Ideas for new businesses

• http://wesleytansey.com/startup-ideas-july-2011/

My investments

• hedge against downturns in market: I buy these when markets goes south (as seen on home page of google finance):
  as seen from google finance, 2 "stocks" rose over 20% when the rest of the stock market went south:
  http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:FAZ
  http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:SKF
• http://www.proshares.com/funds/skf.html
  "This ETF seeks a return of -200% of the return of an index (target) for a single day".
• Plutonomy investing: Names in this basket that our analysts recommend as buys include Julius Baer, Bulgari, Burberry, Richemont, Kuoni, and Toll Brothers.
  plutonomy citi analyst pdf here and here
• As advised by the Motley Fool Stock Advisor report, I buy the following companies for their long history of dividend payouts, not for the stock prices:
  Genuine Parts [NYSE: GPC], Emerson Electric [NYSE: EMR], 3M [NYSE: MMM], Diebold [NYSE: DBD], Dover [NYSE: DOV]
  More from the MOtley Fool:
  " Procter & Gamble [NYSE: PG] has raised its dividend each year for the past 50 years.
  More people are going to need more things. In particular, companies that produce the raw materials used for all sorts of necessities will be poised to profit in the decades to come. For instance, Commercial Metals [NYSE: CMC] recycles, manufactures, and distributes steel and metal. It also boasts a 3.4% dividend.
  Similarly, the Vanguard Energy ETF [NYSE: VDE] owns a basket of oil and gas drillers, exploration, and refining companies. It should profit tremendously as demand for oil and gas spikes in these emerging economies. An aging population will need more health care, which supports not only obvious picks like high-yielding Merck [NYSE: MRK] but also riskier plays.
• This article got me thinking: http://news.yahoo.com/concerned-consumer-look-china-wants-042745086.html
• I have recently started buying the Yuan, as a diversification strategy:
  Personally, I’m not waiting. I have already diversified part of my savings into stronger foreign currencies for my family. One way to buy yuan is through an exchange-traded fund (NYSE: CYB). It’s best to diversify your currency holdings now while the dollar is still strong so you can get the most for your money.
• Another way to hedge america's impending disaster is to As a long-term investor, you can buy more fundamentally strong currencies like gold, the Australian dollar, and the New Zealand dollar. These are the long-term currencies that will prosper over the next few years. (Although gold will likely perform best in the short-term.)
• I just love the motley fool, and here are some recent stock picks for long term investors here
• Invest in the boom economies: singapore, thailand, and malaysia:
  Here are five possibilities:
  The iShares MSCI Singapore Index Fund (NYSE: EWS) has net assets of $1.71 billion, a price/earnings (P/E) ratio of 5.5 and an attractive yield of 4.21% -- it's primarily concentrated in financial and real estate sectors.
  The iShares MSCI Malaysia Index Fund (NYSE: EWM) has net assets of $980 million and a slightly higher P/E ratio of 3.92. It gives you substantial exposure to plantations companies, which benefit greatly from rising agricultural prices. The iShares MSCI Thailand Investible Market Index Fund (NYSE: THD) at $632 million is smaller and less diverse - its top holdings are the local telecoms company and a cement company.
  
  Finally Indonesia, the largest economy of the four, is the focus of the Market Vectors Indonesia Index (NYSE: IDX), which has $700 million in assets and is focused on the largest Indonesian companies, has too much bank exposure for my liking. You may alternatively want to look at an actively managed fund, the Aberdeen Indonesia Fund (AMEX: IF), which has been in business since 1990 and has a more balanced portfolio.
• Buy water stocks:
  Veolia Environment ADR (NYSE-VE) may give us the perfect opportunity to pocket some nice returns as it works to prevent the looming global water shortage.
• Buy oil- it will spike up: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/10/12/the-next-huge-oil-spike.aspx
• The best gains will be found in the oil field service stocks - companies like Baker Hughes (NYSE: BHI) and Schlumberger (NYSE: SLB). These are the kinds of companies that sell all the various supplies that oil companies need to pull oil out of the ground. Share prices of oil-service companies track oil prices closely so investors reap the profits as oil becomes more valuable.
• When you buy a foreign stock that pays a high dividend, you’re essentially getting paid to diversify away from the dollar.
  
