Hope you all had a good week,

This has definitely been an exciting week all around. With a great session of Q&A here at The Net Fool where I gave out two free text links to the best question-askers of the day, the launch of my latest blogging masterpiece Bullish Bankers, and a “surprise” Google Pagerank update… there has certainly been a lot to talk about here.

I managed to rack up a massive 40 comments on the latest post about Pagerank. Proving once again the power of link love. My strategy was essentially to spam the blogosphere by making a huge list and linking each blog individually. Some would say that this is Pagerank suicide, but my PR 4 doesn’t seem to mind. Regardless, you can always get comments, traffic and exposure if you spread the love around! On that note, let’s hit on the best posts for the week ending July 26th 2008.

• Garry Conn - What Is A Viral Video?
• The Blog Entrepreneur - Quit Wasting Your Time With Directories
• Blog About Your Blog - Why Newsletters Are The Next Big Thing
• Zac Johnson - Affiliate Network Offer Sharing and Cutting Margins
• Stephan Miller - The Ultimate DoFollow Blog List

First and foremost, I promised Garry a link due to me skipping him on my PR post (hey man, your blog was down I swear!). Great article there about viral videos, which are always fun. Also, I was really impressed with Stephan Millar’s massive post about dofollow blogs. Those are those websites that get you a nice backlink every time you leave a comment, so I’d recommend checking that list out!

Stock Market
A ho-hum week in the stock market, with things closing out the Dow down 1.1% on a relatively steady week. Sentiment was flip-flopping all day, but some bad reports on housing along with some disappointing earnings misses from the likes of Boeing and Ford had things in a slump. I’m quietly pleased with the way things are coming along, as my core holdings Deere (NYSE: DE) and Apple (NYSE: AAPL) had some pretty good gains to speak of.

Despite all of the negativity, I do believe there are many areas for growth rearing their heads, namely in healthcare, tech and agriculture. Energy is kind of on standby as we wait for a more clear image of how earnings are coming along with oil dropping off to $124/barrel this week. Precious metals like gold and silver were down as well, which really puts me in a position where I feel like opening my arms to the likes of Yamana Gold (NYSE: AUY) and Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX). Healthcare is rocking everyone’s socks off right now with one of my favorite growth plays Intuitive Surgical (NYSE: ISRG) absolutely blowing away estimates late into the week.

If you need some investing help or want me to review your portfolio, please leave a comment or email me directly. I’d love to talk stocks and will definitely be more than willing to offer some suggestions.

Blogosphere

Again, most of the mindless rambling this week was centered around Pagerank updates, which definitely wiped away whatever anyone else happened to be talking about. The Top Affiliate Challenge completely died, which is probably why we haven’t heard much more from them. Also, not a lot of talk about the Blogging Idol competition, though people are apparently still duking it out for first place. At least I sucessfully got a cheater disqualified…. rant posts aren’t all that useless after all I suppose?

The Net Fool’s July Referral Extravaganza is still in play until the end of the month. There haven’t been a whole lot of entries, so if you want a free Flip Mino Camera… it’s going to be pretty easy to get one if you refer your friends, eh? We’re waiting for someone to step up and get people to subscribe to my blog through the official request form found on the contest page. It’s an easy way to win a $200 camera courtesy of The Net Fool dot com and Market Leverage, so get on it!

The Week In Focus
This week is going to be boring so don’t bother coming by this blog….

Actually, in all seriousness, I’ve got a lot planned in the way of posting for this week. I’m trying to have you guys making money on the internet, so I plan on posting another lesson/technique that can make you hundreds… stay tuned for that. In addition, I’m fed up with the naysayers of the GPT industry, so I plan on releasing a post explaining for the last time why it is indeed a great way to make money on the internet. I’m in the giving mood, so perhaps I’ll give out a prize this week randomly as well too? I’ve hit a growth of over 100 subscribers in July already, so you guys have certainly done your part to make The Net Fool a success… time to return the favor!

-The Net Fool

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As many of you have probably heard by this point in time, the Q2 2008 Google Pagerank update has just concluded. Every few months, Google re-evaluates every website on the internet and places rankings on some of the best sites available. This ranking metric is very important for blogs for many reasons, including reader participation, advertising rates and industry reputation.

