Nacco Industries Inc. (NYSE: NC) has reported a modest decline in net income for the fourth quarter compared to the like period in 2009, when the company realized a big gain on the sale of certain coal-mining assets.

The producer of coal, lift trucks and small appliances said its net income in the quarter was down nearly 10%, declining to $38.4 million, or $4.59 a share, from $42.5 million, or $5.12 a share, in the fourth quarter of 2009. The bottom-line results in the year-earlier quarter included income from discontinued operations of $21.9 million, which reflected the sale in December 2009 of certain assets of the Red River Mining Co. Get full info…

Social media marketing like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube is a tricky beast. It can be time consuming and if done wrong, super spammy. That having been said, social media can produce REAL results for your small business!

We do social media marketing for small business owners and oftentimes during the sales process they ask us what kind of results they can expect from our efforts. I THINK that they are asking what kind of SALES can they expect to receive within a couple of days of starting, but that is just conjecture on my part!

Social media marketing is not a direct line kind of thing. It is more like grabbing a tigers tail and hoping that he is going where you want to go!

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Shares in Ramelius Resources rose after it reported high-grade gold results from deeper drilling its Wattle Dam mine in Western Australia and was admitted to the S&P ASX 300 index.

Ramelius shares closed up four cents cents, or 3.33 per cent, at $1.24 after reaching an earlier high of $1.28.

The miner on Friday said top results from ongoing underground drilling at Wattle Dam, near Kambalda, included a 12-metre wide intersection grading 112 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and two zones of significant visible gold.

The drilling is being undertaken beneath the current mine plan, where Ramelius has previously reported significant intersections.

The Wattle Dam mine contains “nuggety” deposits, rather than the disseminated gold mineralisation that is often favoured by analysts because it is more predictable.

But the operation has so far yielded more than 100,000 ounces for Ramelius since the commencement of underground operations in late 2009 and the company believes drilling at depth will extend the mine’s life.

The highest grade encountered at Wattle Dam so far has been a whopping 6,700 g/t – or 6.7 kilograms per tonne.

Also in WA, Ramelius aims to return its Mt Magnet project to production by the end of this calendar year.

Ramelius acquired the operation last year from South Africa’s Harmony Gold Mining Company Ltd for $40 million and expects it will cost about $45 million to bring the project back into production.

The board expects to make a decision about whether to proceed with the project in April. Get full info…

U.S. research universities churn out over 60% of our nation’s basic, game-changing research. In this era of tight budgets, some universities are offshoring the work involved in bringing on-campus inventions to market, paying companies in India to do market research and low level legal work such as patent prior art searches. It’s counter-intuitive, but could offshoring the commercialization process of university inventions help bust out some of the un-used backlog of innovative university technologies, and actually *help* our universities create domestic, high-value jobs?

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Many people interested in the field of medical billing as a medical coding career or profession were asked if they should get a job as a biller or start a home-based business. Many need the security of knowing they are paid every week or two and others do not know exactly what it means or what it takes to start a medical billing company. Guide To Medical Billing will help you to make the right decision.

We can obtain the education or training by an online school or the same program at college or university campus. Get full info…

Realtor marketing question – should you be unfriending your real estate clients on Facebook? This week we got A LOT of questions asking about a post that one person had written, suggesting that if you have friends on Facebook you could be, scary music sounds go here, ruining your real estate career and putting your license at danger of being revoked.

On Wednesday I got a frantic call from another client who said, “DID I KNOW THAT THERE WAS A FACEBOOK PHONEBOOK AND THAT EVERYONE’S NUMBER IS LIKE PUBLIC?!?!?!” I did know that and so what. If you are in business in general, your number is on your website, on your business cards, in your ads and generally available for, huh, people to call you. If you

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Northern Rock’s decision to start offering 90% loan-to-value (LTV) mortgages has reawakened memories of its risky lending practices before it was nationalised in February 2008.

In the days of easy credit and lax lending criteria, the Newcastle-based lender’s Together loans essentially amounted to mortgages worth 125% of the value of a customer’s home.

More worrying, perhaps, the new range being offered by Northern Rock is billed as helping first-time buyers, just as the Together range was.

But first-time buyers have struggled to get on the property ladder since the crunch, even though the froth has been taken out of house prices.

Data from the Council of Mortgage Lenders shows that the number of first-time buyers under 30 who turned to parents or other relatives for financial support rose from 38% in 2005 to a peak of 84% as the size of deposits needed to secure a mortgage exploded to 40% of the value of a home.

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Yesterday’s marketing post had a few bugs in it. The AVC user base did a lot of bug reporting in the comments and if you have an hour or more, you should read through the entire comment thread, at the end of the post.

The first and most important bug is that I dissed the marketing profession at the start and again at the end of the post. Seth Godin says I conflated marketing and advertising. I don’t totally agree. I simply disrepected marketing and then went on to talk about how to do marketing. Not a great way to have a rational conversation about marketing.

The second important bug is that my advice holds mostly for the kinds of companies we seek to invest in.

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