We had a pretty good turnout for the third Q&A session run here on theNetFool.com. And now it’s time to get all of your questions answered! As promised, everyone who asked a question within the allotted time slot will be on the receiving end of a free link back in the answer replies. In addition, the best three questions (totally my opinion) are going to get access to my $15 premium eBook that can show you how to make money by writing effective material on the internet.

Danny from LinkersBlog.com asked:
“How many copies of ebook-rich have you sold?”

Well Danny, to be quite honest I do not track the total number of books I have sold since half go through my automated system and half go straight to my PayPal account. As far as a rough guess, I have sold about 50 copies of the book to date. Its been especially useful to give away as a prize in the competitions I run here as an added incentive though… so it’s definitely served its purpose.

Ryan from SmarterWealth.net asked:
“What is your number one affiliate marketing program? (IE: Ebay, Amazon, etc.)”

This is, in fact, a question that I do get answered a lot. In reality, I am not much of an affiliate marketer. I am the guy who goes around promoting different networks and trying my hand at some more simple offers… but I don’t even take in $100 a month in internet marketing. Simply put, it’s something that I am interested in, but not an active participant.

Don’t be taken aback, I understand how everything works and how you can get more revenue from your campaigns… all that good stuff. Really, I am (and have been) far too busy as of late to seriously get into campaigning different programs. If I had to answer, I would say that my top aff. marketing platform would be HostGator… since I have done a good job selling out hosting to partners.

Melvin from MelvinBlog.com asked:
“What do you think of your current affiliate marketing challenge?”

Things haven’t panned out the way they have for my Affiliate Marketing contest, and I am honestly very shocked that the turnout has been so poor. My basic thinking behind this is that everyone is already signed up to alternative referrers already. Market Leverage does a heck of a job promoting their company around the internet, and it is very hard to pick up any “super affiliate” that will earn you $1000s by waving a Nintendo Wii in their face.

Harry from TranHarry.com asked:
“What effect does the current economic crisis have on advertisers and the publishers ability to remain profitably sustainable in online marketing?”

Nobody on the online universe seems to know or care about the economic crisis, and this will be their downfall. The credit crunch is now internationally spread, and it will be effecting all industries for the considerable future. Google has already seen their earnings crunch effect the amount of advertisers who are putting money into the system, and there are honestly WAY too many affiliate marketing companies to stay profitable.

We are going to see online advertising companies cut their work force, and the entire industry is going to get more competitive. People will be less than willing to pass profits on to you, so all publishers will be feeling less profit margins on their internet marketing campaigns as we continue along. Again, this is a prediction and not necessarily truth. But I feel it is inevitable.

Nicole from GreatPricesHere.com asked:
“What is your take on Warren Buffet’s suggestion that we buy American stocks now?”

People put way too much trust into what Warren Buffett does. He might be a great investor, but as of now he is getting incredible deals on preferred shares of stock (not common stock like everyone else buys)… so his risk is a lot less than the individual investor trying to make some money in the markets. At any rate, I trust Buffet’s call to invest in American equities in 2008. Companies like General Electric and Goldman Sachs have fallen off the map, and don’t deserve to be so cheap. If you invest now you will make money in the long run… it just might be a bit too risky to jump in right now.

Yan from ThouShallBlog.com asked:
“Who is your biggest inspiration in blogging? and why do you usually share all your secrets?”

My biggest inspiration in blogging is probably John Chow. Let’s be honest, the man is good at what he does. If I could get my blog to the level that John Chow has his… I’d be quite satisfied, haha. On the subject of secret-sharing… I typically give everything away just because, well, I don’t care enough. People that horde everything for themselves are all concerned about keeping their profit margins high. I am only a marketer on the side, so my focus isn’t there. Because of this, I can share everything I learn without regret!

Ganesh from BlogSmartly.com asked:
“What should I do to increase my RSS count?”

