Investors get another chance to profit from higher energy prices. Here’s a range of plays for all types.

Have you ever heard or read the phrase “multiple streams of income” before? Do you know what this phrase means? For many businessmen, creating multiple streams of income online or offline is one way of securing themselves as well as their businesses in the future. They also believe that it …

You’ve probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you. Here’s why that’s not entirely true.

Google has incorporated a new factor to its Quality Score. If you’re advertising on Google AdWords, this new factor might influence the position of your ads and the minimum price you have to pay for your bids. What do you have to do to make the best out of the situation?

Usually when people speak of the law of supply and demand, they focus on how price is affected by this law. However, another thing which is affected by this law is whether or not there is an overabundance of businesses or potential businesses in a given market.

For centuries, investors have purchased products in a country in which there was an overabundance of supply and therefore very little market and ship them across the ocean to countries in which the same product is either rare or non-existent. One of the reasons that Columbus’ voyage across the atlantic was a milestone in marketing is that there are many products available in the Americas which were non-existent on the three continents which are sometimes called “The Old World.”

Dr. Jeffrey Cornwell, who is the Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University, posted a picture on December 11, 2005 which very clearly explains what I have tried to say about crowded sandboxes and about the “Bratwurst Rule” of marketing.

It is not sufficient when researching a market to merely discover the level of demand, you also have to look at supply:

Suppose you did some market research and discovered that if 80 people attended an event, 70 of them would want a hamburger and 10 would want a bratwurst. Which business would you decide to get into? The correct answer is “Insufficient data.” You next need to know the competition. How many vendors are selling each product? How happy are the consumers with the currst service and quality of product? What available locations are undersupplied based upon the flow of traffic? Etc. Etc.

It is also important to know whether or not the market is oversupplied. This quote is from the conclusion to my article on the “Bratwurst Rule:”

The lessons from this are -

Just because a product or service is popular does not mean it is the most profitable choice.
Market research is key to determining which products or services have the most potential for profit.
If the sandbox is full, play elsewhere.

Hulbert Financial Digest has reported that the AlphaProfit Focus model portfolio ranks number 1 in performance among all fund portfolios tracked by Hulbert Financial Digest for the rolling 12 month period ending November 30, 2005. Hulbert Financial Digest reports that the Focus model portfolio gained 36.2% during this 12 month period. The AlphaProfit Focus model portfolio has been rated number 1 three times during the past four months. Hulbert Financial Digest is the leading investment newsletter performance tracking service of Dow Jones.

In November, the AlphaProfit Focus and Core model portfolios gained 4.3% and 4.9%, respectively while the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index gained 4.0%. For the Y-T-D period, the AlphaProfit Focus and Core model portfolios are up 29.8% and 15.2%, respectively while the DJW 5000 Index is up 6.2%.

There are lots of variations on the traditional method of decision-making. The fact is that these variations are still how-based models and as such leave themselves open to the same traps as the traditional model. How-based decision-making models are no longer adequate in our highly competitive world.

There are some myths in affiliate marketing, which attract a lot of people to it believing they are true. First is they think managing an online business is easy and second, they think that one can make a fortune through online marketing in an instant. Probably not even 10% of …

For a long time, I have been telling my clients who are interested in increased traffic that creating a Niche Portal is a way to retain old traffic and build up referrals. In an article dated Dec. 8, 2005, eMarketer.com shows that Portals are even more popular than search engines.

Two of the general top portals, Yahoo and MSN, are more popular than Google and retain their audience for longer periods of time.

Although this article does not address Niche market portals, it does look at News and Music portals.

The reason that Portals are popular is that they decrease the amount of time which it takes to locate a topic of interest. The more narrow and specific an audience’s interest area is, the less relevant are the results of a general search engine. Very specific interests areas call for very narrow Niche portals.

Two examples of Niche Portals are the Designer News portal on the right hand side of the Hanscot website and the small business and independant professional Portal named “Driven By Success.”

The acquisiton and publication of links for such portals is one of the services provided by Qwerty.