One of the best books on marketing I had ever read is the famous “Obvious Adams”.  The book is basically trying to get you to notice the “Obvious” which is in front of you.  It is not hundreds of pages long or complex, it is a short book (it almost does not qualify as a book, more of a pamphlet) but anyone in business should give it a read at least once. 

I was surprised to see a copy of it now available in PDF.  Read it at:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2006/20060721003ob/20060721003ob.pdf

With the latest news that people may have harmful granite countertops and the public having a perception of danger, it does open a business opportunity for those that are quick enough to act.  Homeowners will be searching for people to test and maybe some to dispose of their countertops throughout the nation.  Typically, these will be more affluent homes allowing for premium fees.

Those that learn how to test countertops and possibly to dispose of them could earn quick money for a year or two.

News article about the perception of danger:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=5466066&page=1

Back in 1999, Jaclyn Easton published a book called "StrikingItRich.com".  The book detailed 23 dot com businesses that were making a hit at the turn of the century, before the dot com bust.

The book was an interesting read back then and just recently, I found it among my older books.  I thought it would be interesting to see how the businesses weathered the dot com bust.  Surprisingly, the ones I checked up on were still alive and well. 

Shame that cannot be said about the success of the book and it's site.  Currently, the StrikingItRich.com web site is up for sale.  Would have been great to had a multi-volume set showing the continued success of some of the original companies along with detailing the new successful companies that have come along.

Anyway, if you want to hear how some dot com businesses started around the turn of the century, you might pick up a copy of StrikingItRich.com.  Amazon has them used starting at $0.01.

There was another useful article on StartupNation that I would recommend everyone read.  The article points out how not only to make money now, but on into the future also, we should not forget the about the future:

http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9076/1/customer-magic-words.htm

Well, even if you are over the age of 20, or even way over the age of 20, this article at the Financial Post will still be inspiring.  It talks about server people who have had great success in a short about of time.  One person even starting at the age of 9 years old.

http://www.financialpost.com/story-printer.html?id=327828

Today, I was going over the idea of the shared income business structure.  My concern was to handle:

1. Dividing up the income
2. Figuring how to handle salaries when not enough has been received to pay all of them
3. Employees who no longer work for the company but still earn a share of residuals
4. Applying a factor based on the length of time a person was worked for the company, there should be some benefit time invested

I think I have resolved those issues, but it will require more thought at a later time.   Here is what I have so far:

The business profits will be divided up as:

10% - Charitable
10% - Rainy Day Fund
20% - Marketing
20% - Residual Fund
40% - Salaries - (Includes all expenses related to salaries)

While the plan does not allocate a large amount for marketing, some usage of the Rainy Day fund could be used when needed.

The 40% is divided up with a cap of $126,000.  If there is a surplus, it should move into the Residual Fund.  If there is not enough to meet payroll, the balance will be taken from the Residual fund (or Rainy Day fund if available).  If there still is not enough, the salaries will be less and the balance paid back from the Residual fund when available.

Every month a person works, they will accrue 100 Time Investment points (TIPs).  If there is not enough funds for a full salary, the TIPs will be factored in to ensure those with more TIPs receive more towards their full salary.

The primary purpose of the Residual Fund is to share the profits with those that no longer work at the company.  They still earn residual income up to 25% of the current Salary rate factored by the TIPs and the age of the company.  For example, if a worker is with the company for 10 years and the company is 10 years old, they would earn a share of the Residual Fund Income for that month (not off the balance of the fund) up to 25% of the current salary.  If they only worked five years, then they would receive 50% less as their TIPs are equal to 50% of the company's age.  They will not earn anything if there is a negative balance in the Residual Fund.

The focus is making sure everyone receives equal pay while employed and the possibliy for residual income for the rest of their life for their time invested.

Another aspect of this model, it allows people to be hired when there is not enough to pay the full salaries and pay them over the future from the Residual fund as long as the company stays a alive.  It would have to be clearly noted that the debt would be canceled if the business folds.  Additionally, if a person leaves with a balance owing on their salary, they would still receive payment for that balance from the Residual fund until paid in full (which would mean the Residual fund would carry a negative balance until they former employee(s) was paid in full.

I just spotted this article.  It is that Google is making about $1 per Interent user.  Here is the article:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/ archives/google_making_ 1dollar_per_user.php

I read an article at the money.cnn.com site about Kevin Ham who owns a over 300,000 domain names and is portfolio is worth over $300 million.  Most of that was built off of grabbing domains with mistyped names, those that people easily misspell. 

Another avenue he is used is making deals with countries to use their domain name extention such as ".cm" which belongs to the West African coutnry of Cameroon.  When someone makes a mistake and ends a domain name request with ".cm" instead of ".com", they are redirected to his site where the person is shown advertisements.  He gets a cut of the revenue and so does the country.

Now he is moving into building out sites.  He realizes there is far more money in developed sites than just the ad-clicks of the typo'ed sites.

You can read the interesting article at:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm

Want some extra cash locally?  Here is a nice grill that you can rent to others for parties or be the cook and sell your services:

This would surely be hot (no punn intended) for get togethers.  Feed around 100 people with this huge grill.  Made here in Southern Oregon! 

