Could it be when a group uses the threat of violence to illegally abduct and detain individuals who peacefully start businesses that compete with their own vice monopolies?

In other news, great opportunities ahead for internet entrepreneurs in Antigua and Barbuda who want to run a business without worrying about those pesky TM and copyright C&D letters.

Some people are wondering how a bad economy could affect internet publishing and affiliate marketing.

There is no doubt now that specific regions are being hit very hard by the unravelling sub prime lending market — as I write this. There is not much need to discuss possibilities or causes here. The business cycle is very real and it will happen several times throughout your life. Thats reality.

Here is what you need to know:

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Over the past 4 months or so I was considering dumping a grand or two into getting a kick ass new design, perhaps even hire an illustrator to give posts some life. So far, no actions have been taken.

Indecisiveness is typically not a good signal. Usually when I get an idea the ball is rolling before I go to sleep (and if not, it can do a better job than caffeine at keeping me awake.)

New blogs for this industry (lets just say making money online) are popping up daily. It wouldn’t be such a big deal except many of them are very good blogs.

So what could I do?

(I am now going to use the more option per Greywolf’s Wordpress SEO video suggestion)

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Nearly every entrepreneur at some point in their lifetime has a business partner. I was giving it some thought while driving today and decided to write my views of this sometimes controversial subject down.

1) A 50/50 business partnership should result in more than double profits. (Ok, you can’t really predict this.)

or

2) A business partner should serve a specific and needed function.

3) Low level tasks do not require a business partner. For example, a web designer should be an employee, not a partner. However, a highly skilled & competent programmer may be better as a partner than an employee.

These are basics. Many people new to running their own business want to jump in with a partner right from the beginning. There is no shortages of complaints and stories from owners unsatisfied with their partners performance. This is not unreasonable, if someone has control of half of your company they must be bringing a great deal of value with them.

Here are some specific things you should be looking for as it relates to small internet businesses:

1) Capital — not so important in the beginning. If you give someone 50% for $10,000 , if the time comes that you need to bring in VC money you will be looking at a complete loss of company control with just 1%.

2) Geographic location — Both the east coast an west coast are hot spots for internet business. Just the same, if you live outside the US a partner anywhere inside the US can bring great benefits.

3) Skillset — To me, a good internet business is made up of two backbones — marketing and programming. Succeed at both and you can move mountains. Like I said above, who the hell cares if someone can whip up html pages. Pay them a couple hundred bucks for some templates and move on. If you are a great programmer find a great marketer and vice versa.

4) Drive — They have to want to do it, and if they want to do it any less than you it just is not going to last.

In a business magazine or book I read this great advice: Partner on projects, not companies. With online business I believe this advice is worth its weight in gold.

You can partner with someone to develop a CMS, specialized metrics software, and so on, but you do not have to run the entire business together. Then, each partner can put in however much time, effort, capital, and knowledge and reap their own rewards appropriately.

I like this approach a lot. When a business partner is truely an entrepreneur they are going to be moving on to other things. If you partner on a project then there is no need to worry who will be answer support e-mails 3 years from now or filing the tax returns.

Business partners are not always needed. The most important lesson: never let them slow you down.

I am not very involved in the retail side of internet marketing, but I know many of my readers are.

A court case in 1911, Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. John D. Park & Sons Co., prevented manufacturers from forcing a retailer from selling a product at a minimum price. The case is now under challenge.

If this case were overturned it would allow manufacturers to cut out retailers who sell their products under a given price. Currently, if a manufacturer does this they can be liable for large sums of money. The case here involves a retailer who was awarded $1.2 million after the manufacturer cut them out for having a temporary sale.

From the Charleston Daily Mail —

“Basically, they want to get rid of discounters, particularly Internet discounters,” Cooper said. He added that if manufacturers’ actions must be challenged on a case-by-case basis, “the burden becomes immense.”

Those of you in the US have probably heard plenty about the collapsing sub prime loan market. I follow the global economy pretty closely myself, subscribe to the Economist, read economics books, and so on. No big suprise here; it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on in the housing market. Smart affiliate marketers were moving away from mortgage leads months ago.

