Jim’s posting on time this week?!?
Impossible… YES! And it’s Sunday…
…so here comes some LINK LOVE!

It’s that time of the week again, and time to recap what has happened and what is to come. I had a busy week from the start, as a contest ended and a contest started. But not only that, the stock market (once again) crashed to smithereens in the face of the highest reading on the VIX (AKA, the “fear index”) in history. So people are scared now right? Well well well… looking like a mighty fine time to get some capitulation off our lows, at least temporarily.

“What’s this talk about the stock market Jim? Spare me the jargon, and get me some link love!”

Right right, sorry. Let’s get back on track. Here are five of the best articles that I came across this week, the week ending October 11th 2008, and a few reasons to read them. Things are getting hectic, but lets settle down and run through some link love!

Let’s kick it off with my man Big Ben, who wrote about making your own custom robots.txt. Making this file could prove an effective way to get Google to index your pages, so check it out! Chris Guthrie did a neat study where he compared blog earnings to number of RSS subscribers to see how they worked together. Uber Affiliate wrote a pretty informal post about how to bump up your affiliate marketing to the “next level.” I doubt he’ll show up to comment here (despite my efforts), so let’s just bombard him with links till he gives up, eh? One of my favorite marketers Ian Fernando gets in to MySpace advertising in a quick case study you should see. Finally, sweet Suite J gets into outsourcing your projects, and offers up some cool tips to boot. Great work this week guys, looking forward to more.

Stock Market Update
Ouch. Again. The good news this time around is that we had a nice reversal in the Dow Jones leading into the weekend… giving investors high spirits as we closed things out down just a percent and a half after falling more than 700 on Friday. In fact, the 1000-point spread between lows and highs was the largest in history! This just goes to show once again how volatile things are getting out there.

International turmoil is getting quite out of hand, and the American markets actually aren’t bad at all compared to the overseas exchanges. The dollar continued to rally (as did the Japanese Yen) in the face of a crashing market, which was quite funny. However, you have to consider how other markets are volatile. Since the U.S. Dollar is such a reliable currency, people are buying it hand over fist to maintain liquidity.

We got that international rate cut that we were looking for! Many central banks around the world lowered their rates (borrowing from bank-to-bank) in an attempt to ease credit concerns and increase buying/lending interest to fuel the globablized economy. The United States Federal Funds target is now at just 1.5%… though I feel it should be at 1% where Alan Greenspan (the former chair of the Federal Reserve) had them during the last crisis (9/11). Despite all this, the market sank that day. Fantastic. This pretty much describes the markets, eh? :razz:

What’s Happening ‘Round the Blogosphere?
As most of you know, I launched my October Spectacular contest where you can win a Nintendo Wii and a lot of other really cool things. Unfortunately, it seems that the market has been cornered and a lot of my readers are out in the cold. Because of this, I am in the process of re-negotiating terms. Perhaps I can change around the contest structure and get the rest of you on board to win one of these fabulous prizes.

What’s with all the irrelevant posts? I don’t want to name names… but there are so many people nowadays posting random stuff to their blogs… we’re talking politics, video games and poetry… that it begs the question. What were you thinking?! People like to justify these posts in the following way: “well I got a lot of traffic to those posts!” and that’s fantastic… except that random hits mean nothing. If you are running a blog for the sake of making money off it, you should go out and get a $6/hour job selling lemonade because it’s probably a better use of your time. Blogging is for leverage, not immediate profit. Therefore, unless you have visitors that are interested in your product… you aren’t getting sales. Bottom line. Your thoughts? :???:

A pretty slow week over all from the blogging world. It would appear that the online world is becoming a more and more attractive place to try and make money online after many people have lost their jobs or are trying to secure their finances. This pans out well for bloggers! If you still don’t own a blog, you are missing out. I can hook you up with a free Blog Domination Package if you are interested.

The Week Ahead
I had planned on posting a part three of my Keyword SEO series, but have been slacking. So, I am hopefully going to have that post out sometime this week. In addition, I’ve still got that controversial article to work on. I have the idea, I just need to sit down and knock it out! This should be a fun way to gauge just how serious bloggers are about their work… but enough hints for the day. I am planning on focusing down on the financial markets this week. I feel that there will be a BIG reversal this week, and I plan to use that to sell out my stakes and jump into some double-short ETFs, which is essentially betting on a market decline.

As always… stay bullish on the net!
-The Net Fool

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