Last night you read on your local newspaper's website about how gas prices could reach $4 a gallon this summer, so you went to a car site to check out some reviews about hybrid vehicles and then visited an automaker site to learn about the car prices. This morning when you checked your email, you saw two ads for hybrid cars.

Did you think - wow, this relevant ad sure is handy or, yikes, Big Brother is watching my every move?

In the old days, a telephone came in two designs and had one ring. With the rise in cell phones, the styles are endless and so are the types of rings you can make the phone chime. There are master tones, ringback tones, polytones, monotones and they all have a price. Users can download them over the Internet and program a ring to sound only when mom or that special someone calls. Users can also send a ring out to someone to let them know who is calling. But they aren't cheap - as much as three times the cost of one hit single from iTunes.

A work-at-home marketer complained that he gained 30 pounds in the last few years when his home-run online marketing business became successful. In fact, his wife stopped working, he was doing so well. He published an e-book on how he made it and he moved his family to a bigger house. He loves riding bikes with his kids and happily juggles his work hours and a new 11-month-old baby. A great success story, except that he just can't lose that 30 pounds.

As the CEO of TradeDoubler - a Swedish performance network with a vast European presence - William Cooper has his eye on global expansion. TradeDoubler, with its local offices in 15 countries across Europe, is known as the biggest affiliate marketing network in the U.K. Cooper was appointed president and CEO in March of 2007, riding a wave of first-quarter revenue for 2007, up 30 percent. Previously, Cooper, a six-year veteran of TradeDoubler, was COO of the company for a year. Before that, he oversaw the company's U.K. operations.

This sounds like any hard worker in the performance marketing space, you think. The only difference is that Gevirtz is a freshman. No, he is not a freshman in college, not the next Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame) working out of a dorm room. Gevirtz is a freshman in high school - a 15- year-old wunderkind.

If you think getting people to shop online is tough, consider the plight of nonprofit organizations. They ask people for their time and/or money, but instead of receiving goods, these donors simply get the satisfaction of doing good.

Although nonprofit organizations may have a different agenda from the for-profit online marketers, many of the goals (building relationships, income, brand awareness, etc.) are the same.

The new geography features auction-based ad exchanges and conglomerated companies with divisions that buy, sell and distribute ads: something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

In my last column, you were warned to "Never watch sausage being made," lest you find the process so unappetizing you'd never eat it again. But even if you find sausage links tasty, you'll want to spit out those spam links every time.

Last time, we explored the consequences of content spam, which include bad publicity and getting banned from the search engines. This time around, we'll explore link spam techniques so you can avoid them or notice when your competitor stoops to them.

For many aspiring affiliates, the phrase Affiliate Lifestyle conjures up visions of big beautiful homes and shiny new sports cars. Graphic images on affiliate training sites encourage visitors to imagine themselves at their desk, dressed in pajamas and smiling the big happy smile as hundred-dollar bills miraculously fly from their computer monitor. Those images often include a picture of the loving spouse standing in admiration somewhere in the near background.

What can you do when you've invested in Web initiatives and it looks like the investment isn't paying off? For some industries, embracing the Web as a way to increase business has been a long, slow road. The good news is that every day, companies are pushing the envelope to create online tools and features that move their industry forward in search of the revenue-altering effect of a successful Web presence. Zyloware is one of those companies.