News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch is a brilliant businessman. When he speaks we should all listen. He has an interesting take on charging for news content. He says he plans to remove News Corp content from the major search engines and switch to a paid model. If anyone can successfully monetize news content, it’s Murdoch. People are so used to getting free content, I’m really interested to see if people are still willing to pay for it. If he keeps it at around $6.95 a month he could probably pull it off, but we’ll see. (hat tip Sky News) --- Better read it while it’s free.
Affiliate marketing can be a very profitable business if you know what you’re doing. As with most things in life however, the money doesn’t come easy. One of the most time consuming aspects of affiliate marketing, PPC marketing, and Internet marketing in general is checking your stats. You have to log in to each affiliate and PPC program to see how many clicks you’re getting, how many conversions you have (or don’t have), which banners or text links are converting (and which are not), etc. Even if you create a spreadsheet to aide in tracking, it’s still a massive time...
Here’s the keynote address Gary Vaynerchuk gave to Mediabistro the other day. It’s a fantastic presentation and Q & A that’s worth watching if you have an interest in social media marketing: