Foolish readers,

Happy Sunday! I’m writing this right now from sunny (and humid) Connecticut, enjoying a nice long weekend courtesy of the 4th of July. This week was a killer in many ways, but with the emergence of the Blogging Idol competition that I am half-heartedly supporting… let’s press on! :)

As always, I’m going to use today’s post to reiterate some of the best posts that I have found from the week ending July 5, 2008. With a lot of talk circulating around the blogging world as two major events have just recently launched… let’s get to the brighter spots and put our profits in the fast lane.

There were a lot of posts this week that were, well, redundant. Namely those circulating around the Top Affiliate Challenge (which I’ll get into later). These are what I feel are the “best of breed” selections for the week… and there’s definitely quite a lot to learn by looking into the five.

Stock Market
This week was my worst week to date, without a doubt. The stock market is looking more and more like a bear market, to the point that we have now officially crossed into bear market territory (-20% from old high). Sure, crossing into -20% territory technically shouldn’t be any more significant from being down 19%… but investors tend to take the symbolism a lot more dramatically than it should be. Because of this, the U.S. as well as international markets have been absolutely clobbered.

Fortunately for me, NVidia (NYSE: NVDA) decided to pre-announce lower than expected earnings… and were down over 30% on Thursday (I jest). Things could have been worse, as they were the smallest of my holdings. Yet this in combination with the rest of the market being down did a world of hurt to my finances. At this point, I strongly encourage all investors to hold/sell into November of 2008. I simply don’t see things picking up, and would ONLY recommend buying commodity-related stocks like oil drillers and mineral miners. Things surely are messy!

Blogosphere
The blogging world was definitely quite interesting this week. With the launch of two major projects, a lot of people are in a frenzy to put out good material… which is definitely a plus for all of us. The first project is called “Blogging Idol.” In this contest, about 80 bloggers (including myself) have signed up to try to boost RSS numbers more than anyone else. The prize is $1,500 from a few sponsors, and has really raised some eyebrows. If you haven’t subscribed to my feed, go ahead and do that to support me! The fact remains, I feel that too many people are using cut-throat methods that are borderline blackhat in order to artificially boost their numbers to win. I really don’t think this is fair, and it’s sort of self-defeating in my mind.

The second competition that went live this month was the much-hyped “Top Affiliate Challenge,” a contest with a dozen or so affiliate marketers in Nebraska, trying to make the most money to win. This contest is sponsored by Azoogle Ads, but has really turned into a joke. Everyone from the contest that I have talked to is unhappy being cornered in a rural environment (no offense to all you Nebraskans) with little to do than pour thousands of dollars into a contest that really isn’t going anywhere. First of all, bloggers are unhappy that the website loads slowly, to the point that it takes hours upon hours to load a simple 30 minute episode. Other than that, the rules and regulations are twisted, the camera work is poor, and the competition in general is boring and un-educational to say the least.

The Week In Focus
I really can’t do a whole lot of planning until I get back from Connecticut. As it happens, I am writing this on Saturday to launch on Sunday just to keep up :razz: . Despite the fact that I think the Blogging Idol competition is weak… I do want to give it a solid run, so I am going to give you all a few great money-making strategies this week. I know that a lot of you appreciated my “Speed Up Your Blog” post (18 comments!), so I may put up another useful post on another way that you can improve your website’s performance.

I would have loved to make this week a video post, but since I am away with no internet connection (using an internet cafe right now), that really isn’t very practical from my standpoint. Perhaps I’ll give a stock market run-down one day of the week. I know that a lot of that goes over many of your heads, but I like to simplify things for the blogging crew while satisfying my stock market junkies to keep everyone happy. Besides, the economy is the most important thing right now, and everyone should be somewhat educated on what is happening in the markets all over the world.

That’s all she wrote… stay bullish on the net!
-The Net Fool

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