If I could only give one piece of strategic advice to any business owner, I would say this:

Own and distribute proprietary content.

A subset to that advice would be this:

If your company doesn’t have the resources or skills to develop proprietary content, pay someone to do it for you.

There are a number of companies that serve the association/non-profit market with “custom” e-newsletters and online buyers’ guide directories. They contract with associations to produce and distribute branded e-newsletters and guides. In exchange, they sell advertising into those products and split the revenue with the association. The revenue split is usually something like 80/20 or 90/10.

The pitch is simple: Associations get a new product that generates revenue without additional overhead. It’s a pretty good pitch for associations that don’t already have publications and want to diversify their revenue streams. Unfortunately, it’s all about the short-term dollar. The elephant in the room that nobody asks is whether anyone will read the e-newsletter or use the buyers’ guide.

There’s good reason to think these publications aren’t reaching readers. Why? Because these companies are sales organizations, not publishers. They create products that appeal to advertisers, not readers. They do not (will not?) produce original and proprietary content for your organization. In other words, you could be sending an e-newsletter with the same links to the same aggregated content that your competitors send.

The problem is that any business can set up Google alerts, find stories on particular topics and link to them through their website, blog or e-newsletter. Any organization with enough cash can replicate the technology and scale necessary to reach many eyeballs with aggregated content.

So think about what kind of information you offer your customers. Is it information they can find somewhere else? Is it information they’ve already found somewhere else? If so, you are playing in a crowded field. When that happens, you can expect that advertising revenue is going to go down eventually. What distinguishes a company and allows you to hold advertising pricing steady is when your publication has information and content that no one else does.