In case you missed it, Google was featured on a "60 Minutes" story this evening.  A Google executive explained how AdWords work, among other things.  Millions of people who had no idea how AdWords work are now clued in and ready to spend money to promote their products and services.

Look for these possible impacts from this exposure:

• The price per click will rise across all products and services
• AdSense advertisers will be earning more money due to this rise in click prices
• A less sophisticated group of advertisers will be spending money without proper tracking and ROI calculation

This is not the time to get in a bidding war with the new advertisers.  Let them duke it out for a while with each other, and then step in and fill the gaps when they settle down a little.  Also, if you are an AdSense publisher you should be adding fresh new content like crazy to pick up some of the additional revenue that will be flowing through the system.

One of the best business models for a work at home business is to be a publisher.  You simply write good content about a variety of subjects, mix in a few affiliate links or links to your own products, repeat often, and cash the checks.

There are many, many publishers on the Internet right now - how do you get a competitive advantage?

Your advantage will come from the use of advanced technology or a better understanding of the technology used by others.  One example of this is blogs.  If you don't know what a blog is, just ask Google.  Put "define blog" in the search box and you'll learn all you need to know.  Blogs have been around a long time, but they are just now beginning to be used in a commercial manner (pissing off a lot of people along the way).

Here's a short blueprint that will help you use blogs to your advantage:
When you build a website, make sure you install a free blog on the same domain name.  If your site is at bigradios.com, put your blog at bigradios.com/news or bigradios.com/blog.  Step two is to post to your blog every day, or even several times a day with quality information and news related to the topic of your website - in this case, big radios.  Along with each post, add a link to a page of your site.  For example, if your post is talking about speakers for big radios, link to the page of your site that talks about or sells speakers.  When your blog posts are broadcast all over the Internet, the search engine spiders and human visitors will follow the links in your blog posts to your static website pages - instant traffic and instant advantage.

Home Business Ideas

Old, dated Search Engine Optimization advice is very dangerous to your business.  Be very careful when reading articles about getting your site to rank higher in the search engines - if there is no "published date" associated with the article, you could be looking at information that was published years ago and no longer applies to the current SEO environment.  The search engines are constantly changing the way they rank sites, and you need to have the very latest information to stay on top.

For example, old SEO articles will tell you that every link to your target page should have optimized, keyword-rich link text associated with it.  As of Jan 2005, research indicates that you should only have about 50-75% of those links packed with your keywords.  The other links should be a mix of related terms, and even non-related terms.  Right now, optimization is all about being natural, not packing your pages with keywords and other traditional optimization tactics.  If you follow the old school thinking, you get old school results....