I’ve blogged about webmaster stuff for the past week or so and thought today would be a good time to take a break and touch on some big news in the business world. If any of you follow the stock market you ahve most likely heard the news that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit an all time high. It has literally been going up and up since the depression ended in the early 1940’s. Just take a look at this graph at Yahoo Finance.

Interestingly enough, the NASDAQ Composite has yet to rise above pre-911 levels, although, it has been going up slowly but surely since around 2003. Check out this graph for a visual example.

In the web industry it can sometimes be hard to get the traffic that you desire. This is called normal life. It can sometimes feel like your advertising dollars are just a drop in the ocean compared to other people’s campaigns. There is a solution to this, however. It is called viral and geurilla marketing. How do these types of marketing work? Well, first of all there is the ripple effect. A drop in the ocean doesn’t have to stop once the waves from the big boys crash through. All it takes is some creative thinking, some free time, and a venue.

There are a lot of people who want to get into the web for profit game. The big question a lot of people have up front is what type of site makes the most money? While this is a valid question I think a more important question is which type of site is best for a “newbie.”  There are many advantages and disadvantages with each type of website. For example, forums rely almost 100% on user generated content, blogs require a constant commitment to writing new material, and article sites require a way to constantly have new material written.

When it comes to making money online, two very popular methods are through affiliate marketing and pay per click ads. When it comes to marketing PPC ads I almost always consider this MFA (Made For Adsense). If you are driving traffic to a useless site with the intent of driving higher click rates then you are running a MFA site. MFA is borderline “black-hat” marketing and is not technically allowed by Google.

As for affiliate marketing, this is something entirely different. Affiliate marketing companies such as Commission Junction or Azoogle allow you to promote CPA (Cost Per Action) ads to your users. With CPA ads you are only paid if a click on your ad results in an action such as a purchase, a signup, a lead, etc. One popular affiliate program I am a publisher for is eBay. With eBay I receive a percentage of eBay’s profit at the end of a sale if the winning bidder was referred to eBay through one of my ads. There are also other ways to make money with that program but that is the basic payment structure. CPA and affiliate based advertising setups are quickly becoming a popular alternative for PPC. Advertisers are sick of having their money wasted on click fraud and other forms of PPC abuse including false keyword targeting, MFA pages, etc.

In business news it seems like everybody is talking about the recent financial numbers made public about Yahoo and Google. It seems as if Google has taken an incredible chunk of the market share from it’s #1 competitor Yahoo. Google’s first quarter revenue was $3.66 billion dollars while Yahoo’s was only $1.67 billion. I say “only”, but even so, Yahoo’s revenue came in at less than HALF of what Google has raked in thus far in 2007.

This leads me to do some thinking about the two search engine giants (Ok maybe there is just one giant now, but you know what I mean). Yahoo and MSN were the top two search engines up until the late 90’s. In 1999 that began to change with the arrival of Google onto the scene. Google’s homepage was bland, yet eye-catching. It provided users with a quick and easy search form without having to read the latest news headlines, weather reports, and horoscopes. Best of all, Google offered users the convenience of searching ALL of the other popular search engines at once. The results from each were sorted and displayed in standard Google fashion. Google did not start out having it’s own algorithms, let alone massive data-centers. That all came later as more money came in. But what was Google really? At first glance some might think it was a search engine, which in fact it was. But, there was something far more worthwhile within Google that even Yahoo did not catch on to until years later. Google was building what would soon become the largest advertising network on the internet. Enter AdWords and AdSense.

I was browsing the web today (as I am known to do on occasion) and came across yet another website with the familiar “This site is best viewed in IE” text displayed prominently. Don’t people realize that they are losing traffic and inevitably also losing money by limiting their visitor base? Here are my tips and suggestions for optimizing a website.

First, never EVER optimize for just Internet Explorer. FireFox popularity is growing at an exponential rate and FireFox users can no longer be ignored. I use FireFox myself and would never go back to IE. Most FF users feel the same. I suggest that every web admin have the latest version of FireFox installed if only to ensure that each website you make is fully compatible. If you have access to a Mac computer and the Safari browser then I also suggest making sure that your websites work there as well. Chances are if it works on IE and FF perfectly and passes XHTML validation then you are probably safe on most browsers. Now, onto XHTML validation.

I have had a YPN account since Yahoo first started their PPC service. At first I joined in with the crowd and was excited to be a part of the YPN beta launch. At first it seemed everybody was making a lot more money with YPN than with Adsense and everybody who was anybody seemed to be supporting the jump to YPN. Well it’s now been a few years and I have to say that I’ve gone back to Google for PPC publishing.

Yahoo promised all sorts of targeting and higher percentage payouts than Google. This all sounds nice when you hear it but even now Yahoo has not managed to perfect their targeting system. Based on some experimenting I did with Google and Yahoo on the same site (on alternating page loads) it turned out that Yahoo DOES in fact generate more money per click, but, the problem is that Adsense gets more clicks.

As you may know, I own several highly valuable domain names. I’ve been investing in domain names for a while now and have built a quality portfolio by now. I generally receive offers a few times a month from parties interested in purchasing one of my domains. Being an avid “domainer” myself I know exactly how the domain acquisition process normally works. I’ve purchased several highly valuable domain names directly from their owners simply by contacting them and asking for their asking price. Often times this works, but, occasionally the would be seller wants to play hardball. Today I had an interesting situation…

Here’s more of a personal finance post, but, hopefully it gets you thinking. I’ve always liked the convenience of credit cards. They are certainly easy to use and above all it’s nice to be able to spend money on “instant loan” instead of having to wait until payday. The idea is to pay off your card at the end of each month in order to avoid interest on your monthly balance, but, if you are like most people you will settle for some debt, then some more, until you realize one day that you are in trouble.

The average American household with at least one credit card owes a collective sum of approximately $9,000 according to the Federal Reserve’s 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances. This is a very unfortunate statistic. Now keep in mind that this is an average. There are certainly people with much less, however, there are also some people with a lot more. Eventually once you reach debt well into the thousands of dollars it becomes increasingly difficult to get out of debt.

Often times when a “newbie” wants to make some with a new website, he or she will be quick to throw up ads. In this day and age of affiliate programs it is very simple to quickly have access to publish all sorts of ads on your website from the start. There are a few problems that this will cause, however.

First of all, if you do not have daily traffic coming in already it will be hard to attract repeat visitors if your website is cluttered with ads. I definitely think that a few non-intrusive ads are fine, but anything ugly or annoying will almost 10 times out of 10 jinx your site from the get-go.