Business Blogger

Well the economy looks alright but what about Google? It’s a known fact that Google has seen dramatic changes in click-through behavior since they changed their ad hot spots. Straight from the mouth of one of the largest Google publishers on the web: “The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with Google’s changes.” Markus Frind is looking for new advertisers and digg looks as if it has stopped using Google ads altogether. Where does this leave Google?

Well this little image tells you exactly where Google is at. It’s the first look at Google’s new Adsense test layout. It seems as if Google’s Adsense conversions might be affecting their pocket book more than they had anticipated (someone should get fired). Google is now testing Adsense boxes in which the user can click through on every single piece of text in the ad. A lot different than the current Adsense model which lets the user click on either the title or the URL of the ad. My guess is if this doesn’t work they will quickly move back to making the entire ad click-through. As I stroll over to Engadget I notice that they have done just that, what a coincidence. I do notice that landing pages fed with Google Adsense have not changed as of yet.

Maybe this is a special publisher deal, although not likely. This is probably just a few tests for Google Adsense to see what’s next. They have some tough choices to make and their stock price depends on it. The choice for Google has come down to one of relevancy or money. I think they are on the right track, but who am I to judge?

There are many questions that can be raised about the economy and the situation that it’s in as of right now. Many wonder where we are headed in the near future. Since Ben Bernanke announced the possible stimulus package, reporters all over the world are questioning what will happen in the morning when the U.S. markets open up.

The markets overseas seemed to have gone into panic mode with many markets over the world taking a hit on the possibility that the U.S. markets will do the same. Do we need to face the truth and admit that we are in a global economy? The world is connected through our economies and more than ever today thanks to the internet.

While the world seems to be in a stage of panic over the state of business throughout the world we should we should step back and take a look at the positives in business and especially internet business. According to the Philadelphia BizJournal, internet business and the venture capital sector is looking pretty good.

So what will happen in the morning? That’s the question on everyone’s mind at the moment. You can be sure that our business interests and everyone else’s around the world are at stake. Will there be a big hit on the stock markets? Will people start to frantically pull their money out of the markets or will it be just another day at the office. It will be interesting to see.

This year is scheduled to be a busy one with some big plans for our internet business blog team. The plan is to cover more interesting newsworthy stuff that’s going on in the internet business world. One of the most exciting things we have going on this year is the upcoming launch of our business directory. A little something we have created for the B2B community.

This is very exciting news for us since the project has been going on behind the scenes for quite some time now. We have been working very hard to create a community resource that will be of high value to the business to business community. On top of this we have a few other projects going on behind the scenes that will be keeping us on our toes. It will be a very exciting new year for business indeed.

Because business on the internet is growing at such a rapid pace there is a new market that many businesses are not yet aware of. With internet ad budgets going up faster and faster each year, most have realized the value the internet can bring to their business. The truth is businesses of all kinds are finding their ways onto the internet for the first time, realizing the potential market they had been missing out on. There are new and exciting businesses being developed daily that provide value to businesses all over the internet. We look forward to covering these business launches and providing our readers with valuable business related news and discussion.

In the business world the internet seems to be the great equalizer, at least for those that get business. Just because you can set up a business blog does not make you an entrepreneur, nor does it make you a blog writer. I don’t claim to be a great writer, in fact this blog has helped to hone those skills, but I do claim to be a true business junkie. I pick up a good business book and can’t seem to put it down. I think of an idea for a business, beat it to death in my head and if it has the possibility to work I will beat it to death on paper in the form of a business plan.

These things about me aside I do think that the internet is a fantastic place for business and a venue that levels the playing field. What makes the internet a great place for business?

Domain names: You can pick up a great domain name and immediately be playing ball with the big boys. It’s like doing business in the big city versus that of a small town (good domain vs. bad domain). Your domain name can make or break your business, plain and simple. Money can buy a great domain name and creative thinking can help you to come up with the same. Your business depends on it.

The internet itself: What a great place to do business. You can sit anywhere in the world and be able to play on the greatest piece of real estate available, your domain name. Yes, I do think domain names are very important.

You make your own strategy: You make or break yourself (for the most part) on the internet. For instance, you can promote yourself and your business through so many venues on the internet for free that you could essentially make something from nothing. With free hosting, free layouts and free promotion how much money does one really need to get started? Ah the price of a domain name and your precious time.

I’m not naive enough to think that people are going to spend absolutely nothing on promotion and rise to the top quickly, but if someone were to create a business out of nothing this would be the place to do it. OK, enough rambling, but for those of you out there that are asking; What is the best way to make money on the internet?….I have the solution. Stop asking the question and start learning about the internet and domain names, read business blogs, etc.

