Roundup 8/22/08: eBay Lowers Fees!

This week in online business: eBay reduces fees associated with fixed-price listings. It's rare that we get to report about eBay lowering fees, but they did this week!

This week's roundup links to 18 awesome resources, including:

• Blogging Lessons From The Daily Show's Jon Stewart
• Is Google finally integrating AdSense data into Analytics? Rumors abound. There are even screenshots!
• Six Ways to Get Instant Links to Your Website
• Free Legal Documents for Raising Funding for Your Startup
• ... and a dozen other useful links!

If you have a tip for next week's roundup, email me at onlinebusiness.guide@about.com. Thanks!

Ecommerce

• eBay Lowers Fixed Price Insertion Fees [About eBay] - eBay's strength is its auction business. Ecommerce sellers, however, prefer to offer fixed-price listings in a storefront. It results in a more predictable sales model when the sell price doesn't fluctuate based on buyers' moods. To boost its fixed-price cred against competitors like Amazon Marketplace and Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, eBay has lowered the upfront insertion fee for fixed-price (or "Buy It Now") listings.

Blogging

• Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart [O'Reilly Radar] - Stewart's Daily Show "shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters."
  
  
• Blog Fatigue? Try Mixing Things Up [Blog Herald] - Some of the biggest challenges in building a successful blog are perseverance and consistency. After a few months (or years) of consistent posting, even the best bloggers get tired. If you're finding yourself struggling to maintain your blog, try some of these tips to mix it up and reawaken your enthusiasm.
  
  
• Top Bloggers: How Much They Earn [The Digerati Life] - Summary of what the very top blogs/bloggers earn. Includes BoingBoing, Problogger.net, Perez Hilton, Techcrunch, and others.
  
  
• How to Add AdSense for Feeds to Your Blog [About Google] - About.com Guide to Google Marziah Karch offers this 5-step guide to adding AdSense advertising to your blog's RSS feeds.

Webmaster's Toolbox

• Is Google Analytics Integrating AdSense Metrics Into Reporting Tool? [SearchEngineLand] - Rumor has it that Google will be including AdSense data in Google Analytics reports. If the rumors are true, there will be many happy webmasters who will be able to better optimize their website content because traffic and advertising stats can be more easily correlated.

Search Engines, SEO/SEM, and Link Building

• 6 Ways to Get Nearly Instant Links to Your Website [Bill Hartzer] - Six ideas for generating "instant" links to your new website content. Some pretty decent ideas here for new sites/blogs, but remember that these techniques don't result in high value links. For that, you'll want to establish relationships with other websites in your niche so they will give you plenty of link love.
  
  
• Making the Business Case for SEO [SearchEngineLand] - It's hard to quantify the ROI of a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. There are a lot of variables, and the effort put into an SEO project only indirectly leads to higher sales (hopefully). But there are a few indirect metrics to watch out for. This article provides tips to help sell the need for an SEO campaign to your boss or clients.
  
  
• How to Adopt a Pro-SEO Culture at Your Company [SearchEngineLand] - "The most successful SEO programs aren’t solely the result of a great SEO team. They happen because the entire company incorporates SEO into their portion of a given project, and the ROI on this level of SEO engagement from the entire company is through the roof."

Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

• reCAPTCHA: Awesome Use of Wasted Time That Works [SitePoint Blogs] - Captchas are those text or image questions you have to answer to prove you're not a spambot before you can register or post on a website. They're a valuable tool in the war on spam. reCAPTCHA is a popular and easy-to-use captcha service that not only fights spam, it uses the answers it collects to help improve optical recognition software. Fascinating read on an innovative Web service that fixes two disparate problems with one solution.
  
  
• What is Social Media? [Learning SEO Basics] - Collection of various definitions of social media. The phrase has been applied to a whole host of wildly varying websites and services. Even though no one can settle on a single consensus definition of "social media", most people agree that it's all about user interaction. (After reading how Web luminaries define "social media", check out our overview of social media websites and services.)
  
  
• Y Combinator to Offer Standardized Funding Legal Docs [Techcrunch] - Early stage venture capital firm Y Combinator is "open sourcing" the legal documents they give to the startups they fund. Experts familiar with the process say legal costs for just one round of funding can be over $20,000. Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham says the goal of releasing these documents is to help young startups avoid some of the expenses of that first small round of funding.
  
  
• Market Research on a Budget [About Marketing] - We all know that market research is a must. But what is less well-known is how to get to that market research without spending our entire startup budget. About.com Guide to Marketing Laura Lake explains what kind of data to look for when doing research, plus three places where you can find that information.

New Articles Here at About Online Business

• Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors - And how you can apply them to your website so it appears higher in search results.
  
  
• 6 Reasons Why You Should Care About Social News - Social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are powerful Web communities you can't ignore. Other than the potential to send massive traffic to your site (50,000+ page views in a single day), being an active participant in the social news scene gives you a significant leg up on your competition.
  
  
• How to Get the Best Out of Your Web Designer - Expert designer Naomi Miles of Intuitive Designs writes about the three phases of a Web design project: planning the project, doing the project, and afterwards. She offers tips on how to work with your Web designer during each phase to get the possible outcome on your design project.
  
  
• Interview with a Quickbooks Expert - I had a chance to talk to Camille Wright, a Quickbooks consultant to small businesses, about common accounting issues facing small business owners. She offers some tips on getting a handle on your accounting and taxes, and how you can get the most out of Quickbooks.
  
  
• 11 Do-It-Yourself SEO Tricks - If you're new to online business, you can quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of SEO related advice flying around the Web. You may be tempted to pay high fees for an SEO consultant to take care of it all for you. But the problem with that is twofold: first, basic SEO is easy enough that you can do it yourself. Second, proper SEO is not a one-time project. It requires an ongoing awareness of being SEO friendly... and you can't do that if you've outsourced your SEO strategy. Guest expert Scott Fox (author of Internet Riches) covers 11 SEO tricks you can (and should) do yourself.