It’s not easy being in ad sales these days. We bear the responsibility of generating the majority of revenue associated with our publication(s) but have almost no decision-making authority when it comes to the tools, technology and training we need to gain a competitive edge.  

I hear more and more media executives lament how their salespeople can’t sell digital or that they’re not using a consultative sales approach. There’s a remedy for this: Train your sales team to use web analytics platforms.

F+W Media has leveraged the power of the community – or communities in its case – to carve out a high-growth e-commerce business. Its 21 e-stores – selling everything from books, CDs and DVDs to workshops, calendars and, increasingly, affiliate products – helped the publisher grow its e-commerce revenues by 113% in 2009. 

In a world of free classifieds, newspapers are struggling to find a differentiating factor that local businesses value enough to pay for.  Yext, a startup based in New York City, may have found a way to overcome that threshold by developing an advertising system that enables local businesses to pay only for calls that result in business.  

If Google can’t make money off the news, who can? That’s the heart of a brilliant post by C.D. Nixon which says a bunch of things most journalists and many publishers can’t bear to admit. Nixon’s post  features a picture of a Google search for “Afghanistan war.”