Check out the deals at their site at:

http://www.ironhorsebbq.com

It appears that Google is getting ready to show its teeth and start charging businesses to use Googles various apps.  Looks like the free ride is over and Google wants paid!  Wonder what the costs are going to be for email, chat, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, etc?  Shame they start free then go fee! 

Sure hope fees do not spread over to their web master tools!

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_07/b4021070.htm

Bill Gates talked about a new system that is coming offer not online another online payment system such as PayPal and Google Checkout, but it will also give the ability for Micropayments!

First, the system is going to allow for online commerce without credit card fees.  Just wait until that starts eating into the Visa & Mastercard revenues!  I see court battles ahead...

The most interesting part to me is the ability of micropayments, which many of us have been waiting years to come to light.  Microsoft has may have just the power to bring this to fruition!

What are micropayments?  Well, it is the abilty to charge small fees for products or services, such as small as a dime or even less.  In today's world, processing fees can cost as much as $0.25 minimum making small purchase impossible.  With micropayments it is not only possible, but can be quite profitable!

There is a vast array of avenues businesses can reap great revenue from micropayments.  Think of how much content is given away for free to website visitors simple to try generating advertisement revenue.  Now you will be able to charge a couple pennies here and there for your content and if it is popular content, bring in much more than you could have ever earned with advertisements.

Not only will it make a different to businesses, but it can help to change people's views to accepting fee based systems.  Not a lot of people want to spend several dollars online for content, but an article that costs them a few pennies to read, may just drag them in the door. 

Anyway, here is the article I spotted today:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/ articles/djf500/200701271224DOWJONESDJONLINE000323_ FORTUNE5.htm

 Some are suggesting the structure will be a point based where you purchase so many points and when your make purchases, those are in points.  Personally, I think this is the best way to handle online transactions for many reasons, but most importantly, you can break up the value down to to a fraction of a cent if you so wished. 

One thing I have found from point systems is that people do not quantify what they are spending as they have no real world value in points.  That is, if a person looks and the charge is 200 points, that does not sound like anything if they have 20,000 points available.  They do not seem to think that those 2,000 points cost them $20, but if you had the price listed as $2.00 on the same purchase many people may not make the purchase having a value to which they can relate.

This is one reason I plan to use a point system in my OurLocalArea.com site which will get a major upgrade this year.

Here is a link to a blog talking about the possible point system:

http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert /archive/2007/01/28/microsoft-to-open- points-micro-payment-framework.aspx

Getting indexed on Google and keeping up with the results is a bit time consuming.   The added a tool called "sitemaps" a while ago that makes it easier to point Google to your pages and now (or should be soon), MSN and Yahoo will be supporting the sitemaps.

This post is not so much on the sitemaps as it is on their new tools.  Simple add your sites to the following area:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once you sites are added and indexed, there is a host of information available to you.  When you click on your site in the grid, you get information of the last time Google crawled you site along with link to show you what pages are indexed on your site.  Also, there is a list of errors the Google search bot found while scanning your site.  This can be greatly helpful to figure out dead links you have on your site or those that are not being served to Google as they should.

There are tools such as:

Robot.txt Analysis:  shows how Google is viewing that file.  On one of my sites it was hindering the Googlebot due to a rule that Google ignores. 

Crawl Rate:  gives you information on how often and at what rate Google crawls your site.  It also has an option to slow down the bot if it is crawling your site too much.

Enhanced Image Search:  Here you can opt in to have images on your site included in the Google Image search section.

Then there is the "statistics" tab the "Page Analysis" can be pretty handy but the one I love the most is the "Query Stats" section. This gives you details about you positioning based on search keywords.  You might want to keep track of this!

Be sure to also check out their Analytics tool, easy to get going and no performance hit on your server:

http://www.google.com/analytics

Most people have heard of MySpace and over 140 million people have their own account.  Growth has been fast and at times crippling to their servers, but at the end of the day, they have still pushed through to become the most visited site on the Interent.

Read the store of that hard road and possibly learn some lessons to prevent the potholes in your road to success:

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp

There are tons of business sites out there trying to help the little guys, but there is one I have kept up with for a while now.  It is called Startup Nation and is a good source of ideas and helpful information.  Be sure to signup for their mailing list, it helps you to not miss something important.

Not only does the site have helpful information, it has become a small business community with a number of knowledgeable people in the forums giving quality advice to those in need.  Make it a point to signup and join the forums, it can be a valuable asset to your business!

http://www.startupnation.com

There is a new kid on the block to compete with companies such as PayPal (owned by eBay).  Google Checkout has launched, which allows a shopper to purchase items from websites that use Google Checkout without having to expose thier information to the sites.  Google is promoting this as the secure way to do online commerce.

They also have integration with Google Adwords so if you use this on your site and spend money with Google AdWords, you can process $10 worth of sales for free for each $1 your spend in AdWords.

Bottom line is mostly, 2% of sale + $0.20 transaction fee.  This can still add up to quite a bit!

https://checkout.google.com/sell?promo=sbop