Increasing your RSS count is one of the harder things to do when you are first starting out as a blogger. I would recommend going all out during your first few months of operating. This might be a pain, but by going around and commenting on other blogs every day, posting comments in related forums and making sure that your presence is felt you will eventually get your solid footing in the niche. My best advice is to never give up, because you WILL have a breakthrough sooner or later.

MomsCashBlog.com asked:
“Which is more important money or Page-rank?”

Money.

Sherry from NameSherry.com asked:
“How do I avoid spam comment when commenting?”

When you are commenting, you might get labeled as spam by Akismet (the most common spam filter) if one of the following applies to you: 1. You have been filtered as a spam comment before; 2. You have included a link somewhere in your comment; 3. You wrote a very long (75+ words) or a very short (>5 words) comment. That’s pretty much all the advice I can get you on that. You can actually email Akismet at their website and ask to be “white listed” if it is continuing to happen.

Emma from GettinPersonal.net asked:
“With the way the economy is going and the USA and the way it is effecting neighboring countries, what do you think will happen to blogging?”

“Blogging” itself is a pretty recession-proof industry. The one thing I would be concerned about is the possibility of lower ad revenues if you happen to maintain a for-profit blog. People spend less, you get less… that’s the bottom line. As far as blogging goes, you’ll be fine.

Shawn from theBrokenBox.net asked:
“How will each candidate affect the online income I make?”

Minimally. The effect you are going to see is in the taxes. Under the Obama campaign, you are going to see higher capital gains taxes on a good bit of your income. I’m actually not quite sure how this will play into online earnings… since a lot of what you make online is under the table and the IRS can’t really get a hand on the records very easily. John McCain will probably be keeping the taxation on your earnings more or less where they are now.

Simon from Otooo.com asked:
“How do you block an IP address from commenting?”

I have had some pretty annoying commentators here at theNetFool.com, people that post trash all day and it is clearly the same person time and time again. WordPress actually has blocking built right into the system. Log in to your Dashboard and head to “Settings” –> “Discussion” –> “Comment Blacklist” and enter the IP addresses you would like off your website!

Najat from MiniSiteSpot.com asked:
“Who are your favorite online money making gurus?”

My favorite online money making gurus are Derek from ClickConsultants.com, and Jonathan Volk from JonathanVolk.com. These guys both have pretty loyal blog readerships, and have a good amount of influence around the internet because of their talent.

Jackie from GetAngryWithMe.com asked:
“I’ve been reading a lot of posts lately that say micro-blogging sites like twitter are about to kill traditional blogs. What’s your take on that? And do you twitter yourself?”

Eh, I believe that micro-blogging has its place. It’s more of a medium for communication than anything else… and I doubt that they will ever replace the obvious function of blogs. Bloggers write to educate others around them and make the world a more opinionated place. Websites like Twitter simply help us bounce ideas off each other faster. And yes, I do Twitter!

Brad from BradBlogging.com asked:
“When internet marketing, do you suggest starting out small with smaller websites (via advertising) or going big with larger websites (via advertising)?”

When you go about internet marketing, you HAVE to start small. Too many people start out with big ideas and can’t contain themselves. I’ve wasted literally weeks of my life trying to do everything myself. The fact remains, you have to start with a set niche goal in order to dominate and profit in this business. Especially with internet marketing, you want to target a small niche… and over time expand outwards to a more profitable area.

We’re all done with the third Q&A session and I hope that you were all satisfied with the replies I gave. As I have said before, I can’t devote an entire post to every one of your questions. However, if you shoot me an email with anything extra… I wil lbe more than happy to give you a more personalized response to get you making money in a flash.

The winners (best three questions) of my eBook are:

• Jackie from GetAngryWithMe.com
• Harry Tran from TranHarry.com
• Yan from ThouShallBlog.com

Shoot me an email to claim your prize! And to the rest of you… thanks so much for participating. I hope that you all have a great week… and stay BULLISH on the net!

