He says, he’s so pleased with Apple, that he’s going to work exclusively with them, and will pass on the chance to work on other platforms, like Google’s Android.

“Do I want to be spending 6 months to write the game, and another 6 months making it compatible? If I had Trism available for Android, and there are 50 Android devices and every time one of them crashes (the users) contact me, do I want that?”

So if he’s not expanding to the other mobile platforms, what is Steve going to do with his newfound wealth? He says he’s actively looking to hire more people – engineers and artists specifically. While he started off on his own, he now has four more people working for him in San Francisco, working on 5 more iPhone games.

businessinsider.com

I Just Made $250K From App Store In Two Months is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

PropertyRoom.com is set up as a kind of eBay for police auctions. Items are sold in categories including jewelry, fine art, tools, bicycles, watches and “everything else.” The site was founded by former police officers, including Daryl Gates, former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, according to its Web site.

Since many of the items were stolen but never reclaimed, PropertyRoom.com will return them to their owners provided they can prove ownership of an item shown online.

When the site started in 2001, it had contracts with 100 departments and profits of $3 million. Now, the company has contracts with nearly 2,000 departments, 25,000 new bidders each month, and last year reported a profit of $35 million, according to company spokeswoman Cher Murphy.

nwsource.com

Property Room: Where Cops Sell Stolen Goods is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Here’s how the scam works. When you’re shopping on Craigslist, you make a purchase, then get an email asking you to buy a B.B.B. Purchase Protection Program.

As thousands of people have already found out, the protection program does not exist.

You can protect yourself though when making a purchase by going to www.bbb.org, and review the B.B.B. reliability report. Also, if your buying off Craigslist, they recommend that you deal locally – with folks you can meet in person. This usually avoids 99% of the scam attempts on the site. And, never give yout financial information, like a bank account number or your social security number.

Protect Yourself on Craigslist is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Hundreds of millions of people are surfing at any given time. We in the U.S. (and other English speaking countries) have a tendency to think everyone speaks our language.

The foreign language Internet – meaning all web content not in English – is an enormous opportunity for companies to increase revenue, but one that most ignore. In doing so, they’re not only throwing away money, they’re unnecessarily increasing their competition.

Launching a web page in English instantly pits you against billions of other pages on the search engines. Launching a page in another language can make it much easier to achieve prominence.

Putting together a foreign language Internet site may sound daunting, so here are a few things to keep in mind as you begin planning your strategy.

Develop your understanding of the market. If you have customers abroad, or domestic clients with links abroad, ask them whether they think your offering might be attractive internationally. Ask for contacts that can validate your ideas and perhaps become your first customers.

Check out the competition. Google’s automatic translation tools can help you quickly determine what your competition is up to.

Evaluate the demand. Use Google and Yahoo’s tools to identify the key phrases you need to target in your foreign markets.

Have your site professionally translated. Google’s translation program is adequate for understanding content, but completely unreliable for a company website. Use a professional translation company to get the message right for your customers.

Market your site online. The principles are the same as in English. Build links through partners; use pay-per-click; and try to get mentioned on sites your potential customers frequent.

Following these steps (and repeating the process in other languages) can result in a larger, better-diversified business.

venturebeat.com

Cash in on non-English search engines and more is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Google co-founder Larry Page recently revealed in his commencement address to the University of Michigan that the basic platform for google was based on a sleep dream he had in college. Page, then 23, took the source material of his dream and worked it until it became a minor internet player.

Page told the college grads that he had a “vivid dream” at age 23 that woke him up in the middle of the night that he just had to write down.

Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my adviser, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

There is nothing inherently special about Larry Page that isn’t also in all of us. He just took the ball and ran like Forrest Gump with it.

examiner.com

Larry Page founded Google on a sleep dream is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Shreelaxmi Suresh received recognition for her work after she developed a website for Kerala Bar Council, located in the country’s south.

The youngster has displayed a keen interest in computers and art since she was in Kindergarten.

With a little assistance from her father, Shreelaxmi managed to find a ‘knack’ for web design.

At the age of eight, Shreelaxmi had already created the official website of her school, a website for deaf people and a news website for children written in Malayalam language.

Her newest creation, The Kerala Bar Council site, aims to update people on legal matters and offer free legal aid through the website.

bigpondnews.com

Nine-year-old starts up web business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

All too often the only statistics a site’s owner has on hand is a basic set of website logs from their web hosting company – logs which they rarely have analyzed or looked at in depth. Further, they often have few processes (if any) set up to track activity across the web.

That’s a critical mistake. Analytics are a window into the demographics and habits of both your customers and potential customers. Setting up analytics processes should be one of the first things you do as you launch your business.

Fortunately, this isn’t as hard as it might seem. There are several good website analytics packages available, including Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) and the Quantcast.

Initially there are two main analytics goals you should set:

1. First, you’ll want to establish a baseline of the traffic to your site. You’ll also want to be able to detect new traffic and observe how people use your site and applications.
2. Your second goal – learning how people use your site or service – could be the most valuable information you collect. Once you have traffic and users, start building up statistics on which links they follow (and which they don’t). What features of your application are they using? Where in the process of registering do they give up?

Whether the results are positive or negative is irrelevant. Either way, you’re better able to learn about your customers, their habits and what changes impact their behavior.

venturebeat.com

Harnessing the power of analytics is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Apple has finally allowed pornography into the iTunes App Store. The application, called Hottest Girls, costs $2 and includes “2200+ images of topless, sexy babes and nude models”.

UPDATE: TechCrunch is reporting that Apple has pulled the app from its App Store, stating, “it appears someone over at Cupertino [has] ultimately decided to reject the first such app.” However, the removal of the app is only a temporary one, according to the app’s developer, who states the he made the decision to stop distributing the app himself.

Allen Leung, developer of Hottest Girls, posted on his web site that his app is “temporarily sold out” due to overload on his image server.

The application itself is terrible. Four photos are shown on screen at once and tapping one will pull a full sized version from the server. From here you can look at it or save it to your photo-roll. There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work. You could of course just use the application for downloading and view the pictures later in the Photos application.

You can, however, pick a category. On offer are Popular, Asian, Blonde, Brunette and Swimsuit. This is a little less specialized than what you will find on most porn sites, and it is also distinctly softcore: while there are nipples to be seen, that’s about it. A smartly-worded Google image search would do better if you’re looking for titillation.

wired.com

Porn Hits the iPhone App Store is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. YouTube – In case you don’t already know, YouTube was bought by Google for 1.6 billion in 2006.
2. Vimeo – Vimeo is a video-centric social network site (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp) which launched in November 2004. It now supports HD and is a favorite of Internet video producers. It is favorite for high quality (non clip) content.
3. BlipTV – blip.tv is a free videoblogging, podcasting and video sharing service. If you don’t have a blog, they will give you one, and if already have one, they will help make it a show. BlipTV is another IVM fave rave.
4. Metacafe – Metacafe is of the world’s largest video sites, serving a vast smorgasbord of best videos, funniest movies and clips.
5. Veoh – Veoh provides free access to all of the great TV and film studio content, independent productions, and user-generated videos on the Web.
6. Atomfilms – AtomFilms was one of the first Internet Video hosting and distribution services – it is still one of the best.
7. Dailymotion – DailyMotion collects the latest music videos, short movies, TV shows, funny and extreme videos from a variety of web sites in addition to creating their own original content. You can also upload, share, and embed your videos.
8. CollegeHumor – CollegeHumor showcases hilarious original videos, articles, contests, and interactive features, as well as pictures and videos submitted by fans like you. Humor is not for kids.
9. Howcast – Are you an expert? Howcast welcomes experts from across the web to share their how-to videos with interested viewers on Howcast.com, the Howcast Distribution Network, and Howcast Mobile.
10. Videojug – 1000s of how videos and articles. You can upload your own videos and take part in the busy discussion forums by posting questions and responding to other users’ questions, either by using text or webcam.

Do you have a favorite online video hosting site that is not listed here? Let us know, we will take a look at it, and if it’s good, we will add it to the list

Top Sites to Make Money with Internet Video is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

The premise of MathTime is simple; it takes the old-fashioned flashcard “mad minute” drill idea and adds a new media twist. Participants can practice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the phone by quickly solving problems with two taps of the phone, one to show the problem, one to display the answer.

“I thought it would be cool,” said the Hinsdale, Ill.-native, adding, “It’s really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up” on the App Store.

After he established the basic premise of the game, Owen’s 9-year-old brother Finn designed the mathematical symbols in Photoshop. Once the design was done, the boys pitched the program to Apple.

“Nothing’s impossible if you don’t know it’s impossible,” said John Voorhees, Owen and Finn’s father, who created an app account and provided a bank number for the boys. “He dug into it all by himself, I didn’t touch a line of code.”

