It’s Sunday, it’s the end of the week, and for the twentieth consecutive time it’s time… time for some link love! :D

This has been a busy week for sure, but I feel like I put out two solid posts in a row to compensate for an otherwise frantic week of work. I wound down my summer job with Aflac, and started prepping for college (I leave on Friday). I’m going to need to buckle down and get some big finances together… maybe I’ll rack up on some of Citigroup’s cheap sub-prime debt, eh? Okay, okay, enough economic jokes… let’s work through some funny, insightful and down-right clever posts (other than mine, of course) to wrap up the week ending August 16th, 2008.

I actually just stumbled across Net Strife today, and loved the post on purchasing freelance work. Zac Johnson had a really nice case study where he breaks down a “fitness” ad he ran on Facebook. Nicky Cakes came out with yet another amusing article. Da Blogger showed his best stuff with a how-to on writing paid posts that don’t make you seem like a jerk. Finally, The Germz brings up two really cool tricks to bump up your traffic in a jiffy. Great stuff that really had me thinking, so check them out!

Stock Market Update
We were up a nice 8% from the low hit on July 15th to start out the week, then reality started to set in. To be sure, this week was a consolidation rather than a reversal… which is actually a pretty bullish trends for the market. A “consolidation” period refers to a time when the markets trend sideways… up a bit now, down a bit then, and that’s just what we got with the S&P 500 Index up a massive 0.1% for the week. The real story for the week was the continued strength of the U.S. Dollar that dragged down commodity markets once again to the market’s cheers.

So what’s the deal with crude oil and other commodities? Really, there have been tons of bullish signs for natural gas and crude oil that would ordinarily send the price much much higher. However, people are sort of overlooking this as they continue to bet the currency markets (which interact and play into commodities). I think that this is still a strong market for oil and especially natural gas… so I made a BUY this week on Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK), a company I absolutely love and snagged just under $45/share. I still love this stock anywhere under $48, as well as Noble Corp. (NYSE: NE) under $52.

Blogosphere
What’s up with Feedburner?! Once again, their connection with Google’s RSS Reader cut out, dropping me temporarily underneath the 500-level a few days ago. Because of this, I need to run another 500 SUBSCRIBER PARTY!!!! …… just kidding, sorry. But check out what IM With Joe had to say about all this, a blogger that I continue to link but still hasn’t shown me the link love in return, which makes me sad. :(

Jason from The University Kid hyped his money making technique all week, a post that he locked except for people that went out to get subscribers and links for him. Smart idea, and the post was great so check it out if you can. Besides that, I was actually FEATURED on a “treasure hunt” that took place on WildTreasure.com. Basically, they take pictures from around the net… and if you can find them you win real money, great concept so check it out!

What’s up with all this garbage about how you have to jump ship on the “make money online” niche? I don’t see any problem with labeling myself an MMO blogger, while others use creative workarounds like “entrepreneur” and “affiliate” to try and suggest they aren’t in the same business as everyone else. The flurry of posts coming about this have me thinking “what exactly is bad with MMO?” Nothing. And that wraps up an important message from Jim himself. ;)

The Week In Focus
I’m going to do all that I can to get some creative posts up in a week that is going to be riddled with work leading up to my departure back to Penn State (among other things). I also have a web design project that I need to complete from start to finish in a few days, so that’s going to be rough. However, I am currently working on some linkbait pages to try and increase my Google Search Engine Rankings (SERPs)… so I’ll definitely get you guys a post on how you can increase your rankings along with me.

So keep checking back with The Net Fool dot com for some more material on how you can improve your own blog, how you can make some money on the internet, and an easy to understand explanation on what’s happening with the price of oil. Everyone’s talking about it, and most of them don’t understand how the industry works… so I want to get everyone educated to be informed voters, right?. Let’s hope for a rebound in natural gas prices so that I can make a lot of money! Stay BULLISH on the net!

-The Net Fool

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!