-The Net Fool

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Hey guys,

It’s been a busy few days for me as Penn State knocked off #9 Ohio State on Saturday Night NCAA College Football. We’re in good position to win out the season, going undefeated and earning a spot in the BCS National Championship game assuming that either the #1 Texas or #2 Alabama teams fall. So over here at Penn State… it’s pretty much football madness. Saturday night was one of the most memorable nights I have had, so I’d love to share a video with you guys of the street riots that broke out after the game. College kids do crazy stuff when they are excited, haha.

Youtube User-Submitted Riot Videos
Penn State Collegian Riot Videos

So as we get past my weekend, let’s hop into this weeks link love, eh? I mean, that’s what you came for after all! I found some cool new blogs that I have subscribed to this week, and one of them here is a first-timer in the Net Fool run-down. Here they are, the top five articles from the week ending October 25th, 2008:

• John Cow - How to Crack Into Google’s Servers and Find Gold
• 45n5.com - Google Adsense and Analytics Get Married
• Affiliate Confession - Checking Stats: Like Watching Concrete Dry
• Ian Fernando - Twitter: Find Quick Fast Niches for Quick Fast Cash
• Cash Tactics - Free PR6 Backlink from Apple.com

Some pretty cool tips and tricks were posted this week. One of the more interesting (to me) was John Cow’s Google SEO information on how to find profitable niches using their own tools. 45n5.com had a nice press release on how Adsense and Analytics are now paired together. Affiliate Confession wrote a funny editorial on how watching your stats is a waste of time. My buddy Ian wrote a neat trick that uses Twitter to find hot niches in the marketplace. Finally, Cash Tactics had a brilliant trick to get a free Pagerank 6 link back from Apple… a must read. Great stuff this week!

Stock Market Update
Things continued their downward spiral last week in the face of more bad news amid earnings season. A lot of companies are reporting earnings in the span of about 3 weeks, so this is going to continue this week. One thing is for sure, fundamentals no longer matter. The entire market is being driven based on feeling, not on actual “worth” as would have previously held true.

This weekend, a lot of countries around the world expressed interest in bailing out their financial systems. One of the bigger names here was Kuwait’s banking troubles, as cross-Gulf regions move to rescue their own financial institutions… no longer able to rely on oil-rich land. Credit is on lock-down and nobody can get a loan, so getting any kind of free cash flow is becoming increasingly difficult.

As of today, the U.S. Fed Reserve has begun what is effectively “phase one” of the bailout plan. Dozens of American companies signed up just last week to be able to sell their short-term commercial paper ot the Fed, who has effectively pledged to buy it up at a cheap cheap cheap interest rate. You can think of commercial paper as an “IOU” of sorts, it doesn’t need to be more confusing than that. The key here is that we will get some more liquidity as the government takes some risky debt off of many company’s books.

Blogosphere Update
Big scandal came into view this week with CPA Empire. Apparently, these guys were “shaving leads” from one of their affiliate clients. This is basically when the manager (CPA Empire) is withholding profit from the customer in an attempt to juice their own numbers… effectively stealing money from their client. This was posted on WickedFire.com and was then deleted from the forum once debate got to a climax. Following this, a proof video was posted to YouTube.com. Note: The video was just removed as well

If CPA Empire was really screwing one of their clients out of his/her hard earned money, this is a huge problem that could severely hurt the internet marketing business. I do NOT have an account with CPA Empire and have never recommended them here. I cannot say fully one way or the other if this is true, but at any rate it will damage their reputation.

I had a string of guest posts go out this week, and might even get another one or two out. Luckily for me, I actually hit with an article on JohnChow.com, which was better than I could have ever asked from random “would you like a guest post?” emails that i sent out with outsourced 500 word articles. Basically, I picked up a bunch of lasting backlinks for about $3 a pop… nice. I’ll get you guys a bigger report back on this in the near future.

The Week In Focus
This week is going to be rough as I have an exam and a lot of meetings set up to take place. However, I do have a lot of posts and case studys that are in the mix. Essentially, at this point I am building up draft posts to go out. Of course, I’ll be doing the response post to my Q&A session that was held last week… and announcing the winners to that.

