Over the past year I’ve heard the occasional opinion expressed that affiliates are overpaid. After all, they just post a link with a code, do nothing, and many make 50% or more of any sales they send — while the retailer is working their ass off day and night. Isn’t it a complete waste that the job being done by a guy making hundreds of thousands, or even over a million dollars a year could be done by a cookie-cutter employee being paid $35,000 a year? Right?

I was reading a very good blog post at Revenews which illustrates why the affiliate marketing business model works — and works well.

some merchants tend to think that they should pay the affiliate less. the problem with in-house teams is that they don’t really care - it’s not their money. If they lose it, they have excuses, if we lose our money, we have less money for next month - reality bites.

Additionally, affiliates add a critical element to online success: traffic. Traffic = money. Affiliates are essentially investments that send pure profit back to online retailers. They have traffic sources, they know where to get them, and they are going to send it your way. If that $35,000 a year employee had those same traffic sources, well, he wouldn’t be making 35 grand a year or be working for you.

News Corp is still gobbling up websites. Their most recent aquisition was UK classifieds site Propertyfinder.com for $25.3 million. More on Reuters UK.

Was this a good deal? According to The Australian.. “Launched in 1995, it makes a slight loss on revenues of $7 million a year.”

As website publishing is becoming more widely recognized as a legitimate and highly profitable business (mostly thanks to Google) it is only natural that more people want to get started in this field.

So what makes it so hard for new people to get started? There is no shortage of free information online about building websites. There are countless open source programs which mean virtually no money has to be spent on expensive new software.

Profitability is virtually guaranteed in this business — it just takes time to sort through all these piles of free information (and dis-information) to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

But, there is one hurdle that often is the most difficult for new web developers: “where do I start?”

Its not an uncommon problem. Many people want to start their own business — but they have no idea what to start.

I believe that new developers should start in one place: a topic they like. It can be a hobby, a sport, or personal interest. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you like it. Here is why:

-You already know what you are talking about, so content is easy to write

-Because you know more you sound more interesting — readers come back to your site and tell friends

-Because you know more you sound more authoritative — other webmasters link to you, often with out you asking them

-And ultimately, updates feel like recreation rather than work

This first site might be in a super-competative field or have limited growth potential, but at bare minimum, you will make a few dollars and have fun learning the unwritten ins and outs of website publishing along the way.

I don’t like to get involved in political issues here but this is pretty pathetic.

Democrats on Wednesday managed to defeat a bill aimed at amending U.S. election laws to immunize bloggers from hundreds of pages of federal regulations.

Google’s conterversial move to search books has been launched at Print.Google.com. Despite legal threats by book publishers in the US and elsewhere Google has continued as planned. Is Google just testing the legal waters, or does it actually believe that the publishers have no case?

DNJournal.com has reported that Bachelor.com, .net, and .org have sold for $125,000. That sounds like a reasonable price to me, but several of the other top domain sales for the past week leave me wondering. 123world.com for $85k? mypremierecreditcard.com for $20k? Unless there was something else with the transaction, I don’t believe it.

I’ve heard some discussion on various boards about using the Wordpress blogging software as a content management system.

I recently decided to integrate Wordpress into an older site of mine as part of the re-design process. My main need was something that would make publishing news easier. I had researched a few alternatives over the past few months but nothing met my needs.

So, yesterday I created a new Wordpress template, and integrated it into the front page of my site. After a lot of tweaking to get everything working, its now running just as I planned. It might be a bit of a stretch for me to call this a CMS, as I am only using it for news and not articles. Whats important is that with a little tweaking it is doing exactly what I want it to do.

If you are looking for an “out of the box” Wordpress CMS solution you may want to look into Semilogic.