Employment

Back in the early 1990s, when the internet was new and fresh, there were many popular search engines. Those with good quality indexing services, such as Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista Excite and HotBot quickly rose to the top. When Google came around in 1998, the switch to this powerful bot-assisted Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines was rapid because it was so democratic and comprehensive in its page ranking - the competition was all but over in a very short time, with Google still accounting for nearly half the web searches worldwide in 2007. But, this doesn't mean the other PPC search engines are not worth your attention and they are indeed worth serious consideration for online advertisers, but as a general rule Google AdWords is the best place to begin your online advertising. Today, pay-per-click advertising, as made very popular by Google AdWords, is a multi-billion dollar industry that allows just about any business to compete on equal footing with the largest ...

Kirk Simpson learned a thing or two after his first start-up joined the dot-com graveyard in 2001. Such as: don't start a business with friends. "There's a tendency with your first business to surround yourself with friends as co-founders," says Simpson, who launched adventurelifestyle.com in 1997 at age 23, after dropping out of college. The site helped people arrange extreme adventure trips, such as bungee jumping excursions. "I think there's a natural desire to do it. You have to look at it from 50,000 feet: if I didn't know this person as a friend, would I want to work with him or her? Then look at the friendship -- is there loyalty, trustworthiness?"  Adventurelifestyle.com was largely self-funded, with some angel financing. Simpson and his buddy hired five more employees (friends) before it folded. He blames the failure on his youthful naivete, among other things. "We didn't have a big enough network," he says, to really figure o...