The Net Fool’s October Spectacular is still in full force and anyone can enter! Get a free Nintendo Wii and more just by checking out the original contest thread. It’s one of the easiest contests run so far, so it is definitely within your power to win this thing!

That’s it for this week, stay bullish on the net!
-The Net Fool

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Time to break out the Q&A session… that’s the big numero tres!

I haven’t done this in a while, and with the amount of questions that I get about blogging, making money and even stocks and bonds, I feel like making a separate post to address these common questions is the way to go. Want to know what I know? Ask a question and find out your answer here.

Every Question Gets A Free Backlink!
One of the biggest pluses to the question and answer sessions that I run over here at theNetFool.com is that I take the questions and answer them in a separate post. In these posts, I’ll list your website or blog and give you a free link back. This means you are scoring a completely free PageRank 3 link back to your website and some potential traffic flow, that’s probably the easiest link back you’ll ever get!

Naturally, if you’d like to remain anonymous, that’s not a problem either. If you don’t specify your website in the comment area… I promise not to link back and potentially give you some unwanted views.

Question Suggestions and Ideas
Since I’ve run two Q&A sessions in the past, I generate a lot of buzz and have been getting more and more questions to answer each time I do this. Because of the high demand, I am going to have to ask that you limit yourself to one question. If you ask two, I’ll simply pick the one I feel would be more beneficial to the rest of the readers to answer. Again, you can always email me directly anything specific.

I am in the business of blogging, making money online, affiliate marketing and equity investing. As such, you could really ask anything from “what are your favorite names in the tech business?” to “which affiliate network is your favorite, and why?” I’m not saying I’m obligated to answer you on everything (haha), but I usually share all my secrets unlike 100% of other bloggers that selfishly give you half-tips to keep their competitive border. I like to shake things up, so feel free to ask whatever is on your mind.

Since we are so near to the U.S. Presidential election, I will allow you to ask questions form this domain as well as I know a good deal about each candidate. Just know that if you ask a question in this testy area, you are going to get a very bi-partisan answer because I’m not trying to twist your mind one way or the other as the media tends to do (e.g. “Sarah Palin buys $100k of clothing” or “Barack Obama removes American flag from private jet”).

Here’s a list of categories to get you thinking:

• Blogging
• Making Money Online
• Internet Marketing
• Affiliate Programs
• Investing Research
• Monetization
• What I’ve Learned
• Economic Theory

Three Lucky Winners Get A Copy of My eBook!
I like a good question, so if I feel that yours is one of the top three asked you’ll get a free copy of my popular eBook “Work Smart, Get Rich!”… which is available through Ebook-Rich.com. No, this isn’t a random selection because the world is not a “fair” place, haha. It’s going to be totally based on what I feel constitutes a more effective question… but shouldn’t discount anyone else’s comment either. My eBook retails at $15, so this should be a fun little incentive (as well as the free backlink automatically included) to spur some conversation.

Comment Below With Your Question
Ends Saturday at 2:00pm EST

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A few days ago, I wrote part 3 of my series about optimizing keywords for Google search engine rankings. Now that we are into the marketing portion of that lesson, it’s important to learn the most effective means to get the word out about your blog, or to market your keyword phrase.

I originally listed “guest posts” as one of the best ways to start your “friendly” marketing campaign… essentially the opposite of what is referred to as “bum” marketing. As this original thesis holds true, I have found that if you are working on a low budget (as most upstart bloggers are), you need a way to get the maximum amount of traffic and link juice pointed toward your blog, with as little cash flow involved. The solution is guest posts… so let’s give you the Net Fool’s Marketing Method!

Understanding the Costs

Let’s have a look at some of the standard costs of marketing. Usually, big corporations and partnerships have no problem opening up their wallet for some high-quality traditional advertising. Banner ads, text link ads, paid reviews and full out partnerships. However, if you are just working on your own and don’t really have the capital to spend across the competitive landscape… I would recommend that you try to focus more on the cheaper alternatives.

