Dow Industrials Shed 315 Points on Disappointing Economic and Corporate Reports, US Stocks fell sharply Friday after a series of depressing economic data and corporate reports as well as high oil prices stoked concerns about the overall health of the US economy.

All of the major stock indexes fell with their biggest lost of the year with Dow Jones falling at a lost 315 points. The Market will cotinue its downward cycle as things are not looking on the bright for the month of Feb.

Make sure you maintain a strong put position to cover your positions, the market is filled with too many uncertain factor at the moment. I have cleared all my position waiting for the next sell spot to enter my put position again.

Good luck to everyone.

Andy

Here is an interesting write up from TechCrunch by Michael Arlington of Fox Group is seeking alternative and might terminate the deal they have with Google. Original quote below.

Even while parent company News Corp. continues to try to disrupt the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is rumored to be in negotiations with Microsoft take Google’s place as the MySpace advertising partner.

The Google-FIM deal, first announced in August 2006, obligated Google to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to FIM of at least $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments. But the original deal was negotiated in extreme haste, say people with knowledge of the deal. In February 2007 the parties were rumored to be working on the final agreement, months after ads were already being served by Google.

In Google’s haste to keep the deal from Microsoft they may have paid more than they can stomach.

According to our source, Sergey Brin’s thinly veiled buyer’s remorse verbalized during Google’s most recent earnings call on January 31 angered News Corp./FIM execs:

We don’t talk about individual partners’ performance or anything like that. Now I do want to highlight though, we have had a challenge in Q4 with social networking inventory as a whole and some of the monetization work we were doing there didn’t pan out as well as we had hoped. But we are continuing the efforts and we are still optimistic about future quarters.

…we have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the MySpace relationship, including of course Orkut, our own network, which is very, very successful and probably like 20 others, or something like that. I don’t know the exact number. But we have an incredible amount of this inventory and in fact, it varies quite a bit in how it all monetizes, based on a number of factors, some of which we understand, some of which we don’t.
…I don’t think we have the killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks yet. We’re running lots of experiments. We had some significant improvements but as I said, some of the things we were working on in Q4 didn’t really pan out and there were some disappointments there. I hope to be able to report more progress in the future but it’s a big opportunity because it’s so much inventory.

The vast majority of social network traffic that Google serves ads into is controlled by MySpace – this was a direct complaint about that deal. Shortly thereafter, our source says, FIM started discussions with Microsoft about taking over the advertising inventory. Microsoft announced a guaranteed payments deal with Facebook just two weeks after the initial FIM/Google deal. I’m sure they’d be very happy to get their hands on MySpace traffic, too. And if anyone has more money to burn than Google, it’s Microsoft.

What we don’t know is what kind of termination clauses are included in the existing agreement. But Google seems to be saying publicly that they wish they had never entered the deal. Perhaps now, with Microsoft waiting on the sidelines waiting to play sugar daddy, MySpace will suddenly be sexy again.

Very interesting to see if Microsoft/Yahoo would be the right replacement if the deal turns for Google. Keep an eye out.

Andy Huang

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paper’s high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

To your success!

Andy Huang

• What is your GQ? A great article I found! Read! #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

What is your GQ? A great article I found! Read!

I came across this post on Dane Carlson’s Business opportunity blog, What a fantastic write up on the new IM statement better GQ!

The Wall Street Journal:

You created a Web site for your business. You set up an e-commerce system to sell products online. You even created a blog. So why aren’t customers biting?

“You may have no GQ,” said Brent Leary at the Small Business Summit in New York. Mr. Leary is the co-founder of customer-relationship management-consulting firm CRM Essentials in Atlanta.

No, Mr. Leary isn’t referring to the men’s style magazine, but to your business’s “Google Quotient” or visibility and rank on popular search engines.

The best way to get noticed on Google? Establish yourself as an authority online in your niche. Here are four ways to get started:
1. Find publications and blogs by industry leaders and begin posting original thoughts regularly.

2. Review a book.

3. Choose your social-networking Web sites wisely.

4. Become an expert.

Photo by Google.

Google’s Inside AdWords crew Feng, posted an update on InsideAdwords and share the following Optimizer tips.

The Conversion Optimizer is a bidding feature that allows you to set a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) instead of a maximum cost-per-click (CPC), helping you save time and maximize profits. We recently held a series of Conversion Optimizer webinars, which you can watch on YouTube. To help you get more out of your Conversion Optimizer campaigns, we’ve compiled a list of top tips based on the most common questions we received from our webinar attendees.

1. A campaign must have 200 or more conversions per month as tracked by AdWords conversion tracking to be eligible for the Conversion Optimizer. If none of your campaigns reach this level, check out these tips to increase your conversion numbers.
2. Conversion Optimizer works on a campaign level, not at the account level. You can enable Conversion Optimizer for eligible campaigns by following these steps. Keep in mind that you can’t use Conversion Optimizer with a brand new campaign — it needs the conversion history to work correctly.
3. Once you activate the Conversion Optimizer, you should check its performance periodically to ensure that it’s delivering what you expect. Keep in mind that normal variations in campaign performance can make it difficult to interpret short-term changes. You can change your bids as often as you like.
4. The Conversion Optimizer works on a maximum CPA, not an average CPA. While we aim to avoid any conversion that costs more than your maximum CPA bid, changes in your conversion rate may cause your average CPA to exceed your maximum CPA.
5. Keep in mind that if you choose a CPA lower than the recommended maximum CPA bid, you are likely to get less traffic than you did with your old CPC bids. It’s a good idea to start with this recommendation and adjust based on the results you observe.
6. If you choose to opt out of the Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will revert to the previous CPC bids you were using. (So, there’s nothing to stop you from giving it a try!)
7. Conversion Optimizer campaigns cannot yet be modified with the AdWords Editor, but we’re aware that this is a common request from our advertisers.
8. The Conversion Optimizer does not work with Google Analytics conversion data, but it’s fine to use AdWords conversion tracking and Analytics at the same time.
9. The tool does not impact your keywords’ Quality Score, which is calculated in the usual way regardless of the bidding option you are using.
10. It’s best not to turn on the Conversion Optimizer for the first time right after you’ve made major changes to a campaign, as your conversion rate may not have yet stabilized to reflect the updates. Similarly, while you are running the Conversion Optimizer, it’s best to avoid major campaign changes that are likely to impact conversion rate (or to pay careful attention after making them to evaluate their impact).

We hope this information has piqued your interest about the Conversion Optimizer. Please visit the Conversion Optimizer website for more information, including FAQs and details for upcoming webinars.”

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Andy Huang