Don’t believe what you hear, Google Pagerank isn’t as worthless as people (with bad rankings) try to point out. The bottom line is that sometimes, the rankings are unjustifiably high or low. However, for the most part Google does a fantastic job presenting accurate representations of website popularity. TheNetFool.com held it’s PageRank 4 designation, which I believe is a 100% accurate rating for the time being based on statistics, quality and traffic. Despite the fact that I would prefer a PR 5 (wouldn’t we all), it’s important to look objectively at things to see what you are really worth in the eyes of a third party.

The Net Fool’s Pagerank “Fair Value” Rankings
Because of the constant ranting on how “unfair” Google’s Pagerank service is, I decided to pull generously from my RSS reader to see how other blogs in the “make money online” niche fared on the updating process. Below, you will find a list of 55 blogs, their new Pagerank as of July 26th 2008, and their The Net Fool “Fair Value” ranking.

Q2 2008 The Net Fool’s “Fair Value” Pagerank Analysis

The Results
Google often gets bad press on the Pagerank process, but I believe that a lot of this criticism is undeserved. As the results show, a lot of the blogs that represent the “make money online” niche are either appropriately valued or downright overvalued… getting more than they statistically deserve in my opinion.

• Appropriately Valued: 51% of blogs
• Overvalued: 12.7% of blogs
• Undervalued: 36.3% of blogs

I was overly critical of Pageranks in my own analysis, so most will actually find more than 51% of blogs to be accurately represented by the recent Pagerank update. At any rate, a clear majority (63.7%) should have no cause for concern, but it is the rough one-third of blogs that is publishing the negative press that we have all come to know and love.

The Verdict
Google does in fact to an impressive job in accurately portraying a website’s overall popularity and traffic strength. Many webmasters feel that they deserve better rankings, but lack the link juice from upper-tier blogs to get them the reputation that they need to obtain higher rankings. Furthermore, many “undervalued” blogs simply haven’t been around enough for Google to honestly justify a high PR for the website.

Bottom Line: Hopefully, this sample pool of websites is large enough to get an accurate representation of the Google Pagerank process… as I feel it does. All this weekend, be prepared to hear all of the Pagerank “horror stories” that are out there. Just don’t forget that many bloggers post on impulse rather than rationality, and this case study clearly favors Google as the results lean toward appropriate or generous valuations. Sure, there are a few websites that Google has totally botched… but you need to expect that to happen if they are analyzing so many pages!

-The Net Fool

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If you keep up with the news at The Net Fool, you have probably heard me hinting at a new blog that I have had under wraps for about one month. This project has really been time consuming, and now that it is completed… it is going to unlock a LOT of time to doing what I do best on theNetFool.com.

Announcing the release of Bullish Bankers!

Bullish Bankers is a stock market collaboration owned by yours truly and operated with a bunch of my close friends from Penn State University. Most of these guys are also acting mutual fund managers with the Nittany Lion Fund, LLC. and really know there stuff about the stock market. We are essentially planning to be the next SeekingAlpha, TheStreet.com or TimothySykes in providing 100% free stock market analysis, opinion and research to the masses every day. Let’s have a look, shall we?

Why Bullish Bankers?
Okay so first things first, this website is basically a combination of two blogs. One that I had started, and one that my friend Santosh Sankar had planned. Since I already had the know-how to do this, we decided to collaborate and basically form one big stock market community. I am really interested in the stock market, but as you can see I am gradually shifting focus away from the markets here at theNetFool.com. Why? It simply doesn’t fit the best interests of my audience.

Now, I am going to keep with my spin on things here, informing you guys what is happening and probably still making the occasional stock market related article, but I feel that the bulk of information here is desired to be blogging tips, affiliate marketing, online entrepreneurship and making money in general… so that’s what I’m going to give you! Bullish Bankers is going to be a very large resource in my best estimates, as we already have a decent stock hold of posts. Eventually, we’ll probably be putting out 10-15 articles every single day with the sheer number of authors!

Bullish Bankers Features and Design
By now you are probably saying to yourself, wow… that is one good looking website. This one definitely took a lot of effort (like The Net Fool did), and I really wanted to make sure that everything looked as professional as possible. By the graciousness of Brian Gardener, we got a copy of his popular Revolution News theme absolutely free… which I extensively modified into what you see today. It took a LOT of editing, but it turned out great, and Brian’s theme is an awesome foundation to start from. It is fully based on the WordPress system, and even has a forum running phpBB that will go online shortly for an added level of user interaction.

