Gary Burton has just launched his newest website Ideas Festival.

If you already follow Gary, Oli and Daves blog, then you will know that you will definitely want to check out Ideas Festival.

Gary is going to give away ebooks that will be about creating and running your online business.

The first one is called Big Business on a Shoestring Budget, and is a pretty good one to start with as most people seem to start an online business with a minimum investment.

The book will walk you through the basics of buying a domain name, getting some website hosting, building a website, setting up and autoresponder, creating and info product and then marketing the product to make money. All while spending as little money as possible.

There’s a fair bit of information flying around about Squidoo getting penalized by Google for publishing spam. So that’s why mine are getting less traffic!

It’s been no secret that it is super simple to rank for just about anything by creating a Squidoo lens with your keywords and sending your hapless visitors off through your affiliate links.

I’ve been using it for some time with great results and have found ways to knock other lenses off the top spots and secure double listings on page 1 of Google.

However all good things must come to an end and Squidoo is taking steps to weed out the spammers.

Which is great news. Now all the bottom feeders will bugger off to find another great thing to spam and the rest of us can get smart and find ways to stay in Squidoo and snap up all the great lens titles that will become available.

Here are some ways to stay in Squidoo:

1. Write good content. You will just have to bite the bullet and write a good Squidoo lens. It will take a little longer, but remember that it should stay there for ever making you money and traffic.
2. Don’t put blatant affiliate links in the lens. Buy a domain and send your visitors there - and then off to the merchant site.
3. Make more than 3 modules .. or you won’t be published. Well that’s not too tricky.
4. Proxy Servers - Squidoo will be monitoring IP addresses to identify multiple accounts. If you must create heaps of lenses, then you may want to consider using proxy servers when creating and logging into your accounts.

Of course, if Squidoo gets totally booted out of the Google index then all of this will be useless, since you are relying on search traffic for visitors.

And remember, Squidoo is not the only website that can be used for this sort of thing. Little gems can be found all over the place when you are doing your keyword research and competitor analysis.

For more information on the Squidoo Slap, visit the following websites:

Google acting against Squidoo due to spam.
Google Filters Squidoo Lenses?.
The Squidoo Slap.

Rob Benwell has released Blogging To The Bank 2. I have the original Blogging To The Bank, and allthough there was nothing ground breaking in it - at least nothing that can’t be learned from a few of the better forums and blogs, I did think that it threw a few interesting ideas around.

Since Blogging To The Bank 2 is only costs $47, I though I would give it a whirl and write up a review here.

First off, the information in Blogging To The Bank 2 is not rocket science. So, if you are already making money from blogging, I would say that you do not need to buy this book.

However, I myself make my money from blogging, and am always on the lookout for new or variations on money making ideas that I use in my blogging - which is the reason that I bought it. And Blogging To The Bank 2 has enough information on this so that I am not going to request a refund

There are also some reasonable bonus items that attracted me to purchase it - namely the Article Submitter software, some PLR articles (always handy) and Blog Announcer Pro (not entirely sure what this is, but it looks interesting).

Ok. If you are fairly new to affiliate marketing, and you are able to follow through on using somebody elses strategy, then I can pretty much assure you that you will make money using the techniques outlined in this book. I know because I have several blogs that I have not even touched for a year and they continue to make money day after day. This is what Blogging To The Bank 2 is pretty much about. If you can get a blog earning money, then it is just a case of rinsing and repeating until you are making as much money as you need or want.

Blogging To The Bank 2 shows you how to:

1. Set up your webhosting
2. Install wordpress
3. Do your market research - getting keywords etc.
4. Creating and aquiring content for your blog
5. Marketing and promoting your blog to get traffic
6. Some basic Wordpress SEO techniques

Like I said before, none of this is especially advanced. But if you are an affiliate marketing newbie, it could take you several weeks to get this info from forums and blogs (And thats why I read E-books).

So take a look at Blogging To The Bank 2 and check it out further.