Well I remember a while back that I made a post about Google.gov. The thing is I still get pretty decent traffic out of the post but I noticed that Google doesn’t have it anywhere in the serps. HMMMMMMMMMM, that sure is odd because I can remember just a few weeks ago I was getting visits from Google on the post. I’d like to ask Matt Cutts about this one. Ha! Dear Google are blogs just considered news sources now, which become irrelevant within just a few weeks? Is it algorithmic or editorial?

What would Aaron Wall have to say about this one considering the recent Anti-Google claims? From what I can tell the post is not supplemental.

Anyhow, what the hell is this? Google.gov.cn

It’s true Google has gone Gov, I was right all along, just not with it’s host country. Google have you sold your trade name to China to get in on their textile industry? They are growing by leaps and bounds, anyone own any Petro China? It is the world’s first trillion dollar company. Do you still have rights to the Google name? Can anyone use it now? What gives? What happened to your logo?

So many questions, so little time.

As many of you know it was pretty easy not to long ago to get some nice page rank out of Google by creating a network of sites and linking them like mad, no longer the case. As many internet marketers have recently noticed, the linking game is getting a little harder than it used to be.

Now to create page rank you have to get links the hard way, by working for them. Not that creating sites and linking them together is not working, it’s just that Google has decided that it’s not what they feel is a good link profile. It’s official, Google has declared Jihad on blog link farms and some of the big boys had to fork over some of their page rank to comply.

One of the largest and most popular blogs to get hit was Engadget taking a dive from page rank 7 all the way to a page rank 5, ouch. This could possibly affect revenue from link sales at many of these blogs, considering page rank seems to play a major factor when it comes to the price of links.

Another big player, at least in the “make money online” scene, John Chow took another hit moving his page rank from a 6 to a 5 and now a 4. What’s next for John Chow and his money making empire? You can check out a more complete list over at Daily Blog Tips Page Rank - You’ve Been Punked By Google List. Got a little creative with the title there.

Well it’s been a bit since I last wrote, but with good reason. I have been absolutely slaving away on two different projects of mine and for the last two nights I have been up past 2 A.M. For me that’s pretty darn late, considering I like to get up in the morning and get started right away.

Whatever you do you will always encounter something in your way when trying to finish up a project. This time it was a software program that I had purchased to integrate into my website. At initial glance it looked as if the WYSIWYG software would integrate quite well making my nights work end even quicker than I had anticipated. Upon getting the program and trying to get it implemented the programmer noticed that it just wasn’t going to jive. The thing that got us into the mess was that the initial landing page may have been just a tad misleading, meaning I was the .01% of users that the program would not work for. Hey it has to be someone, right?

Well I was a little disappointed to say the least that I wasn’t going to get to use this sharp looking product, but we ended up finding a similar product that integrated very well. Even though the software didn’t work out for me that doesn’t take away from the quality of the product. My only suggestion would be that they should have identified to the best of their ability, who the program would not work for and why. They could also integrate one of those “click here to speak with someone” type of communication tools on the site to keep this from happening, but like I say I’m that .01%.

While the product didn’t work out for me, Vizimetrics was more than happy to give me a refund for my purchase, making me more than happy to do business with them in the future. They have several different products and a high regard for integrity, which is one of the keys to long term success in today’s business world. Thanks for upholding your word.

Are you looking for a way to increase traffic to your blog free of charge? Do you want hundreds of free views to your blog? Sure you do and I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it. First of all you can start by going over to blogrush and signing up for an account. This little widget you place on your blog works quite well, in fact it has already sent me hundreds of visitors. It’s pretty nice when you go check your stats after the weekend to see some extra activity at your blog.

Blogrush uses a little widget to show your latest rss feeds on other related blogs. You have the option of choosing the best category that works with your blog. I chose business because it’s what I blog about, easy enough. Then they give you a little piece of code to place on your blog to show relevant feeds. Place the code on your blog and you’re up and running. Without much hassle you get free traffic to your blog.

The way the widget works is that blogs get traffic from blogs that they refer and so on, you get the picture. Something like ten levels or so. You also get traffic based on the amount of views your blogrush widget sees. So if you get started now you will be well on your way to blogrush success. This literally took maybe two minutes to grab the code and implement it on this blog. The extra traffic you will get is just a little bonus for those two minutes of you time.

I had to go to Google.gov to check and make sure it wasn’t true. What’s going on with the Google algorithm lately? Google has recently stated that they don’t like paid links which is fine, everyone can understand that Google’s algorithm is flawed, in that it doesn’t currently account for paid links. The problem is that many high powered relevant (and picky) directories are being devalued because of the type of advertising they have chosen to use, or at least that’s what the buzz is. There is a conversation going on about this very topic over at sphinn titled “Google Manually Penalizing Directories”.

