I’ve been using PayPal for years. I know the in’s and out’s of it and haven’t really had much trouble with it for the most part. Just the other day I sold an item for $100. A few days later I noticed that the money had been put on a “Temporary Hold” due to being randomly flagged for investigation. The buyer has already received the product and now PayPal has decided to randomly investigate the transaction.

I have been a PayPal user for almost a decade and I have had countless transactions with other “Verified” PayPal users. I’ve never used PayPal for illegal or even questionable purposes and yet they have decided to put my account into a negative balance while they investigate my transaction? What a joke. One of my clients recently had his PayPal account locked and his funds frozen while PayPal investigates his recent transactions. Again, what a joke. I only use PayPal because it’s convenient, but lately I’ve been very annoyed with their practices. It’s no surprise that anti PayPal websites have been blowing off steam for years now. PayPal is out to protect themselves, not their loyal users. Otherwise why would they be taking our legitimately earned money on a whim?

Do you ever wonder if all of the different people selling e-books are full of it or not? After all, if they are making so much money why would they care about your $50 or $100? Sure they offer a money back guarantee, but, is this just a clever disguise of the whole rebate argument? Are they counting on a certain number of people to be too lazy to bother asking for a refund? All I know is that I am fairly certain that most of what you need to know to make money online is not exclusive to e-books.

If you’ve been around the SEO world for a while then you undoubtedly know what the “Google Sandbox” is. For those who are new to the game, I’ll explain briefly so you can follow along. The “sandbox” is where websites are filed away in Google when they are either A, brand new, or B, have very little unique content. When a website is in the sandbox it will not be displayed in Google search results. Webmasters often panic when their website is sandboxed. Often times they assume that their website was banned.

It’s hard to say for sure whether a website was banned or not, but, here are a few tips to get out of the sandbox. First of all, make sure that your site is in compliance with the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Then, add new unique content daily, if not hourly. Add as much new (unique is the keyword) content as you can. Get as many backlinks as you can. If Google bots show up on your website then you are most likely sandboxed, not banned. However if bots do not show up, there is a good chance that your site may have been banned. If your site has no PR that COULD also be a sign that you are banned.

A lot of people swear by AdSense. They make big checks and are definitely success stories on their own, but, is AdSense the end all for online advertising? Lately I’ve started to think that maybe AdSense is the lazy approach to making money online. Now I use AdSense and definitely am a believer in it, but, consider this. If somebody is willing to pay you say $1.00 per click are you the one making the best money or are they? Obviously they would not continue to pay a set amount per click unless they were successfully converting those clicks.

This just in. There are legitimate reasons to believe that Microsoft is eyeing purchasing Yahoo in the near future. Estimated sales values have been projected as high as $50 billion dollars. Yahoo’s stock rose after speculation of Microsoft’s interest became more widespread today. Personally I think this could be an incredible purchase for Microsoft. Yahoo is far superior to MSN in every way. My only worry is that if Microsoft is able to make this purchase I hope they would not try to re-brand yahoo. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Microsoft did buy Yahoo that Yahoo would cease to exist within a year. Instead it would be merged with the inferior MSN product.

There is a lot of talk about what is the best forum software. A lot of people start new forums and use free forums such as phpBB, Simple Machines, or any free hosted forums. Considering that most very good forum software only costs between $100 and $200, it seems that the very script that runs your site should be more important. $200 is nothing in the long run of a successful forum. Most forum admins will spend much more than that in the long run. The thing is that you have to ask yourself if you want to run your forum right from the start or if you want to cheat yourself and your members.

I’m not bashing free forum software. It’s definitely decent or people wouldn’t be using it. But think about all the forums that you have been to. Think of the biggest and the best. Sure there are a few that manage to become highly successful using just a free script, but, don’t kid yourself. You can bet your bottom dollar that they’ve spent a good deal of cash on advertising and promotions. Literally every highly successful forum that I am a member at runs vBulletin. A few off the top of my head: DigitalPoint, SitePoint, NamePros. Even RackSpace and ThePlanet both use vBulletin for their support forums.

If you read this blog regularly then you probably know that I am a Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway fan. I believe that Mr. Buffet is one of the smartest investors alive right now. As I’ve pointed out before, his Berkshire shares have gone up 30% in the past 2 years. That, my friends, is a nice return on your hard earned cash. Buffet will be holding his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha Nebraska this coming Saturday. Berkshire holds large percentages of several large companies including Coca-Cola, Dairy Queen, Pampered Chef, Geico, and Fruit of the Loom. All in all, Berkshire’s portfolio is spread out over $61.5 billion dollars worth of investments. Berkshire also owns over 60 companies on it’s own.

If you run forums then you probably have dealt with your fair share of spam. Here are some of the more sneaky approaches that people will try to steal your hard earned traffic. I’ve taken some time to prepare a small list of some of the more common methods that spammers are using lately to get their free plug.

1. The Prospective User:  These people will join your forums and make one or two posts. The post will be something like this. “Hello! Nice community you have here! I look forward to getting to know all of you! Hey have any of you ever bought anything from xyz-store.blah? I heard they have really good prices but I am worried about using my credit card online. Can you help me? Thanks!” Gullible admins might think that this person truly is asking about that website. The truth is 10 times out of 10, they own the website. This person might seem nice at first glance, but, I would ban and delete them on the spot. I do not believe in giving warnings to spammers. Obviously they have no reason to be here except to plug their stuff.

Every AdSense publisher has at one point or another been faced with the decision to make their ads stand out or blend into their website. I have always been a fan of blending my ads because it tends to look better, but lately I’ve been trying some other options and I have to say that I am starting to lean towards making my ads stand out more.

I think it’s a tricky thing to get your ads just right, but you’ll never find out if you never change them around and try new things. I have lately tried using some pastel type colors that don’t really look ugly, but also don’t blend in directly to my site.

I just read a really good article on Yahoo Finance. If you tend to err on the side of perfection from time to time, you could be wasting a lot of time. There is a big difference between good and great, a smaller difference between great and excellent, but, a much smaller difference between excellent and perfect. When it comes to making you work time worth your while, often times the extra work involved in order to achieve “perfection” is not worth the small increase in money (if any) that you will make.

I think most webmasters and/or designers can relate to perfectionism on at least one level. We like our work to look and function as good as possible, but often times it’s easy to get caught up in a single project when we could be moving onto the next. The Yahoo article mentioned above has some really good tips and pointers to where you should draw your lines, how close to perfect is still ok, and of course some reasons why it’s better to spend less time as opposed to extra time on any given project. It’s definitely worth a read over.