The Apps Store has over 35,000 different iPhone applications and games available for download. “These two kids are unusually young to have done that, but the development environment is so easy, novice programmers with good ideas can now develop something compelling,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Murphy also manages the iFund, a $100-million fund devoted solely to investing in start-ups creating apps for the iPhone.

A now billion-dollar economy, Murphy believes iPhone apps will keep growing. In a single day, MathTime, the .99-cent application, was downloaded 141 times. “It started booming,” said Owen, “I woke up and I was like, I’m an entrepreneur now.”

inc.com

Kid Entrepreneurs Builds iPhone App is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

“It seems like corporate America is in total meltdown. Just about everyone I know has lost their job,” says Kathy Culek, a former accountant of a fortune 500 company and a satisfied Phoenix Site Rebuilder customer. “Six months ago I lost my job and then my husband lost his job the following month. We were so scared. We were living paycheck to paycheck and we thought it was the end.”

“We searched the Internet for site builder software and how to start an online home based business. Luckily, we found Phoenix Site Rebuilder,” continues Culek. “It only took us a couple of hours to set up our first site, then we quickly built several more sites. About a month later, we started making good money with our online home based business. Now we have dozens of sites built with the site builder software and we make over $2,700.00 a month and our income is steadily rising.”

“Starting a successful online home based business will soon become common place,” said Rob Blacksilver, the President of Codex Software. “People that have lost their jobs are now making a good living with an online home based business. In some cases, they are making more money than they did with their old crummy jobs, especially if they purchased high quality site builder software, such as Phoenix Site Rebuilder.”

Rob Blacksilver is the inventor of the Site Rebuilder, which is a combination between site builder software and a content management system. A Site Rebuilder converts dynamic content into static content and it utilizes a unique asset-based architecture to graphically render the structure of a web page.

About Codex Software.
Founded in 2007, Codex Software was started by Rob Blacksilver, whose vision of creating revolutionary site builder software for the online home based business crowd continues to define the company. The result of that vision is Phoenix Site Rebuilder, which is the company’s flagship product. Phoenix Site Rebuilder is high quality site builder software designed around drag and drop mechanics that is easy to use. Quickly build money making web pages that include Google AdSense, Amazon ads, ClickBank ads, PPC ads, data feeds, and more.

prweb.com

Scared Accountant Skyrockets to Success with an Online Home Based Business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. Adapt Strategic Marketing for Sustainable Online Success
2. Design and Navigation: Make Your Website Dynamic and Visitor-Friendly
3. Dynamic Web Copy: Get People to Respond
4. Traffic Conversion: Increase Sales and List Building
5. Automation: Increase E-Commerce Profits
6. Multimedia: Increase Your Impact using Audio, Video, and Conferencing
7. Web Audio
8. Podcasts
9. Web Video
10. Use Video to Increase Revenues: YouTube
11. Taking Your Video Viral
12. Video Blogging
13. Teleconferencing and Web Conferencing
14. Traffic Strategies: Get More Visitors to Your Site
15. Optimize Your Website
16. Web 2.0: The Key to Using Social Media Effectively

entrepreneur.com

Transform Your Website Into a Sales Powerhouse is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Fox’s Steve Noviello has the story of this young Internet entrepreneur (video, left).

“Carlita27” started on the road to hre unlikely living with a homework assignment.

“I had the option of writing a paper or making a movie and I didn’t want to write a paper so I made a movie. I made a YouTube channel and I put it on there. All of a sudden one of my videos went viral and YouTube featured it on their front page. from then people started picking up and they saw my other videos and it got caught up and everything started falling into place,” she said.

Now her movies are making big money because she is cashing in on thousands of clicks each months. That’s a significant step — even in cyberspace.

