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These are very good times to develop websites. You have a multitude of options to monetize just about any website. There’s extra capital laying around, in case you need to ramp up in a hurry. And most importantly, using widely available open source programs, you can build scalable websites cheaper than ever before.

There’s even a few other mitigating factors that should lend eventual success:

• Bandwith is cheaper than ever
• Mobile internet usage is growing exponentially
• More people are connected to the internet every year than the year before
• Web hosting is affordable

Barrier to entry is very low, but few websites will actually succeed. Many website failures can easily be written off due to a lack of effort and persistence. But for people who are willing to work hard and continually improve their websites and their webmaster craft, there really is no chance of failing.

Go ahead and launch another website. It’s not as easy to succeed as it once was 10 years ago, but it’s not as hard as it ultimately will be in 10 more. Competition will only get tougher, so planting your roots and making your stand right now is a good idea.

Really any traffic to your website has to be converted into something. If you want to be effective, you have to have repeat visitors. If you have no repeat visitors, then every day you’re on the internet is your first day! You end up living in a Ground Hog day style nightmare where your traffic never goes beyond a certain level. What happens if we don’t convert anyone?

1) All of our traffic is sold to third parties. THEY then convert it instead of us.
2) We get paid less because someone else did the conversion
3) The lifeblood of our website dries up. Any community we might have built falls off.
4) Our revenue levels stay the same

This means we’re forced to convert visitors. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. People are busy, and can’t focus all of their attention on one thing. You need to get their attention and then keep it. And you need to do this all the while your competition is getting better at doing the same thing. Website competition is tough and getting tougher every day. Every vertical boasts a ton of competitors, and many of them are extremely good at what they do.

Permission marketing can be a powerful tool to help us. People who actually opt-in and are seeking niche information are hugely valuable to our efforts. These people will form the basis of anygoing revenue you hope to attract your website. The people who take the team to read daily are of prime importance.

This week we’ll try and take a look at some “Web 2.0″ ways to attract and retain qualified traffic.

More and more talk is being heard about click fraud this week. To me, it’s not news. I was an early advertiser in Google’s Adwords system and I watched a great deal of click fraud occur. Since many of the keywords I paid for were in the SEO/webmaster category, the automation was rampant. There have been estimates as high as $800 million for the industry being made this week. I have no idea how accurate that figure is, but I assure anyone that thinks click fraud isn’t a problem is deluding themselves.

The biggest problem, to me, for something like click-fraud is how erosive it can be to public sentiment. Advertisers don’t enjoy being screwed out of money, and like all customers, they’re will resent it, and harbor hostility if they experience it. The customers are not warned in any great detail that their money might be flushed. They have a reasonable expectation that they’re paying honest money into an honest system. Truth is, the PPC system is more rigged than Las Vegas Casinos. The Google Adwords advertising system is a complex one, and only sophisticated buyers have a shot at making real money using the system.

The users in Adwords aren’t generally that sophisticated. They end up paying for many clicks that are worthless to them. Add to that failure rate the fact that they may not even be tracking conversions, and you have people disastrously losing money on a system that they entered in the hopes of earning more income. Unless major steps are made to increase security, people will lose faith.

Once the faith has eroded, the system will erode around it. This is no different than the US government selling T-Bills. People need to believe in the currency, or it loses value. When advertisers become resigned to the fact they’re overpaying for clicks, they’ll want to keep paying less and less per click. Since so many websites on the internet now rely on programs like Adsense for most of their monetization, they have an inherent weakness which may become their Achille’s heel, if left untreated. The seeds of destructions for context ads are sewn when click fraud becomes rampant. I hope we’ll hear of some real solutions soon.

I know most people love search engines, and hackers are no exception. They use search engines to make nice lists of targets. This is quite a common thing, with signatures from certain websites targeted:

“Search engines crawl sites, and some information that you don’t want exposed is also exposed because of lack of knowledge of what is on the systems,” Bhalla explained.

The more information that is left publicly accessible on the web server, the more vulnerable the website is to attack. It’s probably true that many people would never even think of something as subtle as how much info the crawlers have made available about your website.

The best part for a hacker using a search engine to find victims is that they can go unnoticed. They aren’t scanning ports or doing anything intrusive enough to set off detection traps. They can quickly find machines that are vulnerable, while raising few suspicions.

Bhalla also pointed out using a robots.txt might help, but:

• It can be read by a human
• Certain crawlers don’t follow it, so you aren’t protected

Awareness of the situation is half the battle.

One of the keys to the online marketing game is to never give up on pulling revenue out of a website. There are a number of ways to do it, and you always benefit from taking advantage of them. Some of these ideas may be basic, but they all make complete sense and shouldn’t be overlooked. You can almost always squeeze more money out of your traffic if:

1) Increase the number of page views on your site. Notice I didn’t just tell you to increase your traffic. Assume you can’t increase your traffic, but need a surefire way to get more money from your website’s current visitors, then try to get each visitors who’s already there to view more pages per visit! Two things can happen with this method: 1) you’ll get more page views for any CPM ads you’re running and 2) the visitor will get likely become fatigued after visiting more pages and click on an even more targeted and high paying ad.

2) Tweak your fresh content to include higher paying keywords. If you update often (like with a blog), start making posts that draw higher paying ads. Start reviewing products that you know have mass market potential. Post about things that people actually spend good money on and your revenue promises to go through the roof.

3) Tweak your Ad Code. Switch between YPN and Adsense. Change the borders or the site layout. Don’t be complacent. Sometimes simple ad tweaks can mean “double your money”. Always keep looking to improve the performance of your ads.

