in, trying it out, and learning as you go.
To help you on your way, I've put together a recipe of skills with links to resources. Some resources are better than others, and you can pursue them in any order you'd like. Have better resources than what I've included? Please feel free to contribute them in the comments.