Carlita27 told Fox, “YouTube sent me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey you want to join our partner program?’ “

Some months, those thousands of clicks on her video can add up to thousands of dollars.

myfoxny.com

Make Money From YouTube is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

If you have good images, you can easily earn anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a month. Here are some places where you can sell your photos and earn money from them:

1. Shutterstock = one of the most, if not the most popular micro stock photography sites on the Web today. Some photographers earn about $600 a month from this site alone. The site pays you $0.25 per download of your images, as well as referrals both in terms of other photographers and photo buyers.
2. Alamy = as a contributor, you get 65% of the sale of your photos while you retain copyright and editorial control over your images.
3. Photoshelter = this site has over 25,000 buyers including magazines, advertising agencies and other high profile types of organizations. They will host your images, the number of which will depend on your subscription plan which ranges from free to $49.99 per month, and they take 10% of every sale you make.
4. StockXpert = offers you 50% for each download of your photographs, but they screen the images first to ensure the quality of the photographs offered in the site
5. Fotolia = a UK website, this site provides commission to photographers of up to 80% though the average is about 52% of the total sale price. You can choose to sell your images on an exclusive or non exclusive basis.
6. iStockPhoto = royalty structure is 20% if non-exclusive and 40% if exclusive.

Other sites that you need to check include:

• Acestock @ http://www.acestock.com
• Corbis @ http://www.corbis.com
• Dreamstime @ http://www.dreamstime.com
• BigStockPhoto @ http://www.bigstockphoto.com
• Fotolibra @ http://www.fotolibra.com
• Photostockplus @ http://www.photostockplus.com

powerhomebiz.com

How to Earn from Stock Photography is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. Unless you really have made a breakthrough such as cold fusion or a flying car, avoid claiming you have made an important “breakthrough!” Spam filters love that.
2. Do not talk too much about cash on the barrel head. Excessive discussion of money is like manna from heaven to many filters. If your topic is money, well, you have to talk about it but try to be discreet and not directly mention money too much. You know what the “get rich quick scheme” emails look like. Avoid the “get rich quick” look and feel at all cost.
3. Sorry Mortgage brokers but if the email looks like a mortgage pitch, the filters are likely to latch onto it. There are many legitimate mortgage broker marketers out there, of course, but the ones who abused email in the past have hurt your current opportunity to get into the Inbox. Make your pitch in more subtle ways, when possible.
4. Urgent! Well, if the sky is not falling do not claim urgency. All hucksters claim urgency, hence the filters are suspicious when an email marketer does this.
5. A “money back guarantee” is sort of like the “check is in the mail.” Nobody believes it in any context including email and the filters don’t believe it either.
6. If you ask someone “why pay more!” you are likely to be asking only cyberspace this question because the junk folder is where your email is likely to end up.
7. Too much hype. We all know excessive hype when we see it. It often includes exclamation marks!!! and ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Ideally, you would avoid all caps and exclamation marks in the subject line and the content or use in moderation.
8. Avoid spammy sounding phrases that are too good to be true. Yes, there really are “once in a life time opportunities” but, let me tell you, they never arrive in your Inbox.
9. Try to avoid sloppy HTML in your emails and never send an email out that is basically one giant image. The filters often assume spammers are sloppy with their HTML and legitimate email marketers are likely to be more careful. Second, a legitimate email marketer is very unlikely to send an email that is one giant image.
10. I think all of us have seen an email all in red type, fancy flashing objects, etc. If the email is hard on your eyes, it is probably hard on the eyes of your subscribers. Well, if your subscribers ever get to see the email as the filters have first crack at it.

smartbiz.com

10 Tips For Getting Your Email Marketing Emails Past the Spam Filters is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Producers of the Internet-video serial “lonelygirl15″ — once thought to be an amateur project but later revealed to be the product of professionals — have raised $5 million from prominent technology investors to expand and introduce new online shows.

The new funding for EQAL, the Los Angeles company behind “lonelygirl” and another popular Internet drama, “KateModern,” illustrates Silicon Valley’s continuing push to move video onto the Web and find better ways to make money from it. Though the online-video industry got a big boost after Google Inc. bought video site YouTube for $1.6 billion two years ago, many companies are still struggling to come up with viable revenue models.

Todd Dagres, a partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-based firm that led EQAL’s round of financing, said the studio understands that “the Web is not TV, and you can’t advertise like you do on TV.”

Instead, EQAL, formerly known as LG15 Studios and led by Chief Executive Miles Beckett and President Greg Goodfried, plans to weave advertising into the content of their shows, Mr. Dagres said, and also to interact with its community of viewers.

Other investors putting cash into EQAL include Silicon Valley’s Ron Conway, who backed Google in its early days; Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of browser pioneer Netscape Communications; Conrad Riggs, a Hollywood producer involved with TV shows such as “Survivor” and “The Apprentice”; and Georges Harik, a former Google executive.

wsj

‘Lonelygirl’ Gets Popular With Investors is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Jordan’s computer savvy has really paid off. Not only has he been able to tuck some cash away, but it’s earned him attention with the McElvy Foundation. They awarded him $40,000 for college!