Okay, so I have the website essentially divided into Equities (that’s all the stocks like Apple, Bank of America and Caterpillar that you know and love), Commodities (like crude oil, corn and gold), Market News (headlines from the economic world) and Economy (U.S. politics). Under equities, which is definitely our focus, we have it broken down neatly into each sector of the S&P 500 Index. This means that you can sort information by just Information Technology or Industrials stocks if you choose! If you are new to investing, we are throwing around investment ideas all the time here… so it would be worth your while to subscribe to our feed and get your free information.

Want To Help Spread The Word and Get A Free Text Link?
I’m looking to expand Bullish Bankers as far as I can from the get go. Knowing that a lot of you own blogs, I would be absolutely floored if you were to write up a post or review about BullishBankers.com. We are currently targeting the phrases “investing ideas,” “stock market trends,” “stock market analysis” and “stock market outlook” so if you write up a post (or blurb in another post) that is 350+ words and use one of those anchor terms to link back to http://www.bullishbankers.com, you’ll score yourself a free month long text link advertisement right here at The Net Fool. Please be sure you have at least 50 subscribers to do this!

Bottom Line: I’m really excited about the prospects behind Bullish Bankers, and I hope your are too. If you are at all interested in the stock market, I really want to encourage you to subscribe to our feed. I’m going to be running some more promotions soon to encourage you all to link to the new blog… but if you act now and offer up a post, you’ll get a free text link and some favorable feedback from me. We all like to network, so if you want to be on my good side, here’s a great way to do it! Let me know what you think of the new blog! I’d love to hear some feedback (positive or negative).

Stay Bullish (Bankers) On The Net!
-The Net Fool

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Wrapping up the week ending July 19th… it’s time once again for some Sunday announcements and link love! A bit surprising this week as a lower than anticipated traffic showing. I think a lot of this was a shock wave from outages as I switched hosting. This was a pretty productive week overall, as I basically reloaded and am now ready to kick things back into high gear.

I’ve been really busy at work on my stock market blogging collaboration, and expect to release it to the public sometime early this week. I’ll be sure to let you guys know when that happens so you can artificially inflate my numbers subscribe and get the goods before anyone else. Before I get into that, let’s check out some of the best articles for the week.

• Enkay Blog - Are You Fast Enough?
• Garry Conn - Who is the #1 Make Money Online Guru?
• The Melvin Blog - The Polluted Make Money Online Niche
• Nicky Cakes - Get More From Google Images Traffic
• Zac Johnson - Was it as good for you as it was for .Me?

I really liked the article on Enkay Blog, which was a response to my post about switching hosting providers. Really good stuff where he compares the speed of tons of blogs. Garry Conn also had a cool post where he compares and contrasts a lot of the top internet gurus. Cool advice from Nicky Cakes about getting more traffic from Google Images as well… so check that out!

Stock Market
Big week this time around. Things were shaky Monday and Tuesday so it looked like the fates of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were pretty much sealed. But then, we had some of the biggest gains of the year Wednesday and Thursday before ending Friday on another upbeat note. Apparently, a lot of the banks were not hit as badly as was projected by Wall Street. Big names like J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup reported losses that were less than expected, and the entire financial sector was absolutely soaring.

Does this mean that a turnaround is finally imminent? I doubt it. However, it’s nice to see a long overdue bear market rally. There really wasn’t much driving this move upward other than a dramatic dive in commodities. The price of crude oil shot underneath $129 per barrel after extending well over $140 just a week ago. I see this collapse continuing down to $115 before continuing a climb upwards. We could be in for some more quick gains, but things are much too dicey to jump back in the game so soon.

Blogosphere
One of the biggest evens of the week (or month) was the release of the new “.ME” domain name extension TLD. With this, a lot of bloggers (including myself) tried to capture those elite blog names (love.me, kill.me, etc.) that would exist with the release of the new extension. Many people have called this launch an utter failure, as registrars like GoDaddy had trouble coping with the demand for the new names. I personally know a lot of people that thought they had successfully purchased names, only to receive messages from GoDaddy the next day saying that this wasn’t the case.

