It’s SUNDAY!
Time for some link love and announcements.

I did a lot of what I am going to call “recon” work this week. Basically marketing and helping out my readers. I have talked extensively with a few people that came to me and I’m even helping a couple of people set up their own blogs, a service that I will be extending to all of you this week. Before I get into my progress, let’s wrap up the week with a set of the best articles from the week ending September 14, 2008.

Let’s talk briefly about these posts, eh? Internet Babel wrote up a great study on what exactly makes a big blogger, well, big! Jim Kukral gave a brief lecture on the finer points of making an effective press release. My buddy Mattaw (who keeps asking me for some link loving, haha) wrote up an awesome post about asking for a pay-raise on your affiliate campaigns… something I didn’t know you could do. Courtney Tuttle went back on his previous argument that content ISN’T king to say that content may be more important than he thought. Finally, Jason wrote up a nice answer to the question of buying traffic for your website that you should check out. Good stuff guys! :razz:

Stock Market Update
Wow, what a crazy week in the financial markets. The biggest news HAD to be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac getting taken over by the government. This is something I talked about last week, but had repercussions on the stock market over the entire week. This deal really fueled speculation that Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) might experience a similar deal as they have had major problems with liquidity and fell 77% on the week. They are currently looking for potential suitors, but have had some problems finding people that are interested. On similar news, Dow Jones component AIG fell over 45% for the week based on similar liquidity issues.

Things started out looking like another big week for the U.S. dollar; however, the rally in commodities and fear over hurricane Ike caused a reversal in the trend over the second half of the week. Even with this in mind, the European Union issued a soft economic outlook, which has really fueled the fire of the Euro’s demise against the dollar. Retail sales were bleaker than anticipated, major auto companies began a petition for loans from the government and financial stocks held on to a 0.8% gain on the week.

One thing that NOBODY is talking about is the strike at Boeing (NYSE: BA), which is absolutely hemorrhaging money form the industrial cycle. I am long Precision Castparts (NYSE: PCP), a company that supplies parts for their planes. However, the real pain is being felt in companies that support Boeing and have nearly 100% of their work sent to Boeing’s projects. Basically, this workers strike over salary and benefits is causing big damage to the markets that has been largely not reflected in the share prices of parts suppliers.

Blogosphere Updates
I thought that my post last week that dissed guest posting would slow the frequency of these posts, but they really kept coming in. I’m not so sure what it is, but while I only got out two posts this week I like to keep the quality and not waste your time with things you don’t want to hear just to adhere to a quota. At any rate, there were a lot of fantastic posts out this week. One that had me absolutely reeling was the first edition of John Cow TV, so definitely check that video post out.

I made a big purchase this week of 50 articles to flood my John McCain and Barack Obama blogs with some quality content. This was a bit of a gamble, but I want to see if it pays off for me. We’ll chalk this one up as an experiment if I don’t get my money’s worth, eh?

Nothing pressing in terms of major discrepancies or fights breaking out. Contests that are being run are currently a bit limited as Market Leverage isn’t giving out much in advance of their October events. However, The Net Fool’s Hosting Bonanza is still in high-gear as I am giving away some awesome free web hosting to the lucky winners.

The Week Ahead In Focus
I had some big success with the Best WordPress Plugins list that I put out on Wednesday. A lot of people enjoyed this and I had over 50 comments and track backs recorded. Not bad, eh? You can use lists like this if you are knowledgeable as I am in a particular area to demand a lot of link-backs to your blog and score a fair share of comments from your users. This is definitely a strategy that I have used and recommend.

This week I am planning on releasing a nice offer to get all of you that have blogs and need to improve them your much needed upgrades, as well as those new to the niche completely set up and educated. Penn State crushed Syracuse yesterday 55 to 13 in a classic route of a team that was honestly playing a bit out of their league. Irrelevant material? Maybe. But I dig Nittany Lion football and want to see my boys do well. The New York Giants will take the field tomorrow at 1pm against the St. Louis Rams in an away game that should be interesting after a long break. But enough about sports, this week I want to put out a money-making tip and start to guide you all through marketing your blogs as I am going to begin a keyword campaign for The Net Fool with the term “making money online.” I successfully ranked “investing ideas” number one for my stock market blog Bullish Bankers, and feel that after that I can set my sights higher after accomplishing this for an unranked and fresh website.

As much as I like to hate on those that over-focus on keyword optimization, it does give you a certain high to see your work land in the #1 spot on a search term for Google over websites like Forbes and Yahoo, so I am going to see if I can continue this success into the future. I am your average Joe with no experience in marketing, so this should be a good experiment. Let’s get to work… and stay bullish on the net!

-The Net Fool

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