Jordan- “I had no idea that you could get scholarships just from being a business owner at such a young age.”

But “Dotcomer” has been a lot more than a paycheck for Jordan. It’s taught him several aspects of running a business including how to conduct himself in a professional way.

Jordan-”It’s taught me to just be aware of how you act when you’re out in public or when your with people that could bve your potential clients in the future. You never know who you’re going to be workign with.”

kxmc.com

Teen Entrepreneur Earns $41,000 for College is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

According to the new policy, all items listed for sale on eBay.com.au on or after May 21, 2008, must offer PayPal as one of the payment methods. Beginning June17, all items appearing on eBay.com.au must be paid for using PayPal or pay on pick up. Visa and MasterCard are accepted only when processed through PayPal.

The only exceptions to the policy will be for listings in the categories of cars, motorcycles, aircraft, boats, caravans, trailers, trucks (commercials), services, real estate and businesses for sale.

eBay Australia Bans All Payment Methods Except PayPal is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

“This is something that’s been needed for a while, but no one has been able to do it successfully,” said Greg Sterling, of Sterling Marketplace Intelligence, an online consultancy. “With these new services, there are a lot of circumstances where it can work quite well for both the business and the consumer.”

When Jennifer Brinn opened a practice in massage and Reiki (a Japanese stress-reduction technique) in San Francisco in 2003, she relied on a day planner and lots of “e-mail and phone tag” to book appointments. Last year, she began testing HourTown, an online booking service started by a former product designer for PayPal, Ryan Donahue.

HourTown, like its competitors, BookingAngel and Genbook, is an online calendar tool, with a twist. Users fill the calendar with personal and business appointments, but they can also transmit to the Web any blocks of time they would like to make available for business appointments. Customers can book a time directly from the service provider’s Web site, or, in the case of Ms. Brinn, they can reserve a slot and wait for her to confirm the appointment with an e-mail. Either way, it is free for customers.

Last year, Ms. Brinn started buying text advertising on Google around the same time she added the HourTown booking technology to her site (www.jbrinn.com), and since that time her client base has doubled to more than 200. HourTown, she said, helps her attract more impulse buyers.

Making Appointments For Doctor Or Dinner is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. Coaching and Teaching
2. Communications/Information
3. Direct Sales
4. E-tailing
5. Event Planning
6. Parenting Services/Products
7. Personal Services
8. Virtual Assistant
9. Website Consultant
10. Work-at-Home Support

Mompreneurs Online

10 Businesses For Work At Home Moms is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Running a Web site that publishes reviews of camcorders sounds like a tame line of work. But I had a moment of terror when an executive at a major electronics manufacturer accused me of hacking into the corporation’s computer system to get information about a new product.

My site, CamcorderInfo.com, evaluates equipment for consumers. I started it five years ago as a senior in high school. While I attended Tufts University, my team and I built it to 20,000 visitors a day. Our major selling point is our reputation. Some reviewers in this field have damaged their credibility through cozy relationships with big manufacturers. We maintain our independence – and publicize it.

The executive’s accusation came after I published an advance look at one of his firm’s camcorders. I had found pictures and specs on the company’s Web site. He claimed that the review, which I considered to be neutral, had forced his employer to release a rudimentary version of the product early and damaged sales. He threatened to call the FBI to prosecute me if I didn’t reveal information about an anonymous source at the firm whom I had interviewed.

Complete story at FSB Magazine

The risks of running an ethical business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

In the current celebrity-obsessed scene, an A-list star – on or off the red carpet – shown wearing a new designer’s creation can almost singlehandedly launch a fashion frenzy.

When Jessica Simpson stepped out recently in West Hollywood with Sang A‘s “jade” clutch in blue python, blogs were quick to post her picture and solicit comments. And with the attention, from sites such as Pop Sugar and Style Minded, came demand for Sang A’s new $1,576 handbag.

Accessories designer Sang A learned early on that reaching out to the online community could be a crucial element of hawking her high-end handbags, which range in price from $1,500 to $15,000.

With a limited budget for marketing, Sang A has since come to rely heavily on blogs not just for attention, but also feedback.

The sites she chose to sell her wares, such as luxcouture.com and lagerconne.com, have developed mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers by incorporating reciprocal links.