The thing is these directories are not even ranking for their names and it looks like they have had some of their pages de-indexed. For a directory owner this could be a nightmare, missing out on that sweet Google traffic that is. The question that everyone has to ask is; can Google end up hurting their own search results by devaluing highly relevant directories? I would say there is a strong possibility of this happening. Even if a directory owner buys valid links to advertise their product should their raking be taken away? There could be some interesting arguments from either side on this one. This is very similar to what recently happened to John Chow and Text-Link-Ads when they were recently also devalued by Google.

The fact is, Google doesn’t mind you advertising but they think you should slap a condom on your link in the form of “nofollow.” The problem with this is that they won’t come clean on the effects of “nofollow” on search results, so people continue to use the old standby, the natural “follow” link. Will directory owners remove their paid links or will they start using Yahoo? It will be interesting to see if Google or Matt Cutts will have anything to say about this topic in the coming days. I have a question for you Matt? If you buy a site (already having links) from an individual and then change the domain to something you prefer, does this constitute as paid links. There are many ways you could stretch this conversation, one thing is for sure, clarity and openness would help the situation a bit, but then Google would be revealing trade secrets and that’s no fun for anyone.

Dear Corporate America,

I’ve been meaning to send you this letter for quite a while now. Every time I hear a “corporate type” talk about the youth of today, I want to pull them aside and explain a few things, so here we go. I would like to take the time to inform you of all the valuable talent that your missing out on. While you’re concerned that “young people just don’t have any loyalty anymore,” you haven’t bothered to take a look at why this is. While you’re busy hiring talented college graduates, you fail to put them to any good use. In fact you’re scared that they might know more than you by their second day of work, rendering you useless. Well guess what, we want to be put to use, we want to work hard and we want to belong to something bigger than we are. This is why we took the job in the first place, right.

Unfortunately, we’ve been let down far too many times by far too many mediocre companies. If we wanted to push papers across a desk we could stay at home. The problem is, if you sit at home you don’t get paid, so talent goes to waste at work instead. It’s not that young people today are not loyal, it’s that they are not properly challenged. So remember that while our grandparents put in thirty years at the office without raising an eyebrow, the young adults of today have a choice. In fact, more than ever are choosing to work for themselves. Whatever it takes is the motto of today’s young people. Even if we have to live out of a van down by the river for the next two years while we get on our feet, it’s much better than working at your lousy company for 2 weeks.

There are exceptions out there, there are great companies that breed talent. These are few and far between. Good luck with your next hiring spree corporate America. Here’s a hint, if you can’t provide a community that fosters creativity and unity you will be conducting these hiring sprees for years to come. Stop using the words “work ethic” when you’re unable to provide a creative environment for employees to prosper. Stop over promising and under producing, and loyalty will find you.

Business Blogger

Let’s face it, business is what makes the world go around. If I had a place to put all of the business ideas I had for everyone to vote on maybe it would generate some traffic. Oh look, another business idea. That’s my point, business ideas are a dime a dozen and if you have what you believe is a unique idea, you better believe that someone else has already thought of it.

The good thing here is that just because someone has thought of a great business idea, doesn’t mean that they’re going to implement this idea. If they have already implemented this idea it also doesn’t mean that they’ve done things better than you can. Just look at the search industry as an example. Who’s on top of the search game now? This is what makes the internet unique as anyone from anywhere in the world has the chance to make a favorable impression on the business world with one unique idea. The internet is an open forum for business ideas with people voting on your product every day by how often they visit or use your site.

Speaking of visits to a site, I had a few ideas to give this blog a boost in traffic when I started blogging. The good thing is that I have not abandoned all of these ideas. I will still use most of the ideas, but I have decided that they are better suited for a later date and time. Some very nice informational posts will be coming your way very soon. Timing is everything and timing can be a valuable business tool, especially when it comes to marketing and promotion of websites.

Until then, you can send me all of your business ideas through my contact page. I just love hearing interesting ideas from entrepreneurs that focus on internet business. If your idea or site is interesting enough we will have to cover it in a blog post.

Well we finally made the switch over to another host. This blog had been run on a different host that I had been having some major problems with. When you suffer downtime more that once a week while you’re in the middle of a post it can get just a little frustrating. It was to the point where it was actually slowing down the posting on this blog. Sometimes a bad host can ruin your plans to actually get work done. Nevertheless we have made the switch.

What did we all learn from this little lesson? Well we learned that time is money, money is time, that whole saying. In doing business online this is more important than ever to remember. The thing about your host or server is that it’s working for you all day and all night long. You would think it would need to take a break, as my old host did very often, but computers don’t need sleep. Computers just need a little upgrade here and there to make sure everything is running smoothly.