The funny thing here is that free advertising can be just as effective as paid advertising. Let’s focus on guest posts v. paid reviews today. If you pay a blogger to do a review, it is going to cost upwards of $100 for a quality website… sometimes more like $500. This is a hefty price tag for 24 hours of spotlight, isn’t it? What’s more is the in today’s world, people like to look past paid reviews and consider them misleading right off the bat! On the other hand, you could write a guest post for a blogger to fill in for them on a day they don’t want to write for FREE. You may not get the same level of exposure, but you’ll get yourself a link in the first paragraph pointing back to your website (and boosting your SEO) that can drive some serious traffic and subscribers your way. Sounds good right?

Capitalizing on the Marketing Spread

If you are anything like me, you won’t want to be sitting in your room all day writing out 500+ word articles just to be able to submit them to other websites for a guest post. This is something you could do once or twice, and you will probably never want to do again. So what I do is hire writers for me to do all the writing at around $3-$5 a pop. Well right now you might be thinking hey, I have no budget… how can I afford to pay someone else to do something that I could do myself!?

Over the past year, I have learned a lot about the true value of time. In the earlier stages of my blogging, I would attempt to do everything myself because I felt that if I could handle something, why would I pay another to do it? The problem with this is that some things just aren’t worth your time… and often writing articles can be that activity. You might be spending more, but you can also make more with your time!

With this in mind, would you rather pay $150 for a review on a high-quality blog, or $3 for a pre-written outsourced post that you re-format with your link in it and submit as a guest post for free? That’s pretty much the same exposure for $147 less! Multiplying this out, you could potentially just use a $150 advertising budget and use it all on guest posts… so you could get effective links placed on 50 blogs for the price of one!

Getting Your Game-Plan In Motion

So now that we understand how much cheaper guest posts are than paid reviews, let’s work on the exact method in what we are going to do here. Again, we are going to seek out a whole bunch of high-quality blogs that are located in our niche that we can potentially guest post on. Most bloggers are friendly and looking for filler, so this really isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

Once we have a list of bloggers that we think we can guest post on, we should get our articles together, eh? No blogger ever really reveals their best writers, and I don’t have a “go to” writer per se. However, you can find writers that put out excellent original content for $3-$5 per 500 words on the DigitalPoint Webmaster Forums. It’s pretty easy to find good people on that forum, so that’s where I would go for the best bang for your buck.

The key to successful guest posting is having high-quality, well-researched content that is 100% original and flows nicely. Lists of “top five” (or similar) are the norm for guest posts, as they keep things orderly and very social media friendly. I typically pay $3 an article with my articles, so this is your low-cost solution!

Once you have your articles, getting free advertising is as simple as re-writing a top section on each article that you get outsourced with a link back to your website. If you are targeting a keyword in Google, you can even link that term up as anchor text and you are on your way. Contact the bloggers you were interested in guest posting for… and send them your articles.

Remember: Never send the same article twice, we want to send everyone a unique article!

Bottom Line: This is an insanely profitable and low-cost marketing solution “for the rest of us.” By marketing the Net Fool way, you get insane cost savings every time! You can use this for as many or as few articles that you want… the choice is yours! Guest posts are perhaps the most effective marketing strategies that I have come across, and I fully encourage you to do the same.

-The Net Fool

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Hey guys, happy Sunday!

Time to kick off another week here at theNetFool.com with a round of Sunday Link Love to honor the best writers of the week. After Penn State railed Michigan in College Football 46-17, it’s been all laughs down here in Happy Valley. It was definitely a hectic week on Wall Street… with the S&P 500 Index recording both its single largest point gain on one day, and its single largest point loss on another day. A lot of mixed feelings around the economy followed the third and final U.S. Presidential Debate between candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. And in the blogging world, we had a couple cool things come out. But I’ll get to all that later… let’s get into that link love!

