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Embracing Google Ad Manager, Reluctantly

Posted Monday, August 31, 2009 - 12:16pm

My company, NewWest.Net, is already a Google shop: We use Gmail for our company email, Google Docs for file-sharing, Google Analytics for traffic measurement, Google FeedBurner for RSS feed management, and Google AdSense for remnant ad inventory. We get a lot of traffic from Google News, and of course we all use Google (GOOG) all the time for search.

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  • Jonathan Weber is the founder, publisher, and CEO of New West, a media company covering life and business in the Rocky Mountain West.

Keep Social Media Social

Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 - 4:11pm

If you pay even passing attention to the business press, you're well-aware that social media—especially Facebook and Twitter—are changing the world as we know it. Therefore, if you have a business, you need to get with the program and figure out what these new media can do for you.

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  • Jonathan Weber is the founder, publisher, and CEO of New West, a media company covering life and business in the Rocky Mountain West.

A Mantra For All Seasons

Posted Monday, August 17, 2009 - 4:47pm
Photograph of a businessman pushing a boulder by Photodisc/Getty Creative Images

Last winter, in the wake of the financial meltdown and a corresponding steep decline in the advertising business, NewWest.Net enjoyed a couple months of exceptionally strong sales in our core online advertising business. In the early spring, we put on a successful conference in Bozeman—a town hard-hit by the real estate meltdown—and generally felt pretty good about our performance in light of the economy.

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  • Jonathan Weber is the founder, publisher, and CEO of New West, a media company covering life and business in the Rocky Mountain West.
Photograph of a businessman pushing a boulder by Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

Getting Paid—The Extreme Version

Posted Monday, August 10, 2009 - 12:39pm
What to do when your business has been stiffed.

Chris Evans, owner of a small finish-carpentry business in Bozeman, Mont., faced a problem that's all too common for small-business owners, especially in this economy: He'd done the work, but he hadn't gotten paid.

Since last October, he'd been owed about $20,000 by the developer of a troubled luxury second-home development in Big Sky called Spanish Peaks. He was on the brink of financial disaster.

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  • Jonathan Weber is the founder, publisher, and CEO of New West, a media company covering life and business in the Rocky Mountain West.
What to do when your business has been stiffed.

Charities of Fire

Posted Monday, August 3, 2009 - 2:37pm
Photo of flaming torch by Jaren Jai Wicklund/Shutterstock.

My company, NewWest.Net, is a mission-driven business, and people sometimes ask me if we're a nonprofit. My stock answer: not on purpose!

But we do operate in a sector—online community news—where the nonprofit "model" is gaining ground. And I did consider at the start whether NewWest.Net should in fact be a nonprofit.

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  • Jonathan Weber is the founder, publisher, and CEO of New West, a media company covering life and business in the Rocky Mountain West.
Flaming torch.

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