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It's a beautifully crisp and clear Monday morning here where I am. There's not a cloud in the sky, the sun is just coming up and it promises to be a great day ... it's a shame that they're actually forecasting rain and thunderstorms to start in just a few hours time.

Maybe there's a lesson about promises for us somewhere in all that but I don't want to spend too much time thinking, I just want to enjoy the morning while it's so nice.

The value in Twitter
I've talked about Twitter here before but if you haven't had a look at it yet then head over to twitter.com and have a look around. Some call it a collection of micro-blogs while others look on it as an instant messaging system. It's already attracted its fair share of spammers but it's not really a system that is open to spamming.

So if you want to use it as a tool for spamming then I don't think I would really bother ... you would just be wasting your time. In fact I've got to say that it's nice to find somewhere that spammers can't bug you but that doesn't mean that Twitter doesn't have its uses for other things besides communicating and learning.

Messages sent through Twitter get indexed by Google and if that doesn't turn a light bulb on in your head then maybe you should go back to bed and start the day all over again.

Google Knol
Speaking of Google and search engine placements for important terms ... have you tried Knol yet?

Google Knol is something that Google hopes will become bigger that Wikipedia ... and it just happens to be run along similar lines to Wikipedia. If you missed the land rush for Wikipedia pages then you really don't want to miss this one because some knols ... that's what individual pages on Google Knol are known as ... are already beginning to appear on the first page of Google's search engine results pages.

Some experts are suggesting that using a knoll as a way to drop links to other pages is not going to be of much use because Google says that all links will include a no-follow attribute. But don't always believe what the experts say ... sure those links may have a no-follow attribute but who says that Google doesn't crawl those links and assign some value to the page or site that the link is pointing to?

What's making you the most money?
Over the weekend Steve and I spent a little time doing an audit on our business. It's something that we do from time to time and I think that's it's something that every webmasters should do occasionally. All too often we're so busy working that we don't really have a clear picture of which things we do that make the most money and which things we do take the most time.

Sometimes the things we do that take the most time ... even though they may bring in a lot of money ... may not be the things that make us the most money. I guess that goes back to the 80/20 rule that suggest that 80 per cent of our time is taken up making 20 per cent of our income.

So if you take some time to step back from all the work and take a look at what your business is doing don't be surprised if you find that you're spending a lot of your time making not much of your income.

While we didn't find anything too startling we did realize that on at least three of our mainstream sites we're not doing much to monetize some large amounts of daily traffic. In fact we really do need to do something serious about that because what we're looking at isn't just money left on the table ... it's money and traffic slipping through our fingers.

We're not going to rush in and make some serious changes overnight ... or even this week. Instead we'll take some time to put some plans together and then we'll start to make some changes and that's the way you should do it too.

If you find some parts of your business that aren't performing as well as they should then stop and spend time doing some research. Look at what others are doing ... if they're doing it better than you are ... see if you can make the changes that might be needed to better monetize parts of your business.

And if you can't improve the situation then be prepared to bite the bullet and drop those poorly performing parts of your business and concentrate all your efforts on those things that are producing the money. That can be a real act of bravery but if you've looked at the situation from every angle before making the move then it should definitely work for you.