  After the company pays you dividends in an emerging market currency and you translate it into dollars, you end up getting a higher payout when the dollar falls.
  
  For example, we recommended Singapore Telecom for our Currency Capitalist subscribers a while back. This is a company that pays a dividend yield of about 5%, which is five times what your bank can offer.
  
  The dividends are also denominated in the Singapore dollar, which is one of my all-time favorite currencies to buy for the long-term. And let’s not forget that the company has operations in some of the fastest growing nations in the world.
  
  I expect the Singapore dollar to appreciate to 1.15 by the end of this year. That’s a gain of about 8% that will be directly reflected in the dividends and the stock price.
  
  That means this income machine can protect you from both the sinking dollar over the long-term - and pay you income.
  
  That’s the power of investing in exotic stocks that pay high dividends. It’s one of the best ways to generate income through currency plays.
  
  For more on currency plays with income, be sure to check out the Currency Capitalist portfolio. We have several foreign stocks already in our portfolio that offer high dividends in addition to currency exposure.
• Swiss insurance giant Zurich Financial, back in May 2001, paid its shareholders a dividend of 17.25 francs. A decade later, in April 2011, it paid shareholders a dividend of 17 francs. Not much changed really ... until you look at that dividend in currency-adjusted terms.
  
  In 2001, the dividend amounted to $9.72.
  
  In 2011, a slightly smaller dividend amounted to $19.37 - a massive 105% leap, as you can see it in the chart below.
• At the moment TDC trades for about 45 Danish krone (US$8.47). The shares are worth closer to 55 krone (US$10.35). So you have a potential gain of 22% in the shares. On top of that, you get the chunky dividend for an all-in return for 2012 in the 30%-plus range.
  
  And you get the ongoing dividend growth of a major telecom player in a safe currency in northern Europe ... plus the likely strengthening of that currency against the U.S. dollar over time. Indeed, over the past decade, the krone has gained about 50% on the greenback.
  
  The shares trade on Nasdaq OMX Nordic under the symbol “TDC.” Any brokerage firm that provides access to OMX Nordic will be able to trade the shares.
• Of course, non-Eurozone EU countries that are capably managed and have a labor cost advantage over Germany, France, and Italy should continue to do fine, benefiting from not having to pay for bailouts.
  
  For that reason, you might look at the Market Vectors Poland Fund (NYSE: PLND), which has suffered unjustified contagion from the euro mess and is trading on only 9-times earnings.
• Here's how investors need to respond:
  
  Hold hard assets as a means of hedging the value of your investments and protecting your purchasing power.
  Include energy in your portfolio because it's driven by demand, compared to debt, which is driven by clueless politicians throwing good money after bad.
  Bet on growth in the form of "glocal" stocks - global companies with a big presence in developing markets.
  Protect yourself with inverse funds that appreciate when the broader markets head south.
  Understand that it's not "buy and hold" that matters any longer. Instead it's more like "buy and hold your nose."
  From here:
• Invest in the motley fool : https://www.foolfunds.com/funds/index.aspx
• You don’t necessarily have to go offshore to diversify into foreign currencies…
  
  For Americans and Canadians alike, EverBank offers a one-stop shop to hedge against the long-term decline of dollar-bloc currencies. And you get FDIC insurance, too. That’s why EverBank is the only bank I’m recommending in the United States.
  
  Over the last few years, The Sovereign Society has worked closely with St. Louis based EverBank (www.everbank.com). During that time, EverBank collaborated with Sovereign Society editors, and then went on to launch two successful portfolios including the All-Weather Portfolio and Asian Currency Portfolio. Both programs have posted gains since their inception amid dollar weakness.
• As far as ETFs go, silver investors might want to check out ETFS Silver Trust (NYSE: SIVR). The ETF can be bought and sold just like any stock, and seeks to reflect the value and performance of the price of silver bullion, minus the Trust’s operating expenses. The ETF is backed by physical silver bullion held by HSBC in London. But, to really leverage the price of silver, take a look at Vancouver-based Silver Wheaton Corp. (NYSE: SLW)
• Among the names he likes and owns now are Yamana (AUY), RandGold Resources (GOLD), and lesser-known Franco Nevada (FNV) --which Holmes says pays a monthly dividend.

