I received an email yesterday about a local business incentive package for technical companies that are willing to hire interns.

My first reservation was to wonder whether or not jumping through all the government hoops would be worth any possible compensation that would be paid against the wages of the intern(s).

Then there are folks like Mr. Brausch who claim to have scores of interns who will do many tasks for free, in exchange for learning an Internet business from the inside (by actually doing the work to keep it running).

Well Mr. Brausch is having a “question period” on the topic of intern programs. Ask him a question on your blog and via a trackback, he’ll know about it and then answer the question.

“What is the one question… that if you had the answer to… would allow you to create your own successful intern program?”

My intern program question is…

What do I need to have in place to make sure that I create an intern program that will be a net gain in productivity for my business rather than a drain on my time and energy?

My experience so far is the most people just want to ask question after question and after a while I feel like I am working for my intern (or any other employee) rather than the other way around.

I’d love an answer to that question, because that is what holds me back in growing my business and creating more freedom in my life.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

In the next week or so I’ll be launching a new Blog Installation service and I need some testimonials, so I’m looking for people who need a blog setup.

Here’s what you’ll get along with the latest version of WordPress:

• create a professional you@yoursite.com email address for you to use to promote your blog.
• install a robots.txt file to protect your site’s admin area from search engine spiders.
• setup your permalinks.
• configure spam protection to prevent comment spam.
• create and install Feedburner to allow you to track, promote and customize your RSS feed.
• install over 20 popular plugins and 50 theme options

These are straight from my sales page. If you have a theme you prefer I can install that for you as well.

You will need to have a domain and a hosting account, although I can help you find both if you would like.

I would like to get this done before the weekend, so consider it a very limited time offer.

Here’s a chance to get a fully tricked out blog professionally installed, just leave a comment and I’ll email you with more details, or you can use my contact form.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

This article builds off of my previous post about how I discovered the technique of using domain names as affiliate links. In the last couple years I have used the technique quite a bit and have noticed the following 7 major benefits.

They Become Valuable As Domain Names

Aged domain names have value. I like to grab something generic, so that it can be re-purposed easily. For example if YouTube had an affiliate program I would grab a domain (always a .com) like OnlineVideos.com. That way it can have value beyond what it is currently being used for.

This way, as I use and promote my affiliate link, the domain is being aged and is developing value that a normal affiliate link would never have. It has turned into an asset in your online business. Rich Dad fans will know that you get rich by acquiring assets.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Highly observant Art of Money readers will have realized that I will sometimes use a domain name as an affiliate redirect link.

A couple of examples:

http://www.blogmasterminds.com/ is my domain which cloaks Yaro’s http://www.blogmastermind.com/

http://www.buildingprofitablewebsites.com/ is my domain which redirects to The University 20/20 Course that I’m taking.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Even though I’ve had to put my push to get to $100 a day from this site down on my priority chart for a while, I thought it would be interesting to continue to post this blog’s earnings, since people seem to like that kind of thing.

Traffic Stats

All very encouraging. Thanks to Problogger picking up one of my stories and Leo from Idiot Affiliate for nice bumps in visitors and RSS readers.

Google Ranking for Keyword Phrases

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

AdSense Referrals 2.0 – CPA Ads EditionAdSense has opened up their Cost Per Action ads beta test to every AdSense publisher.

Now this program has a really unfortunate name of “Referrals” and they have lumped it in with their old referrals program: you remember the one where you got one whole dollar if someone installed Firefox with the Google toolbar, or up to $100 dollars if you were lucky enough to sign up one of the last half dozen or so webmasters on the Internet who wasn’t already using AdSense.

Ya, those referrals.

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Last night I happened to catch Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on Larry King Live. It was a special episode of the show to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Cirque de Soleil show featuring the music of The Beatles: Love.

I’m dating myself big time, but I’m actually old enough to remember The Beatles and, granted I was a very musically progressive 8 year old, to have purchased Let It Be when it first hit the store shelves. The interview was actually quite emotional for me as it recapped the amazing power that these 4 guys had to affect the world around them through their music.

Later, reflecting on the interview and the questions Larry asked Paul and Ringo about their success with The Beatles, I began to wonder what it would have been like if John, Paul, George & Ringo were bloggers.

Here’s my list of blogging tips that I transposed from those thoughts:

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This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

I was working on a privacy document for a new site and as I sketched out all the various policies that the document need to address, I started to wonder how many people don’t even realize how much information about themselves that they leave behind when they do something as simple as visit a website.

Let’s crack open a typical visitor’s log entry and see what I get when you visit my site.

I know:

• MSIE 6.0 – Your browser version
• Alberta, Edmonton, Canada – Your location
• b020650f1950c2f35.ed.shawcable.net - Your computer’s host name as assigned by your hosting company
• 68.149.160.170 – Your IP address
• www.google.com - The site you came from
• q=elite keyword - The search term you looked up on Google to find my site
• 26th June 2007 15:21:38 – The time you arrived
• 10 mins 28 secs - The length of time you stayed on my site
• page a, page c, page d - A list of all the pages you looked at on my site
• Windows XP – Your computer’s operating system
• 1280×1024 – Your screen or monitor resolution

This list is just a partial list, since I use a simple JavaScript logging service, there is more information available with real server logs.

If they start to get into setting cookies onto your computer, a webmaster, or ad company can then begin to track your browsing activities across many sites. Why would they want to do this? So they can “understand” what you are interested in and fine tune the ads you are exposed to in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Notable on this list is your host name as it is a unique name that can be traced, via your hosting company to your account. If you do something illegal online, like download stolen mp3′s, the record company can subpoena your provider to get your name and charge you.

There isn’t really anything too dramatic on this list, but it still feels a little bit alarming to be leaking all this information every time I visit a web site. Services like MyBlogLog also up the ante by tracking sites that you visit while you are logged into their service.

The other thing to note about this info is that it is not only available to websites that you visit but also to the computer providing your Internet access. If you are at work for example, the techies (or the boss) would have this access stored on their system by default.

You can understand the explosion of privacy cloaking applications and proxies which hide this data.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.