Shock horror..! Bill Gates is no longer the world's richest individual. Instead, the Mexican telecomms supremo, Carlos Slim, has overtaken Bill to become the richest person on the planet, at least according to Forbes Magazine. He is half a billion dollars richer than Bill and is the first non-American to top the Billionaires List in 18 years. They will be crying into their beers in Wall Street.

Every year when this list is published, people are eager to find out who has the most money. The media clamours for interviews with these stars of making money and Forbes Magazine, naturally enough, is delighted with the ensuing publicity. The richest Briton, the Duke of Westminster, has hardly had a look in this morning; after all he's merely the 45th richest in the world with a paltry $12bn. And pity poor James Dyson, he's 937th in the world with a mere $1bn. Gosh, he's so far behind that Slim chap with his $53.5bn; but at least he's in good company with J K Rowling, also with $1bn.

Do any of these people care? Perhaps when you have $1bn, what's another 50? You hardly notice the difference. After all, at today's interest rates if you put just $1bn in a standard savings account you'd be earning around $130,000 interest each day. Could you live on that?

This league table is - like almost all league tables - nonsense. If Forbes wanted, they could continue working out the list down and down and down, until they find the poorest person in, say, Somalia putting them in 6,807,782,628th place. And the same is true for everything you have ever thought about in terms of your online business. We could construct a list of income via websites - oh, they do that...! And yes, you can find that Google, Amazon, Ebay and so on, all dominate the list.

If you wanted you could construct a leage table of website traffic...oh, they do that as well do they? And you could look admiringly at the billions of hits that Google gets and become downhearted at your paltry hundreds of visitors.

Or, you could have a league table of Twitter followers, or LinkedIn connections...don't tell me, they do that as well...? So, you've got fewer followers than Stephen Fry? Oh my goodness.

Guess what? None of it matters.

Let's imagine you want to do business with a particular individual at, say, Microsoft. If they follow you on Twitter, or connect with you on LinkedIn and visit your web page, that's fantastic. The very person you want is engaging with you. Sure, your one hit on your website and your single follower at Twitter would put you at the very bottom of the league tables, but would you care? Nope - because you'd be engaging the very person you want.

And there's another factor - you'd be happy. You would have achieved what you wanted.

If all you do is focus on things like how much higher in the league tables your competitors and heroes are, you'll have much less mental energy to devote to connecting with the people that matter. And you will be less happy. There are people down at the level of six billionth in the Forbes list who are happy with their lot in life. Focusing on that, and not on phoney lists, is much more important. If your web business is bringing in the income you are happy with and you are doing business with the people you like then forget all those league tables of web traffic, Twitter followers or the income you generate. None of that matters a jot compared with a happy you and your happy customers.

Silence covered the room as the question was asked, but slowly one man at the back raised his hand to answer. "Ah good," I said, "someone here has been blogging in their business. Tell us your story please." The middle-aged, balding chap rose to his feet and stumbled out just one sentence: "I tried it once but it didn't work."

There I was, speaking at a business event on the power of blogging and the way that it can help companies attract online attention, even money. Only one person in this 50 strong audience had even attempted blogging and from his answer he was expecting it to have an overnight success. Oh dear.

Business Week magazine has proclaimed that "blogging is not a business elective, but a prerequisite". In other words, if you want to be in business much longer you need to have a blog. Many companies still think of a blog as some kind of diary, where you post company events like product launches and new services, as they happen, once in a while. But people who "get" blogging realise that it can fundamentally shift a business once a blog becomes central to that firm.

Here's what you can do with one blog post. You can bring attention to that post, automatically, on:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Yahoo!
• Plurk
• Plaxo
• LinkedIn

You can re-blog it, automatically on things like:

• Blogger
• Vox
• WordPress
• Tumblr

You can automatically bookmark it on:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Posterous
• ...and more...

In other words, with just one blog article you can get massive coverage for your business throughout the web. Without blogging, you have to get all this coverage manually. So, if a blog is central to your business, you increase your visibility significantly - and gain more website traffic as a result.

However, all this is old news. This is the kind of thing that the hapless businessman should have been doing when I asked that question about who was blogging; I asked that question two years ago. Clearly, much of business is so far behind what is happening online, they are getting left behind. A blog, as Business Week magazine said, should be central to your business. But they said that almost five years ago, in May 2005.

