I’d hate to be in the newspaper business. Most papers are losing money. Many marquee ones are closing. Jobs are being cut right and left.

This isn’t new. The bleeding has been going on for at last decade. It’s just in the last few years that it’s gone from requiring stitches to a tourniquet in order to stop the hemorrhaging.

What’s amazing is that despite all red ink and layoffs, most newspapers haven’t been able to come up with a way to stop losing subscribers and become profitable.

The problem is simple: readers have become accustomed to free, online news and newspapers are adverse to charging them. And no one has found a way to keep these free sites profitable. (The notable exception to this is the Wall Street Journal who charges to access most, but not all, of its online content.)

This may chance now that the granddaddy of the newspaper business, The New York Times, had announced it might start charging for news. According to New York magazine:

After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

The Times is smart to adopt some kind of pay strategy. Businesses can only bleed money for so long before they die.

But even charging readers for comments is no guarantee of success. As the article points out:

What makes the decision so agonizing for [New York Times Chairman Arthur] Sulzberger [Jr.] is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world.

In the end, every business has to prove its value. Newspapers are no different. If no one is willing to pay for what you have to offer, it’s time to change your offering or close the doors.

My question for the Times’ decision makers is how much they’ve examined the analytics data on their website to see if there are sections people would pay for and others that are best left free. (The Wall Street Journal, for example, has free access to its Opinion Pieces and a few select articles.) Some content might be worth charging while other content might be able to support itself using a web advertising model. 

Not everyone reads every part of a newspaper. Business readers might be more inclined to pay for content while stay-at-home moms may not have the means to access parts of the paper that, if it has enough targeted viewers, could pay for itself with online advertising. It’s an idea worth exploring so long as their websites can give them accurate analytics data. 

Whatever they do, it’s obvious that for most newspapers the free model isn’t working. To survive they’re going to have to find a way to keep the money flowing. The real question for the Times is whether they have content that people are willing to pay for and, if not, can they change their content quickly enough so that people will care.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on pay per click (PPC) advertising, SEO, PR, and other marketing initiatives attracting visitors to their website without seeing a significant increase in sales or leads. Filling your sales pipeline with high quality leads doesn’t have to be expensive. Most companies can see an immediate increase in high quality leads by implementing 5 proven online conversion practices into their website. Not only will these tips maximize the quantity and quality of leads in your sales pipeline, they’ll also help your organization where it matters most: the bottom line.

To learn more about these conversion practices, download our free lead generation guide here.

In this recession, a debate had raged whether or not organizations should cut their marketing and advertising budget during lean times. According to a New Yorker article, numerous studies have shown that those who keep spending during tough times do better in the long run.

In 1927, the economist Roland Vaile found that firms that kept ad spending stable or increased it during the recession of 1921-22 saw their sales hold up significantly better than those which didn’t. A study of advertising during the 1981-82 recession found that sales at firms that increased advertising or held steady grew precipitously in the next three years, compared with only slight increases at firms that had slashed their budgets. And a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.

The best part?

…the benefits from recession investment are often surprisingly long-lived, with companies maintaining their gains in market share and sales well into economic recovery.

You can read the entire article here. In the meantime, start cranking up the marketing budgets!

As mentioned in Tuesday’s post, it’s difficult to guage the effectiveness of PPC and other online adverting and marketing efforts if you have no idea whether or not visitors from these campaigns are entering your sales pipeline.

One of the new features of our HookTour is the ability to integrate with Google AdWords and other ad sever systems (MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) for closed-loop marketing conversion tracking. Instead of pointing your campaigns to a static, text-based landing page, you can now send prospects straight to a page energized by your HookTour, tracking them from impression to conversion.

But why stop at ad campaign integration? All leads from your HookTour can be sent in real time to any CRM system, including Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Eloqua, and others. We’ve also enhanced client-side and server-side data pass-through options so that you can integrate the tour with your website, affiliate systems, and other custom data-collection engines for more robust call-to-action handling and tracking.

Installing the HookTour and Sapha tracking code on your website is as simple as copy and paste.  Embedding the tour right in  one of your webpages, or creating a link that will open the tour in a modal, stylized window is as easy as designating which HTML tag you want affected — the Sapha system does the rest!

Just think. Prospects will go from an ad, to your HookTour to your sales pipeline all in one smooth process. And, you’ll have the data to see  how effective your marketing efforts really are.

If you’re not seeing the quality or quantity of leads from your marketing efforts, you might want to reconsider how you’re generating them.

According to Forrester Research, the following are the top 10 methods of lead generation.

1. Email
2. PR
3. Tradeshows
4. Direct mail
5. Print ads
6. Search marketing (SEO, PPC, etc.)
7. Sponsorships
8. Executive seminars
9. Inside sales
10. Webinars

But are these methods the most effective ways to generate high quality leads?

Nope.

The top 10 effective methods of lead generation are as follows:

1. Executive Seminars
2. Inside sales
3. Search marketing (SEO, PPC, etc.)
4. Webinars
5. Tradeshows
6. TV advertising
7. Email
8. Radio
9. PR
10. Online video/podcasts/rich media

Of course not all of the above, like TV advertising, are within the budgets or means of every marketing department. However, find out what methods work within your budget and use them.

In the meantime, put the less effective approaches on the back burner and see what a chance in approach can do for your lead generation.

It’s a perilous time to be in the newspaper and magazine business. Advertising revenue and subscriptions continue to fall. Staffs are being slashed. Many wonder how much longer if newspapers and magazines even have a future.

They do. But it will take some creativity to survive.

The Christian Science Monitor and U.S. News & World Report have taken the first step to surviving well into the 21^st Century: Abandoning their print editions and becoming internet-focused publications* (see CSM story here and U.S. News story here).

Changing to a web-only publication is a win for publications because it eliminates one of their biggest expenses: printing, delivery, mailing costs. With the right analytic tools, the move provides publishers and editors more information about their readers. Not only can they know who’s reading their publication but what they’re reading and where they’re coming from and what advertisers to target.

However, their move to online publications should be welcome news for advertisers who are looking for effective advertising avenues and ways to make sure they’re getting the most for the money they spend. The move is also a win for advertisers who, instead of going on ineffective print ads, will be able to know about those who will be to their ads and how effective there advertising campaigns are. As a result, they’ll be able to squeeze the most from every dollar they spend advertising with these web-only publications.

That’s not to say the move isn’t without its challenges. Both the CSM and U.S. News need to find a way to make this move profitable. When it comes to news, consumers have pretty much rejected paying for it online. That means these publications are going to hope that the amount and type of traffic they generate to their websites are enticing for potential advertisers.

For advertisers, there’s little downside other than hoping their marketing campaigns resonate with prospects and the publications are able to provide an attractive target audience.

Whether or not The Christian Science Monitor and U.S. News can make the transition to the web a profitable one remains to be seen. Either way, look for many more publications to take the same leap in 2009.

*  U.S. News & World Report will continue a monthly publication mostly in the form of their annual consumer guides. The Christian Science Monitor will publish a weekly print magazine.