As I mentioned before, on of my bigger projects that has taken a lot of time away from this blog has been the building/updating of my most recent stock market blog. This is going to be a collaboration with me and 8 other Penn State University students… all interested and educated in the workings of the stock market… all posting constantly to turn this website into a resource for stock market information. With any luck, the launch will promise some good results and we’ll hit it big right off the bat. I’ll let you know more once it is released, as I don’t want to reveal things quite yet.

In addition to my latest blog project, I put out a great money making idea this week as promised. Basically, it is a really profitable method of turning affiliates into massive amounts of money. I received less of a reaction than expected, but I think that a lot of people are really overlooking the true power behind my method. If you use the technique I have prescribed, I can guarantee at least $300 profit with no downside possible as there is no investment needed.

The Week In Focus
Things have been rolling along quite well here at The Net Fool dot com. I am going to be spending a fair amount of time tweaking my latest web project, so I am going to have to be a bit more proactive in making sure that you guys get all the daily posts you are used to over here. But even with this in mind, I fully intend to put out yet another money making plan to get you guys making some extra cash on the internet.

There are a lot of techniques out there that are tucked away secretly, so I am open to posting something basic that is guaranteed to score some extra cash, or even something more advanced. In addition, I am considering running a second round of questions and answers here so that you guys can get some more information out in the open. Keep checking back for more!

Stay Bullish on the Net!
-The Net Fool

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If you’ve been noticing some downtime over the past 24 hours… this was because I was in the process of transferring theNetFool.com over to a brand new server hosted by Host Gator. The deal that I received was really great, so if anyone else is looking for a turbo-boost of your own… shoot me an email and I’ll set you up with a deal!

I want to thank a lot of you for sending me instant messages. I know it might be annoying to get messages saying “hey, your website is down” every ten minutes… but it’s a true testament in my opinion of how well-run this site has become. User interactivity drives blogs, so I’m really stoked that you guys are so interested in the website’s performance. The comments-per-post ratio speaks for itself.

The Results
From my old hosting with LVCS.net, I really wasn’t optimized very much at all. The hosting package was unbeatable thanks to a personal relationship with the administrator, Ed Carpenter (my hero), but it was time to move on when I saw that my average load time was well over 3 seconds. After weighing my options, I decided to go with Host Gator to drop a few hundred dollars on because they offered superior customer service, already service over 1 million other websites and came at a steep discount to competition. Not only that, but they will be providing a 100mbps connection speed. That’s a heck of a lot faster than my old guys!

As you well know, loading time is one of the most important factors of your overall performance and traffic. If you have a decent web hosting account already and are just looking to speed things along, why not check out my post on how to speed up your blog or website? When it comes down to it, sometimes it pays to have a premium hosting account with an industry leader. Now that my loading time is pinned under 1 second (0.83 seconds on my test run), I’m confident that I made the right move.

Enjoy the faster loading times!

WordPress 2.6 Is Released!
As long as I was going through the painstaking process of transferring my blog from one host to another, I figured I mine as well check out the latest release of WordPress. WordPress 2.6 was released just a day or two again, so it’s fresh out of the box, and I highly recommend everyone who is running a website based on the platform to upgrade as soon as possible.

I haven’t had a chance to look through all the improvements yet, but it is all drawn out quite nicely on the official WordPress.org announcement page. From what I can see, it makes things a lot easier to organize. For example, I noticed that all of the plugins I have installed are now separated into two sections: active and inactive. This may sound ordinary, but its a great help when you are running 10, 20 or more plugins and things get crammed together. There is also now a live display of your comments and a lot more statistics.

The best feature I know of is the new word count. No more guessing on how long your posts are, or having to transfer things over to another word editor just to find out, it’s all embedded right in the editing software and updates while you go along… cool! What’s cooler is the new image uploading tool. This may have existed in 2.5, so I’m not going to claim it’s 2.6-specific, but I just noticed the sleek dynamic design and I gotta say I absolutely love it!

With some “stronger, better & faster” versions of the WYSIWYG editors, config pages and other management tools, this is actually a bigger step up from 2.5 than the one-tenth of a point would have you believe.

Now that things are all set up, I’m looking forward to some solid posts. I already have an awesome money-making technique in the books that I am working on getting out to the public, and I will be announcing the process for the quick-and-simple Flip Mino giveaway tomorrow. Three cheers to Host Gator for a successful server switch at top-notch speeds. Stay tuned for the contest post, one killer money-making scheme with no risk of loss or saturation and stay bullish on the net!

-The Net Fool

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