• Jim Kukral - Negativity Kills Success, Don’t Let It
• Blogging Tips - WordPress 2.7 Looks Gorgeous
• Thou Shall Blog - A to Z Blogging Guide for Beginners
• Desmond Blog - Never Underestimate Free Resources
• Garry Conn - Make Money Online Watching Infomercials

Jim Kukral fills us in with some mentally empowering material, calling for an end to negativity in your world. Blogging Tips helped unveil the new version of WordPress (2.7), and man… it looks GOOD. Thou Shall Blog put in some big effort in making an A-Z list of blogging, very nice work! Desmond blogged about the power of free stuff. As a student, free stuff is my lifeblood… so amen to that Desmond! Finally, Dr. Pain… AKA Garry Conn… wrote about making money watching infomercials, which was a pretty smart discovery!

Stock Market Update
Every week I come in here and talk about how crazy everything is, and every week we get the same insane movements in the stock market. I accurately predicted the short-term capitulation point early in the week, as Monday’s trading yielded the biggest up day in history up, with the market up 11.7%. However, this capitulation was short lived, and we ended the week down. Thursday’s trading may have been the most interesting yet, as we swung in a 9.5% range from negative to positive.

I don’t trust the markets and think things will continue to fall. The problem? Hedge funds. Basically, these big players have been liquidating their holdings… and should continue to do so. There are a lot of economics behind this, but essentially… credit strains and leveraged holdings are going to cause hedge funds to force-sell their shares to comply with new regulations of investment banks becoming bank-holding companies. No more leverage, no more fun. The jig is up on Wall Street for the time being.

People that are calling this a bottom I believe to be wrong. As always, if you are getting a tip… you should question that. If you are a new investor, or are trying to get in, I am recommending that you DON’T. Again, my target has been February of 2009 since who knows when… and I continue to think that I am correct in my logic. This is going to take a while to sort out… profits can be made in index shorts like the SIJ Industrials Double-Short ETF (my personal favorite) and the DXD ProShares UltraShort.

The Net Fool’s October Spectacular Update
Rules have changed, and now everyone can partake in The Net Fool’s October Spectacular. If you’d like to win a Nintendo Wii or other cool prizes, you should sign up and get active as a Market Leverage referral to beat out the competition. Whichever affiliate makes the most money from now until November 15th will take a prize, and there’s a lot you can win. Even if you aren’t my referral, you can get in the contest by reading the contest details and emailing Dina. The leader has less than $30, so winning is EASY!

Blogosphere Update
Alright, so nothing major happened this week on the blogosphere. One cool event that I experienced first hand was the first ever radio show done by Derek from Click Consultants. This guy makes more in a month than most make in a year from his computer, so it’s definitely one to check out! Heck, I even called in and offered my two cents to spur some conversation, so a good time.

As the U.S. Presidential election approaches, I want to encourage all of you to vote responsibly and feel free to ask me any questions you might have for a bi-partisan answer. I know and understand both sides of the debate, so it really frustrates me when I see mindless garbage like a recent Sarah Palin post on TheGermz.com. I unsubscribed from his blog as a result. Seriously folks, there is a difference between polite debate and mindless bashing.

Back into action, I wanted to mention a friend of mine’s eBook, Ryan McLean. The author of SmarterWealth.net has come out with a nice and short eBook called “Make Money Commenting” and he couldn’t quite afford to purchase a review here, so I gave him a free plug! My buddy Tyler Cruz had a pretty funny (and generous) cash giveaway from the Market Leverage “Cashinator” prize he won at a conference.

The Week Ahead
Alright, so this week I’ll hopefully dive into part 4 of my series on Google Keyword SEO. In addition, I’ll add in a nice controversial posting and maybe push through a paid review! I’ve got a lot on the docket for this week, so let’s see how things turn out. I’m making a BUY recommendation for Emerson Electric (NYSE: EMR) in the NLF Mutual Fund I help manage, so that may occupy my time from Monday-Wednesday. Other than that, it’s back to work… and time to turn time into cash!

-The Net Fool

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