Facebook, the social media network, has become an advertising network with it’s launch of  Facebook Ads. Facebook made the official announcement November 6, 2007 at Ad:Tech New York. The new ad network fires a shot across the bows of Google, which is trying to take Facebook head on with its own social-networking platform call OpenSocial.

Facebook ads have 3 parts:

Social Ads: Ads that are targeted to the user and user’s friends

Beacon: Ad widgets that advertisers can put on their own that allow facebook members become produce endorsers.

Insight: Provides advertises with deep analytics data so they can understand who is intereseted in there products

“Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online,” Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 250 marketing and advertising executives in New York. “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

Read Official Press Release Facebook Unveils Facebook Ads

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Darren has just posted the full details of his massive $54,000 ProBlogger Giveaway. Infact, he points out the total is probably closer to $60,000.

Over the next 7 days he will be giving away $54,000 worth of prizes that were donated to him from the blogging community. In total there are around 115 sponsors with some donating multiple prizes.  The prizes range from theme songs composed for podcasts/videos (something I wouldn’t mind winning myself), to iPods, to logo designs, to magazine subscriptions, to books, to cash and vouchers and so much more. Prizes values range from just a few dollars in value to thousands of dollars.

What are the Rules and how do you get in on the action! 

• Prizes will be won given away in a series of different rounds over the next week - mostly between Friday and Sunday (a little weekend fun).
• Tomorrow I’ll be posting a full list of prizes that have been donated. They’ll include both the prizes and who they’ve been donated by.
• We’ll also launch the competition tomorrow with the first round of giveaways - the purpose of this first competition is simply to spread the word of the competition.
• The competitions will have a range of entry criteria. Some will simply be asking you to leave a comment to say that ‘you’re in’. Others will require you to write a post on a particular topic or in a particular style (like my Group Writing Projects).

Problogger has release a full list of what prizes he will be giving away.  Read this post to see a complete list.

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BlogRush - The fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers to you blog…Absolutely Free!

The latest big traffic builder that everyone is talking about is only 3 days old and is being talked about by all the big players:

John Chow blogging on BlogRush, with his “Increase Your Blog Traffic with BlogRush”

Shoemoney on “How to Get 45,000 Impressions a Day from BlogRush“. This was quite an interesting read as Jeremy goes on to offer up his own impressions earned through the network, to anyone that signs up to BlogRush through his blog. I’m sure he will build a massive base of members under him, but not even Jeremy himself is sure how profitable they will be in the long run.

Jim Kukral’s post “John Reese & Blogrush Want To Resell Your Data” this morning. It looks like we finally have some negative publicity against BlogRush.

So How Does BlogRush Work
BlogRush is a Link Exchange for the web 2.0 world. Once it is installed the system counts the number of impressions it gets and that determines how many times our feed will get shown across the network. This means if your blog gets 200 impressions per day, it will shown on 200 times per day on other sites.

You can gain extra credits when people you refer gain impressions with their widgets. Each time one of your referral gets an impression, you earn on credit.

People become your referral when they click on your widget and sign up for BlogRush, or when they use your affiliate link.

Watch a video that will explain the process

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Over at Shoemoney.com he just made a post that Kelly Felix (the Rich Jerk) is selling the Rich Jerk operation in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Then about 20 minutes ago a friend who I trust in the business who is pretty close to Kelly Felix says he is just about bankrupt and hoping to climb out of the hole and even make some profit. The source also says that Kelly blew a ton of investors money buying advertising on Howard Stern and fake commercials/tv spots to make it look like he was rich.

The business is listed for sale at BizQuest.com. IT has a listed selling price of $8 Million. No real details are listed as to why that the business is being sold other than:

Multiple owners looking to work on various other projects, separately.

To me this is so funny considering the idea of The Rich Jerk is to teach you how to make money online and gain your freedom. Now that same company may be going under. I will do a follow-up if I find out more.

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Fortune Magazine has just rated Google as the best place to work in the United States. Some of the things that make them the best are:

• Free meals
• Swimming spa
• Free doctors onsite
• Free Laundry service
• Engineers can spend 20% of time on independent projects

No wonder Google gets 1,300 résumés a day.

Oprah got to tour the Googleplex for her show to talk about why it is such a great place to work. Watch the video below.

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One thing that I have seen over and over again in discusion boards and blog entries is “How do I choose a Niche that is going to work?” This is one question that will have hundreds of answers and none of them my be right for you. This is because each person will market differently, write copy differently and use a different page layout. The one thing that I think is most important is once you find your niche keep testing different things until you find the one that works for you in the niche that you are in.

You will read a lot in the forums that you should go after popular niches. They are the the ones that will have the most traffic. This is true but they are also the one’s that are going to be most competitive. You will also see people talking about going after niche’s int the Longtail arena. Though they will have less traffic they will be more targeted and have a better conversion rate. To me this is all true. There is no perfect niche out there. It is a niche because it is an interest to someone. No matter if it is a dozen people or millions of people. There is always away to make money advertising to any niche. It is all in the way that you market to them that is going to attract them to what you have to offer. So don’t be fooled into thinking that just because you niche is very popular that you will be able to make money in that niche. You have to have the right message and the right ad placement.

So sit down think about what interest you and what you know about and use that as your starting point and not what Technorati says is popular.

Now don’t get me wrong I am not saying that going after what is popular and hot at this very moment is not going to make you money if you do it correctly. I think one great article the is talking about the proper ways to do this is over at Profit JaneMayblogs.com - From A Niche Right Now - A Step By Step Guide. In this artilce she is talking about creative way that you can make money and use the popularity of the niche to earn the money.  Will this work for everyone NO! But why not give it a shot.

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At the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen unveiled the new version of Google Analytics. The Google Analytics official blog reports that the New Version includes a redesigned reporting interface, new email and export reports, custom dashboard, trend and over-time graph and more contextual help tips.

This upgrade will be rolled out over the coming weeks and users will have access to the old version for a month.

Search Engine Land has some screenshots of the new version.

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