When you think about this in business terms, I have absolutely no idea how many people came to this blog while it was down. I have no idea how many possible readers we lost because of this. What host are you using? Are they keeping your most important sites up and running 24/7? The world never stops searching for information and if your host is down when people are searching for what would be your product, you’re out of luck. This is just something we had to address, took the time to do so and now it’s finished. Hopefully I will have much better luck with this host as they seem to have very happy customers all over the web.

The best thing about doing business on the internet is that the computers do the work for you. You just have to make sure that your host isn’t taking too many breaks along the way. We will see how this host pans out, I will keep you all informed.

From what I gather, the whole Google / Text-Link-Ads thing is just a big mess. What are the investors thinking about this whole ordeal. Why is Google attacking text-link-ads? The real concern here is the business model of text-link-ads and the long term validity of that business model. Sure the business model sounds like a great idea, you sell text links on tons of different web pages and take a percentage of the profits. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, until Google steps in and tells you you’re doing it all wrong.

Google wants to make their search engine great, and the only way they can do this is by scouring the web and checking links to other web sites. For Example, if Wikipedia linked to this business blog from it’s main page, in Google’s eyes this blog can do no wrong. Site ranking has been passed on to other sites for quite a while under the trust factor. Google relies on you to link to relevant content from your blog and until now, Google has relied on you not trying to game the system by using text link advertising. The problem with this is that there are so many players out there trying to game the system, tons with non-relevant sites that feed nothing but ads. Google has no where else to turn but to slap around those that can’t abide by their rules, so they have commenced the slapping. The unfortunate problem for text-link-ads is that they didn’t plan for this fallout to even begin.

Text-link-ads, with it’s current business model, doesn’t do anything to stop sites from gaming the system. My advice to text-link-ads, you need to limit advertisers to a predetermined category or categories. For instance if I wanted to advertise this blog in a text-link-ads campaign I would only be allowed to advertise on sites that are aimed at blogging, business and the internet. This will enable text-link-ads and their advertisers to keep their websites relevant and on topic, thus eliminating a majority of the play for page rank.

Maybe Google is hoping that text-link-ads will just give up. Maybe they think their investors will bail and then they could come in for a sweep, buying out text-link-ads for pennies on the dollar. Maybe text-link-ads will take my advice, maybe not.

Has everyone seen the commotion over what has happened to John Chow (JohnChow.com) and Text-Link-Ads.com? Since I used to read his business blog, I was going to do a post on John Chow and how he is going down the wrong path, but I decided against it. It was just going to be evil anyhow. Speaking of “evil”, John Chow can’t even rank for his own name on Google anymore. Google has knocked his block off, at least in their search results. It’s a good thing for John Chow that the majority of his traffic comes from sources other than Google. He’s always said, “don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket.” That’s never been more true for him than right now.

John Chow will have to come to the realization that Google can play games too. For months John had been accepting reviews of his site, in return giving you a “link back from a PR 6 site,” a tactic that this business blog will not partake in. Oh, let’s not forget that John also uses text link ads to sell horribly unrelated links on his front page. If you break Google’s rules they will slam you as hard as they can. Google basically got tired of John trying to pimp their page rank, so they knocked him around a bit and put the Google boot (size XXXL) where the sun doesn’t shine. On top of the fact that John Chow can’t even rank on page one for his own name, he can’t rank for his favorite search term “make money online” either. They put a little hurt on John Chow but the publicity he will get from this whole thing will probably just help him.

On top of that, Text-Link-Ads.com isn’t even ranking for the term “text link ads.” Wow, when Google says they don’t approve of people buying or selling links, what they really mean is they will kick you down their search results. What I did notice is that text-link-ads.com does have a little ad campaign going with Google, they happen to occupy the top spot. They can still buy links from Google apparently. What’s going to happen to the link buying industry? If Google has any say in it, the whole “text link ads” business model will just go away completely and sites like John Chow will go down in flames. Is this the new definition of “Google Bomb?”

What are you doing Google? After a recent post attracted some attention I figured the readers of Business Blogger might enjoy something else along the same lines. Here is a list of 14 interesting domains I found that point to the Google search page. Enjoy!

1. BAIDU-INC.COM - Google doesn’t even own any Baidu stock!
2. BOOGYBOX.COM
3. COMPEXPLUS.COM
4. EUROUSF.ORG - The www version of eurousf.org points to a site.
5. HANNAHDEGARD.COM
6. KEVINCHOW.COM - Long lost brother of John Chow? The www version of kevinchow.com points to a active site.
7. KK-INSURANCE.COM
8. MARKEL-INSURANCE.COM
9. MUSICAMINDS.COM
10. NIJKAMPADVIES.COM
11. REDCROSSHELP.NET - When I think of giving blood, Google you always cross my mind.
12. SERIESOFTUBES.INFO
13. SPECIALMARKETSINSURANCE.COM
14. UNTRACEDSERVER.COM

All of the domains listed here are hosted on Google’s personal servers.