Cheap credit simply drives up prices, increased prices make it harder for people to afford things. Thus interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages have become very popular. In the extremely hot markets, such as California, interest only was really the only option for the average wage earner to even be able to afford payments. Since housing prices had upward momentum this was not only acceptable but seen as a good idea.

Suprise, it turns out housing prices actually weren’t grossly undervalued and prices weren’t going to keep making double digit gains year after year. In fact, the fundamentals have flipped.

Now certain individuals in the United States government and special interest groups are up in arms over “predatory lending.” The complaint is that lenders were giving people home mortgage loans to essentially unqualified individuals. A direct quote from someone off CNN.com “…pushing of exotic loans on people of color, female-headed households, families with children, people with disabilities.” its a little wonky, but it gives you an idea what side of the room this predatorial worldview is coming from.

Since mortgage leads have been such a huge part of affiliate marketing and internet lead generation this is an important issue to many here. Suprising isn’t it how a “doomsday” scenario can suddenly appear in a very large industry overnight — just like we saw with gambling.

Regardless, let me get back to the point. What is predatory about this? Lets look at the reality:

1. Loaning money to someone who ends up not paying it back — who is the real loser, the borrower or the lender?

2. Is it predatory to deny a loan to someone, even if a second party is ready to hand over the money, because the government says so? (haven’t held their job long enough, make $100 a month less than required, etc.)?

3. What about the President’s ownership society? He certainly has bragged about high home ownership rates. Could he be a predator too?

4. What about Alan Greenspan dropping interest rates to the floor to bail out investors in a stock market bubble? The lower middle class with little to nothing invested in the stock market got nothing in return but rapidly inflating home prices. Not such a bad deal if they already owned. Not such a good deal for those who purchased a year or two ago. Hell, this guy even applauded sub-prime and exotic mortgages a few years ago. Could Alan Greenspan actually be the Predator-in-chief?

At the end of the day, the fact remains, investors have been gobbling up ultra-high risk loans for only a few percentage points extra gain. The government could just play hands off and lets these guys f*** themselves. Something tells me thats not quite what will happen.

Google Adwords has just launched a new beta service — Google Pay-Per-Action. This is going to have a huge impact on Adsense publishers as well as Adwords advertisers and perhaps even affiliate networks.

Directly from Google’s page: “publishers in the Google content network can choose to place your ads on their website. You’ll only pay when a user clicks on your ad, visits your site, and completes your desired action.”

I am curious about a few things. First, will the same rules apply to pay per action as Adsense? A big part of pushing affiliate marketing traffic is saying *click this link to sign up for free/enter your email/zip/etc.* Doing that to an Adsense unit is a big no-no. Second, could advertisers shave Google? Why not? It may be Google’s tracking code, but its on your website.

There is a lot of information coming out about this new advertising product. One thing we know is Adwords is adding a new text link ads format for these new CPA ads (man, thats got to be pissing the heck out of the guys over at text-link-ads.com; should have gotten a trademark.) You can read more on the official adwords blog, but basically it looks like publishers will be able to change both fonts, sizes, and colors. These are not hard text links, but the link units that will direct to the pay per action offers.

Diorex has some very strong words to say about the new Google CPA program, tieing it together with Google’s other data collection programs such as Google Checkout and Webmaster Central — “…would you want to share any of this data with your competitors, suppliers, partners, or anyone other than an accountant? Profit per sale, sales volume, average transaction size, conversion rate, or average lifetime value of a customer? I would consider all of these pretty darn proprietary, yet tens of thousands of publishers have handed this very data over to what could very well become your biggest competitor.”

Are you going to use Google Pay-Per-Action?

I was suprised to find detailed overviews of the Elite Retreat sessions being posted by Kris Jones at pepperjamBlog. There are domains of web sites owned Shoemoney as well as Aaron Wall listed in these posts. May be they have been revealed publicly before, but its news to me.

So far there is:

Day 1 - Shoemoney
Day 1 - Neil Patel
Day 1 - Aaron Wall
Day 2 - Darren Rowse

Day 2 - Lee Dodd

Back in July of 2006 I made a blog post about just how horrible Registerfly was. Yesterday ICANN announced Registerfly.com’s accredidation has been terminated, effective March 31st.