Now, blogging is not enough. You need to do all the things with a blog listed above - you can do it easily with Ping - but you need to do more. You need to think about blogs from a localisation perspective. With geotagging and mobile use now becoming increasingly popular, your blog needs to be locally relevant. It needs to be dynamically changed according to the location of the reader. And even if you are not doing that yet - I admit I'm not - we all need to plan how we are going to do that, because come this time next year it will be the norm.

Video consumption online has hit record viewing figures, contributing to the billions of hours of video now being watched online. How much of your blog is video based? And that's to say nothing of the exponential rise in podcast downloads via iTunes and other audio providers.

Some businesses are still in the "thinking about" stage of adding a blog. They need to get real. Not only has blogging moved on, companies who made it central to their business have also changed the rules. Bblogging is central to many successful online businesses, it's now also the focus for them of a multimedia content production system. Blogging without localisation, video, audio and a host of other enhancements is so "old hat"; yet, sadly, most businesses are still in the pre-blogging phase (i.e. still stuck in the last 1990s).

If you are still thinking about a blog, it's time to wake up and realise that the train left the station several hours ago.

Women have a problem; there I've said it, I've got it out in the open at last - a bit risky for me on International Women's Day, but it's done. Their problem, of course, is men. Men have dominated society for thousands of years, resulting in a bias in thinking. For instance, it is popularly thought that men can navigate and that women can't read maps. The problem, actually, is that society has preferred activities for males which lead to better spatial awareness. Until relatively recently, for instance, women were discouraged from football, a game that requires considerable spatial awareness skills. It's not that women can't read maps, it's just that men have prevented them from gaining the psychological ability to do it

So, what has all this to do with making money on the internet, I hear you ask. Well, it's about your brain. New research from the University of California shows that the production of brain waves known as a "theta rhythm" are fundamental to things like memory and the overall health of our brains. And guess what produces lots of theta rhythms? That's right, activities that involve spatial awareness. In other words, it seems that the bias of society has not been helping women make the best of their brain power.

And that's bad. It's bad because a study on the amount of money we earn shows it is linked to our brain power. Women continue to earn less than men, on average, often for equivalent jobs. These studies suggest that there may be a reason; the male dominated society we live in has been restricting the brains of women. But fear not, women know more than we think they do.

They do things which help keep their theta waves active and thereby boost their brains. It's not just spatial awareness that keeps your brain healthy. Relaxation, meditation and learning are all activities which have been shown to boost theta wave production. Go along to any relaxation classes, or meditation rooms and you'll find them full of women. Try looking in at your local adult education centre and the same is true, a preponderance of women. They are busy producing more and more theta waves, boosting their brains, while men carry on working, with little impact on their brain power.

We are now witnessing the impact of all this online. Women dominate the social web; only one social site, Digg, has more men than women using it. The others are either split 50-50, or have more women users than men. And where is real money being made online these days? You guessed it, via the social web. Perhaps the theta-induced female brain is more at home online than the male brain? Who knows?

What is clear is that there is a potential relationship between generating more theta waves and earning more money, particularly online. So, how can you make more money with your internet presence - especially if you are not female? Well, the first thing is learn to relax more. You can take up meditation as well. And, importantly, learn something. Go to evening classes and take up whatever takes your fancy - pottery, local history, or crochet - it doesn't matter. What is important is that you activate your brain into learning mode.

When you learn more, relax more and meditate you will produce more of those theta waves that boost your brain power. In turn, you develop greater clarity of thought, which inevitably means you will be able to solve all those online glitches and difficulties more easily. And that should translate into more money.

Often, too many people focus on their website and then can't really identify the issues causing things like poor conversion rates, or lack of traffic. Taking time away from your website, doing things which create all those extra theta waves in your brain could well be the solution. Spatial awareness activities like football, orienteering, or navigating in a car rally will help, but perhaps today of all days men should take a few tips from women by taking up relaxation, meditation and continuous learning. After all, women are increasingly in charge online. If you're a man and you want to catch up. do what women do to their brains. And don't worry you'll lose your map reading skills - there's SatNav these days...!