Tag

Newsgator

A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce

A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce As an online marketing professional, I’ve long understood intellectually how e-commerce works, how affiliate networks function, and why the internet is such a powerful selling tool.  But I got an email the other day that drove this home more directly. When I started my blog about a year and a half ago, I set myself up as an Amazon affiliate, meaning that any time someone clicks on a link to Amazon from one of my postings or on the blog sidebar, I get paid a roughly 4% commission on anything that person buys on Amazon on that session. According to the email report I just got from Amazon on Q2 sales driven…

We Did What?

We Did What? Newsgator founder Greg Reinacker has a pricelss posting about the first time an entrepreneur discovers that something happened in his company that he didn’t know about. An absolute gem.

Change of Name?

Change of Name Fellow CEO Greg Reinacker posted an open question on his blog about whether he should change the name of his company, NewsGator. This is a GREAT topic. We struggled with it for years at MovieFone, because at some point, the Internet became a huge part of the business, and the name seemed antiquated. Plus, everyone knew us by the phone number, 777-FILM (or whatever number it happened to be in any given city). But it had 10 years of brand equity at that point behind it. Return Path used to be called uLocate.com a really long time ago, and we changed the name to be less “dot com” three months after we got started (that’a story for…

Prepping RSS for Prime Time

With all the hype in the world of blogs in the past few months about RSS taking over the world, I’ve been getting myself up to speed on the space by meeting with some of the companies in it and by publishing my own blog here. Two of the CEO’s I’ve met with in the RSS business are super smart and are doing everything they can to get the technology ready for prime time. What do I mean by that? I mean: Critical Mass: 10 million or more end users using RSS, not just the tech/finance/journalist axis that dominates usership today. Hundreds of mainstream publishers and marketers using RSS, not just a handful of businesses and loads of individuals or…