The story isn’t over yet, now ICANN has to figure out how to make sure the domains return to their rightful owners. Not an easy task when you are dealing with a company run by an alleged con artist and embezzler. I expect in a year or so this will make for a nice 10-page story in Wired magazine..

When you publish a content article on your web site there are several things you wish to achieve. If an article fails to do everything — meeting one or two goals is certainly a success.

1. Bring organic search engine traffic. I’m hardly a search engine optimization guru. I do know both incoming links and on-page optimization matter. Most people just can’t keep up with all the trends (let alone seperate reality from the flood of disinformation out there.) If you follow the SEO basics, avoid common pitfalls in how the site is contructed, and continue to bring in great links regularly, you have one thing left to think about: are people searching for it?

No matter how good of a search engine optimizer you are, if no one is searching the keyphrases your articles are optimized for, you won’t get any traffic. Using tools like Google Trends and Wordze, combined with auditing your own traffic logs, can help you get a damn good idea of what top key phrases people are looking for.

2. Bring your site incoming links and traffic. Just a few years ago, publishers pursued link exchanges and directory links obsessively. Today the key drivers to backlinks and direct traffic are social news sites (e.g. Digg) and blogs. When a link hits a major blog people follow the link and add it to hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of other web sites, forums, and blogs. This is what linkbait is all about.

Getting your links on these sites is a full time job. In the past I’ve had success getting links on the front page of places such as Slashdot. Its certainly a hit or miss game. You need to not only be familiar with what types of stories the editors and audience respond to, but also have the ability to get the story to stand out (there are different ways to do this, some may call it “gaming the system.”)

One of the best things you can do right now is closely watch articles that hit the front page of your niche’s blog, Digg, Netscape, Fark, wherever. You will notice patterns. Some patterns will carry through, others won’t. Here are a few examples that have stuck out to me:

-Lots of content. 10 pages? Great.
-Interactive content. Tools, live statistics, and free web applications attract lots of links.
-Unique & bizarre. When people are shocked, they can not resist telling their friends.
-Timely. Do you have a video game review web site? Make sure your review is out within hours of hitting the store shelves, not a week later.
-Understandable. Unless you are targeting a super-geeky site, the average person should be able to instantly know what the article is about. If its not clear from the headline alone, your already in trouble.

How much does quality matter? Perhaps it will vary between markets and niches. I’m seeing an awefully lot of so-so content getting hordes of links. The last thing you want to do is spend a month on a single article that flops. Writing sticky linkbait is a heck of a lot different than writing essays for college.

3. Make your site money. This is harder — but only when you do not have the traffic. Thus, it should be your final focus. Plastering your site with Adsense so you can make $4.50 a day is a waste of time. When you have a page ranking #1 on Google for a high-traffic term, then its time to split test with Adsense, YPN, and affiliate links. Until then, don’t plan on a Digging making you $10,000.

There are a lot of articles and blogs about affiliate marketing and Adsense optimization. When it comes to creating articles, focus on the content.

Where does content come from?

You can write it yourself, pay for it, or get it for free. If its free it should still be unique. Avoid those free article sites like the plague.

Writing content yourself isn’t all that bad — if you can write. When the words flow naturally it is pretty easy. Thats the way it is for my blog. Even then, you don’t want to be your site’s daily staff writer. If you have the time, you’d be better off launching another content site.

Paid article writing can be quite an adventure. Many, if not most, of the dirt cheap writers are simply rewriting someone else’s content. Besides being a poor business practice, most of this type content is lacking when it comes to spelling and gammar.

Depending how much money you are willing to sink in to your site, I suggest seeking out qualified professionals in your market to write your articles. The association alone can do wonders for the credibility of your site. In addition to making direct ad-sales easier, you may get more backlinks (perhaps from that individual’s own web site.)

Free articles are much easier to get once your web site has some standing. A large community base from your own forum is often the perfect place to get writers (free or paid.) The fact is those guys with hundreds or thousands of posts like to write. They are typing about the topic day after day. Why not put them to work?

Look at who is pulling in the links and who isn’t. Take these ideas and apply them to your own site. Trends change, different markets have different audiences. No one can give you an exact list saying — do this, this, and that, because there are just too many variables. The internet is transparent. The only advantage you can give yourself is testing out what you see other’s do, and then act on those results.