4) Add more ads! Don’t get carried away but you may be able to augment your income by adding additional ad units. Google allows you a total of 4 ad units per page. If you add two more non-context sensitive advertisers on the same page, you get paid 6 times per page.

5) Move people around on your website. Think of the traffic flow at a shopping mall. Don’t be afraid to move people throughout your website. Try to convert them into becoming regular users or get them to the part of the store that pays best. Either one works and beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

6) Increase the number of regular visitors to your website. People who visit every day look at your ads 365 times a year. Don’t sell yourself short and sell all traffic at a discount. Make sure you appeal to at least a percentage of the people who become your regular visitors. These people are the true equity in your web business.

For a company with an awful lot of promise, Microsoft really hasn’t done much as far as search is concerned up to this point. Their results are still ridiculously bad, and they’re the easiest of all search engines to game. Any rankings you get from them will yield a tiny trickle of traffic, rather than a mighty stream like you get from Google. And all of this seems surprising considering it seems like people at the company “get” what needs to be done.

Google allowed to run roughshod over global marketplace. I’m not saying that Google isn’t a remarkable company. They are. But what I’ve been amazed by as an observer is how they’ve been able to totally dominate the search engine industry with barely a whimper of competition from Microsoft. Yahoo has been extremely active in setting up strong competition for Google, but Microsoft lags.

Even Bill Gates has decided to step down from daily operations. It seems like Microsoft is going to concede the game to Google. But none of this seems realistic in the least. Microsoft of course will come into the game at some point with a strong offering, or at least some sort of offering. It’s surprising they haven’t even been able to launch a publisher network like YPN or Adsense.

Even Barry Diller seems to be more active than Microsoft lately with his IAC spending big to promote Ask.com. Whether they’ll actually take market share from Google is debatable though. To me, Yahoo is positioned the best in the overall battle, but based on my logs, Google isn’t losing much traction at all.

Time will tell what happens in the search engine wars, but it looks like the field is heating up a bit. Maybe we’ll see strong players emerge later this year.

Well I’m gonna raise a fuss…And I’m gonna raise a holler…About workin’ all summer…Just tryin’ to earn a dollar. Back when I was 8 years old was the last time I had the Summer off completely. But the best part about the Summertime time now is being an online marketer with flexible enough hours to do my work and still enjoy the warm weather. The best part of having a business online is that you may not have to maintain a strict 9 to 5 work regimen.

Sure, I probably work more hours overall than the average worker, but I work them when it makese sense for me. I only drive across town to my office when the traffic is light, always avoiding the stress of the office worker rush hour.

To me these issues are of great importance. Quality of life means just that: how does your work add to the overall quality of your life? You can’t always define this is in terms of monetary success, but hell, making real good money and having flex time is my definition of it. And online marketing provides me with the opportunity to have this flexibility.

So you won’t catch me having the Summertime Blues this year. And if you have it, my friend, let me tell you there’s a way out. Running an online business is a dream come true. I don’t mean this in the over-the-top the way. Of course you still have to work hard and put forth your best effort. But if you do, you can be rewarded in a way that isn’t possible for the lunch bucket brigade.

If you’re trapped indoors again this Summer and yearning to be free: make a vow that next year things will be different. Make your plan and set it in motion. I’ll be taking my morning bike ride soon, and I’ll follow that with a nice afternoon at the local pool. My wife and I will be the only adults there, as usual, because apparently everyone else in our town has a “real job”. For the first few years of doing this, I actually used to feel a little guilty about having it so easy. No more, though I’ve learned to enjoy it even more.

Are you a fulltime internet marketer? Do you have plans to be one?

These are three things I’m thinking about more, as are many people. Video is such an incredibly potent media. Cinema, and even TV media and advertising, all have huge impacts on how people live. Can you see an internet where video plays a huge roll? It’s not hard to, as the roll of video grows each day. The advent of video sharing is getting everyone in on the act, but is there a place for the small content providers in the world of video?

I think there might be, but it’s going to take a massive effort to professionalize what you do in the field. Some of the most talented people in the world work in the genre of “video production” and all of us are used to an incredibly proficient use of the art. To make weak videos will do as much for you as writing bad copy in a text ad. The media can be the message at times, so if you don’t capture attention quickly, no one will care. It’s not hard to imagine that people have very short attention spans. Can you influence people with 10 second videos? I’m pretty sure you can, and there’s undoubtedly a niche for excellent producers.

Mobile video content is on the rise. In particular, porn videos have made the transition to cell phones and various handlhelds. And more and more mainstream media companies are making the leap. Many of the videos released on Youtube each day are produced by professionals hoping to capture the “buzz” factor.

I have no experience with video editing, but I’m working on it. I figure if I can at least learn to make some decent videos within 6 months it will become yet another way to drive traffic to my websites. I’m not planning on being a professional videographer, but I do think that there’s a great opportunity to drive traffic if you use careful self-promotional videos that also entertain.

Are you interested in video for search engine marketing? Have you used it successfully?

If you’re in the website development game, you reach a point where you decide on working with others, or if you bring in more people for collaborations. I personally have been very reluctant to do any projects with people, and the few that I started with others dried up fast. Most of working online is just plain hard work. If you can find others to work hard, great. But what I worried about happening is spending all of my time managing people, when I could just concentrate on maximizing profit.

If you hire others, your expenses go way up and have to be offset by increased revenue. Even if you enter into a joint venture with others, you need to make more money, or it would be pointless to enter the relationship. But potentifal pitfalls exist, especially because of the unique nature of the internet.

• The partner might steal your ideas – it’s very easy to steal intellectual property
• The relationship might fizzle, and you end up having one more competitor for the top 3 spots of a keyword

Have you done joint projects with others? How did you set up the partnership? Do you think others in a group will pull their weight?