Internet Marketing Information Resources

Lots of white papers and helpful stuff

SEO Strategies

Taken from the Murket Sumaria site:
1. Article Syndication – Syndicating articles to build links is still very much a staple for SEO’ers around the world. There are ways to leverage your efforts here to increase the ‘spread’ of the articles you write that can significantly increase the value from a single article and we’ll likely have more to say on this over coming months.

2. Get Social – taking the content you’re writing and pushing it out through social channels will get you links. You can both simply republish or promote content on your social media profiles and you can intentionally invite people to push the ‘like’ button etc. In recent blog posts where I ‘asked’ people to press the Facebook like button I got 10x the number of “likes” as when I didn’t.

The direct links you’ll create via Social Media will likely be ‘no-follow’ (and so not worth much) but it seems your presence on these properties is being watched by Google anyway. Plus, the flow on effect of being profiled in Social Media will gain you links both from relationships you’ll create and even from the scrapers that take this stuff and republish it.

3. RSS Feed Submission – This is a little techy, but it’s a lovely ‘do once, get benefits for life’ type deal. Here are the steps involved:

a. Create an RSS feed of your content in an Abstract form (e.g. publish only part of each content item or article). Be sure to include a link back to the full article in your feed.

b. Then take this abstract RSS feed and submit it to RSS Feed Directories like feedage.com (just do a search for “RSS Feed Directory” and you’ll find plenty of similar sites).

c. These RSS feed directories will then republish your content and include your link back to the original source. So every time you publish content you get an instant backlink.

Again, this is a little techy, so perhaps worthy of a full post on it’s own, but I’ve found this approach particularly helpful for large sites with lots of pages that aren’t being fully indexed by search engines. Remember, if a page isn’t indexed, it won’t drive any organic search traffic.

4. Forums – Find a handful of the big, high profile forums in your industry and get involved. Make sure you fill out your forum profile completely and put a link your signature file. Then, participate in the forum. Don’t spam the other members, but instead, help them out.

If you stick around for a while (or even better do some research at sites like Yahoo Answers), you’ll find that the same topics and questions get raised over and over again.

A great tactic is to prepare a list of common questions with answers and then watch the forums to see when these common questions get asked (an RSS feed is often available on forums which makes it easy to watch new posts being entered).

You can then swoop in each time there’s a question you can answer. Note, it’s best to put each response in slightly different words to avoid annoying users of the forum. It’s also OK, to say “here’s a short answer, I’ve written a longer post on my blog about it….” and then link back to your blog.

5. Being good at what you do – OK, so this isn’t really a link building strategy as much as a ‘how do to life’ strategy. In general, if you do good work, people will link to you. Particularly if you do good work and get in the habit of asking those you work with to give you link you’ll get some.

We aim to sell a good product and MarketSamurai.com has attracted over 2.3 million links without any formal ‘link building’.

6. Publishing content on your site – Again, not a traditional link building suggestion, but internal links are valuable. It’s simple maths that a site with 1000 pages has more internal link ‘juice’ to share than the site with 20 pages (you’ll also pick up a stack of long tail traffic by publishing lots of content).

Building more content on your site is a killer traffic strategy.

In addition to the above there are many other link strategies you can follow including Social Bookmarking (great for helping pages get indexed), directory submissions, begging (e.g. ask those you do business with to link to you), competitive research, where you use tools like Market Samurai’s link profile report to see what links your competitors have and see if the link source will link to you and much more.

How to get links:

• ways to search in google for link bastions: http://www.coffeekicks.com/create-ongoing-links-indefinitely
• wordpress plugin

Backlink checkers

• MajesticSEO.com
• ahrefs.com
• alexa.com/site/linksin/domain.com

Speed testers

http://tools.pingdom.com

Great marketing templates

• marketing focused wordpress theme
• great marketing of oneself on landing page here
• Another wordpress sales optimized theme

Adsense sites

Ok you need the following free items:

Wordpress
Wordpress Articlesss Theme
Quick Adsense Plugin For Wordpress
Unique Article Wizard Plugin For Wordpress (For Complete Automation and Articles)

Paid Items Needed:
Hosting (Hostgators my choice $10 a month)
Domain Name (Namecheap with Coupon $7)

Thats about it.. :)

Best products

• fighting machine - padded

SEO software/ services

woorank