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