“Blogging is absolutely important because it reaches the people that aren’t inside the fashion industry,” Sang A said.

CNN Money

New designers find shortcut to fashion fame is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

For an e-commerce novice, an all-inclusive service may be most sensible. Yahoo Inc.’s Merchant Solutions, for instance, lets users get a domain name and choose one of 12 predesigned Web-site templates.

You could save money by picking an all-inclusive service without sales-transaction fees. GoDaddy.com, owned by the Go Daddy Group, offers an e-commerce site-building and hosting service called Quick Shopping Cart, which has plans starting at $9.99 a month for sites with up to 20 product listings.

The Wall Street Journal

Keeping Costs Low For an Internet Business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

If all goes as planned, it could become the MySpace for walkers.

The target audience is huge and growing: Nearly 72 million Americans say walking is their favorite form of exercise, and older Americans favor it most.

The free online service complements the subscription-based service already in place on walkstyles.com. Walkers are encouraged to use a DashTrak to tally their daily steps and monitor their progress or to check it against others in the group. It’s a product that people all over the country – mostly women – have encouraged Parks to build, so they can find like-minded walkers wherever they go.

Sun Herald

Entrepreneur Hopes Web Site Will Be Myspace For Walkers is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Spending on online video advertising will more than triple in the next three years, growing from $775.0 million this year to $2.90 billion in 2010, according to research company eMarketer.

With the anticipated surge in spending, media companies are scrambling to get in on the action, as demonstrated by the partnership announced last month by NBC Universal and News Corp. to form an online video ad network.

In announcing the as-yet-unnamed venture, News Corp. President-COO Peter Chernin called it “the largest ad platform on earth,” with an audience that will reach about 96% of the U.S. Web viewing audience. The video network will be distributed by partners including Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, News Corp.’s MySpace, Time Warner’s AOL and Yahoo.

Already, the video venture has lined up charter advertisers including Cisco Systems, General Motors Corp. and Intel Corp.

BtoB Magazine

Online Video Generating Excitement is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Ever since a bootleg clip of a Saturday Night Live sketch comedy skit put YouTube on the map in December 2005, the growing consensus among Web watchers has been that short comedy clips are the “killer app” of the brave new viral video world.

SuperDeluxe.com, a comedy broadband network launched in January by Turner Broadcasting, and FunnyOrDie.com, a partnership between Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions and Sequoia Capital, venture capital firm behind YouTube and Google.

Funny Business Going On Online is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Switchpod is a podcasting hosting service that provides both free and premium accounts. You can create a podcast with their technology, upload it to Switchpod and be podcasting to the world in a matter of minutes.

Switchpod’s product soon generated 800,000 downloads and was bought out by Wizzard Software in an all-stock transaction worth $200,000. The sale also provides the partners with annual salaries of $40,000 for a 20-hour workweek.

startupjournal.com

America’s Next Business Tycoons is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

They all center around one huge rule: You must bring the business conversation away from MySpace. As long as you are on MySpace, you have to play by its members’ rules.

1. The first thing you must have is a form to get your visitors email addresses. You will increase your sign-up five-fold if you give them some sort of incentive to give their email address. Promote this by posting bulletins.
2. Syndication code. MySpace users are Web savvy. They know how to edit basic html and add it to their MySpace page. You want to have a pre-made banner ad with a link to your Web site and supply the html code so that if one of your MySpace friends wants to post your ad on his/her page, doing so is very easy.
3. There must be an obvious link to your Web site.
4. A reason to come back. Have fun on that one.

Here’s a little wisdom so you don’t have to learn the hard way. The most important advice I can give you is to never send unsolicited messages to other MySpace users.

marketingprofs.com

Using Your MySpace Page For Business is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. A faster and better way to create newsletter articles.
2. A strategy for getting published.
3. A low-cost way for a small business owner to market online.
4. A method to communicate and connect — especially important for business owners.
5. Satisfaction of some inner need to share.

Why do you blog? Or, if you do not currently blog, tell us the reason you do not.

smallbiztrends.com

Five Reasons For Small Business Owners To Blog is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Golden Palace purchased the notorious Virgin Mary cheese sandwich, a haunted walking stick ($65, 000,) and the “mystery envelope?” ($7,600.) More recently the company bought a Britney Spears half-eaten egg salad sandwich and a William Shatner kidney stone.

At first glance it might seem that the folks at Golden Palace have more money than sense — a lot more money. But do they really? The publicity garnered from purchasing these ridiculous items is much better than simply spending money on traditional advertising.

