Websites Need To Be Visible In Searches

If you have an internet business or website, you simply need to have your site come up when someone does a search on your area of expertise.

It's nice to get direct traffic, and referrals from related sites but, the fact remains that today, most online users find content through searching on a site like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Having your site come up as a natural search result is ideal, but there are literally thousands of key words that relate to your business. Trying to generate content and links to get your site to rank naturally for all these terms is next to impossible and not a good use of your time.

These days, if you want to continually generate a stream of leads and / or sales, you need to use pay per click advertising. The advantage of this form of advertisement is that you only have to pay when someone clicks your ad to visit your website. So you don't have to pay for showing the ad to people who are so uninterested that they don't even click. In other words, you are getting somewhat targeted traffic.

With pay per click, you choose key words that someone interested in your product or service would search on, and then bid on the words. Depending on your bid, your ad will be shown at a certain position down the right side of the search results that are returned by the key word.

Succeeding with pay per click advertising can be tricky. It can be easy to spend more than what you generate in sales. That is why, if you go this route, you may want to hire a good search marketing company. They can help you with all phases of the pay per click campaign:

1. Choosing key words.

2. Setting bid prices.

3. Writing your ad copy.

4. Creating an appropriate landing page (the specific web page that someone clicking on your ad is taken to).

Using A Stop Loss With The Stock Trading Riches System

The Stock Trading Riches system is designed to take advantage of stocks that are down in price. Falling prices are our friend. That is why the basic system does not use a stop loss.

I think the system has enough of a safety net because we buy low, take profits, diversify, and can always replace stocks that are no longer fundamentally sound.

However, in my book, I have an optional stop loss rule because there are many people who feel uncomfortable buying a stock that is down.

I think a fundamental stop is much more valuable than a strict mechanical stop. Before you rebalance stocks that are down, take time to read up on them, to see if there are fundamental reasons you don't want to continue to own the stocks.

For example, I had 2 deep divers for many years - Lucent and Nortel. Over three years, I only had buys, no sells, on them.

When I went to rebalance them at the end of 2008, I searched for info on them. I read lots of talk about Nortel filing for bankruptcy and whether the Canadian government would prevent it.

So, I ended up keeping Lucent and replacing Nortel. Lucent has since came back, while Nortel did go bankrupt.

Keeping A Business Simple, Small, and Focused

One of my philosophies for success is to keep things simple, small, and focused. As a result, I like to periodically shine a spotlight on niche internet businesses that succeed by finding their own area, and focusing tightly on this market.

Today, I'm profiling a company called Data Graphics, Inc.

Data Graphics has a simple to understand business - they provide custom labels for the industrial, military, and commercial markets. Unlike other graphics companies, who specialize in designing other products, Data Graphics only does labels.

Thus, unlike the competition (who probably only handle a few types of labels), Data Graphics can provide a custom label in an exhaustive list of materials and forms. For example, they can do nameplates, labels, decals, embossed, aluminum, die cut, etc.

This gives them an advantage of larger companies. These companies sell breadth - more than one type of product. Therefore, they can't compete on depth by providing a lot of variety within labels.

Every "Stock Trading Riches" Position is Ultimately Self-Correcting

I'm always amazed and excited when I think about how much my Stock Trading Riches system adjusts and self-corrects itself to actual market conditions.

Not only does each stock's average purchase price get adjusted through rebalancing, but even the stock itself is correctable. If you find fundamental reasons to no longer own a stock, its position can be easily switched over to another stock through rebalancing.

This is because the rebalancing formula is pure mathematics - it doesn't care if you plug in stock X or Y.

For example, suppose you were maintaining a constant value of $5,000 in Walmart and, after a particular year, your position was down to $3,000. Normally, you would buy $2,000 of Walmart.

However, if you lost faith in Walmart (for example, heard it might go bankrupt), you could choose another stock - say Target (it doesn't have to be in the same industry), sell all $3000 of Walmart, and buy $5,000 of Target.

You would then have a capital loss, and could say that Walmart was a failed investment. But, that is only if you viewed the position as a "Walmart position".

If, on the other hand, you took the view that it was a "$5,000 slot", and Walmart happened to occupy it for a while, and now Target occupies it, then ultimately it is not a failed investment.

In fact, if any given position can always systematically buy low and sell high serially across different stocks, then you can't really have a losing position in the long run.

At the high level, the "Stock Trading Riches" system is about splitting your portfolio up into constant dollar slots in which stocks are rebalanced to capture dividends and capital fluctuations. The slot can outlive any particular stock.

Forex News - Where to Go to Get Yours

A Guest Posting by Bobby Quill:

Keeping tabs on the latest forex news is something that you need to get in the habit of doing if you ever want to make real money.  Before you make any forex trade, you need to know what&rsqu! o;s ; going on in the world.

And, you can’t always count on forex brokers to tell you.  After all, things can change so quickly that they don’t even have time to tell you about it!

But with a seemingly endless supply of news channels and websites, where do you go to get the latest headlines, without succumbing to “information overload”?

• The major news sites – like CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC.  They will tell you if something major is going on – like a G8 meeting or protests that could affect the world’s economic climate.  You don’t need to re! ad every single article on their homepages, though.  A quick scan of their major headlines should suffice.  If something looks important, go ahead and read it.
• Economic calendars.  Those will tell you when the Federal Reserve is meeting.  And let’s face it – the U.S. Federal Reserve plays a huge role in the economic climate of the entire world.  You will need to know what decisions they’re making.
• Special forex alerts.  You can sign up for email and text alerts that will notify you anytime something happens that might be of interest to you.  That way, you don’t have to search for news headlines; they’ll just go right to your inbox.

Effect of Japanese Earthquake on U.S. stocks

I hesitated to write a post on how the Japanese earthquake / tsunami affected the stock market, because it is so trivial compared to the loss of life and struggle of the survivors.

When I think of the disaster, the first things that pop into my mind are the tragic deaths, admirable way the Japanese people are coping with quiet dignity, and the heroism of the engineers / operators risking radiation exposure to bring the nuclear reactors back under control.

As for stocks: Japanese insurance, finance, and manufacturing companies went down, while American construction companies like Fluor (FLR) went up because they may get a lot of business in rebuilding Japan.

Oil showed its price volatility by defying initial expectations. Oil prices had gone up because of the unrest in Libya and other MidEast nations, and it was expected that oil prices would go up more because Japan would have to buy more oil on the open market - because of damaged refineries and the nuclear plants.

The Japanese crisis may drive up oil prices before its all over but, in the short run, the price of oil actually dropped because speculators figured Japan (the world's third largest economy) would slow down and actually cause less demand for oil.

Family Finance Carnival

The Family Finance Carnival is a great source of personal finance articles.

Tax Carnival #82

The 82nd edition of the Tax Carnival is up with a lot of interesting tax-related articles.