Here is a wierd story from CNN Money that also reveals a good lesson on PR.

McCoy is CEO of LaserMonks.com, an Internet retailer that sells discounted printer cartridges and other office supplies. Customers include individuals and churches, along with giants such as Morgan Stanley and the U.S. Forest Service. It’s a lucrative business. Sales have risen from $2,000 in 2002, the company’s first full year of operation, to around $2.5 million in 2005.

Having trouble getting coverage from your press releases? Does your e-commerce business (or website) have a good story behind the person who runs it? Who plays as much of a role as what in what stories get reported in the news.

I have seen a lot of questions raised on various forums about buying advertising in e-mail newsletters. MarketingSherpa recently published an excellent article on how to evaluate newsletter advertising purchases.
The only eyeballs you’re buying access to are the ones that bother to open the newsletter.. Plus, many recipients only open issues for handful of seconds to scan the newsletter or just the top headline. Your ad may get a microsecond’s attention if any at all.

How do you find the newsletters in the first place? Take a look at the major sites in the niche(s) you want to target. Many have e-mail newsletters. Google is your friend.

Despite all of the heat Myspace is under right now, Viacom wants to get in on the action too.

Viacom is planning to get into the social networking game, the company announced this week…Viacom did not lay out exactly how it would replicate its rival’s success with MySpace.com, which News Corp. purchased last year for almost US$600 million, but the company did make clear its intention to create its own corner of the Internet where teens and hobbyitsts could hang out and share information.

If you have not checked it out already, stop by Chris’s new blog on WebsitePublisher.net. Be sure to let as many people as you can know about this, because undoubtedly there are going to be a lot of disspointed Sitepoint readers who will not know where he went.

Not everyone thinks the same way I do, but this is the way I thought when I was an employee: every dollar I made was an exchange for a part of my life. That meant saving a few dollars here and there was important. It was worth getting upset if I was over charged $100 because that was almost a whole day of my life gone.

As a business owner and entrepreneur I see things very differently now. First, I enjoy what I am doing. A day of work is something to look forward to. That alone makes all of the difference. The second reason is that I see money differently too. I’ve realised just how wasteful obsessing over money is. The time spent counting every last penny and accounting for every dollar spent could be put to use doing something that not only earns many multiples of that back but also has a positive impact on other people’s lives.

The turning point for me came a few years back when reading The Motley Fool. I was looking for a way to live the lifestyle I wanted on my small income and still have money to invest. I was browsing through a section on their forums called something like living cheap. After reading posts about pinching pennies by eating dirt cheap meals (that were incredibly unbalanced, which I know because my mom was a nutritionist) I realised just how lame and backwords these ideas were.

Now there is nothing wrong with careful spending to finance the start up of your business or sleeping on the kitchen floor of a studio apartment for a year or two in the early stages of entrepreneurship, but nickle and diming for 30 years of your life in order to live semi-comfortably after you retire is simply a waste of your life.

I do this because I want to do it. I like going to bed knowing that I am making money as I sleep. Its even better when I realise how much of a pain in the ass earning a measly couple of dollars took before all of this. Even better in the web publishing business is knowing how many thousands and thousands of people are seeing your work every single day.

So why would I want to work for someone else?

Long time & popular Sitepointer Chris Beasly, aka aspen, has had his blog killed off over at Sitepoint and  has had his moderator privialeges revoked. Ironically, the traffic at his own forum at websitepubilsher.net has increased dramatically thanks to this situation. Despite the popularity of his Sitepoint blog, Sitepoint has decided to move in a “new direction.” What direction that is, they haven’t revealed yet.