EBay’s home for the absurd is the “Weird Stuff” category that breaks down into three sub-categories: “Slightly Unusual,” “Really Weird,” “Totally Bizarre.” A recent check showed about 12,000 auctions in the three sub-categories.

eCommerce-Guide

Making Mad Money on eBay is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

1. Introduce Yourself & Your Blog.
2. Make Friends via MyBlogLog.
3. Pay it Forward.

People spend so much time trying to learn how to game the system, write the best linkbait, and come up with automated methods for promotion, that they tend to ignore the basic strategy of networking. Be friendly to your fellow bloggers and they’ll be friendly to you.

Net Business Blog

Link-Building Secret is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

Amazon.com, the online retailer, is expanding a program designed to allow independent sellers to use its network of distribution centers to store and ship their products, according to Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive.

Since last fall, the program, Fulfillment by Amazon, has allowed independent sellers who list their goods on Amazon.com to use its network of more than 20 distribution centers around the world to fill orders. Now Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is opening the program to vendors who list their items elsewhere on the Web — on their own site, through Google, or even on Amazon’s e-commerce rival, eBay.

The program is part of a broader set of tools called Amazon Web Services, an effort by the e-commerce pioneer to rent out complicated parts of its infrastructure to smaller companies that might benefit from its hard-earned expertise, and who will pay for the privilege of lightening their workload.

The New York Times

Sold on eBay, Shipped by Amazon is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

While Skype charges ‘call providers’ more than Ether does—30% commission versus 15%—Skype’s obvious benefit is its existing global user base. Skype has over 171 million registered users, is available in 28 languages and is used in almost every country around the world. Which means a very large reach for minipreneurs who’d like to sell their services, whether they’re offering Spanish lessons, tax advice or something saucier. (Note that Skype’s guidelines state that call providers cannot offer any content or service that is adult, sexual, pornographic or paedophiliac.)

Other alternatives include BitWine and Wengo.

springwise.com

Sell What You Say is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

When word of a whites-only scholarship at Boston University hit the media last fall–drawing coverage from bloggers and biggies like ABC alike–Daniel Kovach smelled opportunity. His goal: to boost traffic to the website he runs, Scholarships Around the US. So he paid a writer to crank out “The White Man’s Guide to Getting a Minority Scholarship,” which reveals that some schools do offer scholarships to “nonblack” students–and added it to the mix.

Then Kovach planted a link to the article on recommendation site Digg, where it jumped to the coveted front page. That, in turn, led other sites to link to the article. And Kovach landed a top search ranking on Google for phrases like “white man scholarship.”

Such timely strategies have helped Kovach turn his year-old site into a $10,000-per-month cash cow (see correction below). Not bad for a 26-year-old who works about an hour a day out of his townhouse in Raleigh, N.C.

Media outlets have, of course, always exploited offbeat events and stories to drive traffic. But today it’s easier than ever to profit from a surge of interest in a particular topic. Some people simply aim for 15 minutes of Web fame and make a few hundred bucks by setting up a site around a topic, loading it with Google pay-per-click ads, and working social sites to link to it.

CNN Money

How to make money without really trying is a post from: Top Business Opportunities

While Madison Avenue advertisers are looking for new ways to break through the noise smaller companies are using their creativity and low-budget production to stake out a national and even global piece of the online marketing pie. Case in point Terrence Kelleman the inventor of a creative jewelry line who used YouTube videos to launch his company Dynomighty Design onto the national marketplace with his mesmerizing video, “magic magnetic”.

Case in point: A simple video with a white backdrop and one amazing bracelet which caught national attention over the week of Christmas that catapulted a small company of 3 into “an ambitious team of believers” recalls Terrence Kelleman from his new office in Brooklyn. Kelleman recounts, “I didn’t really have a marketing budget for the holidays with many costs building up around me, and so I decided to make some videos in my spare time after work to post on YouTube in hopes of getting some attention, it worked.”

Indeed it did work with over 2 million views that keep growing Kelleman’s small company is trying to keep up with demand. “That video has changed everything for our business” Kelleman recollects “until then we had been doing well but we were not meeting our sales goal for the holidays, then all of a sudden our biggest problem was getting orders filled fast enough.”

PowerHomeBiz.com

Small Home Business Company Using YouTube Video Marketing For Big Gains is a post from: Top Business Opportunities