Bank Holiday Monday

Funny to think how much a bank holiday meant to me when I was trapped in the 9-5 rat race. My whole life was squeezed into weekends, evenings and a few luxurious bank holidays. That was definitely not living, that was existing.

I am so glad I can work from home. My whole life is mine now, every single minute of it. That is not to say I don't work hard, I certainly do but I enjoy it and that makes a big difference.

It was a lovely sunny day today, proper spring weather. I gave my cactus plants their first watering since they started their dormant phase last October. Despite my efforts of a couple of weeks ago, they are still suffering badly from mealy bug (horrid little creatures!)and I had to squash some of the bigger ones. I'll have to get the meths out again and have another purge.

I have agreed to enter a writing project with an American "pen pal". I don't know what form it will take yet, what it will be about or how we will achieve it. We have never met, never spoken and don't know each other apart from our strange correspondence. All we have between us is words (and possibly slight insanity). It is looking as if we might do a joint blog of some sort. I have been looking at other people's blogs. Some of them are so serious, others are just pure advertising, I like having a blog to use as a diary/confessional. (A blog is good because it does not have the pre-printed dates to reproach one when days have ben left with no entries.) The diary of a mad webmistress! Well, why not? There is too much seriousness in the world.

If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my main website at Hunting Venus.com

HIT

Tomorrow is Good Friday.

It is now over a year since I started my home based business so I am now experiencing things for the second time (as in this is my second Easter as my Own Boss). It doesn't feel that long but when I think of all the things I have learned, I don't know how I crammed them all into a year and a bit.

I started this week well but went off the rails a bit for the past couple of days. I signed up for Home Income Team (HIT) and spent ages joining all the programmes. It includes several paid to surf autosurf programmes. This pleased me because I have been so impressed with Studio Traffic

The sign up was not too bad but then I made some changes to my website to accommodate the new traffic exchanges. In the end I didn't get a whole lot done apart from some surfing. Oh well, every little helps.

If you want to work from home on the internet but don't know where to start, visit my main website at Hunting Venus.com

Affiliate Marketing - Ten Excellent Reasons Why You Should Do It

A busy but productive weekend. Hooray! I hate it when I think about what I have been doing and it amounts to very little but failed attempts and wasted time. This weekend I have impressed myself!

Achieved loads this weekend including emailing my list to notify them the monthly newsletter is ready, going to the gym (twice in one weekend, must keep it up now I've started again), loads of surfing, posting (and learning from forums), polishing up a couple of articles and some writing.

Made an early start today. Not even lunchtime yet and I have already submitted my most recent article to all the directories using my incredible, amazing, wonderful Ezine Announcer. Each submission only takes a matter of seconds, it must save me hours of drudgery each time I submit to all those directories -- must be over 50, I'll have to count up on the next occasion and time myself.

Here's today's article.

Affiliate Marketing - Ten Excellent Reasons Why You Should Do It

There are many opportunities to make money working on the Internet. Becoming an affiliate marketer is a great way of having your own online business. Here are ten excellent reasons why you should choose affiliate marketing for your home based Internet business.

1. Be Your Own Boss - What a magical ring that phrase has to it! This is my absolute favourite reason for being an affiliate marketer. Actually, it is my top reason for having any home based business.

2. Low cost set-up - Most affiliate programmes are free to join, so all you need to start your business is an Internet-connected computer and word-processing software. You can work from absolutely anywhere in the world and it makes no difference whether you have a cosy office or work from a corner of your kitchen table.

3. No shipping costs - You don't need to worry about paying for postage or buying packing stuff such as boxes, wrapping paper, parcel tape, labels and so on. You never have to struggle with carrying heavy packages to the post office. The cost and bother of packing and shipping products to customers belongs to the merchant, not the affiliate.

4. Choice of thousands of products and services - All you have to do is decide what you want to sell (and, of course, what you think people will want to buy), just about everything is available online. With affiliate directories like Clickbank it's easy to find products to sell.

5. No merchant account or invoicing software required - You can forget the problems associated with invoicing, collecting payments and processing credit cards. The merchant handles all payment processing; as an affiliate, you never have to worry about chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account.

6. On sale everywhere - Your sales area has no geographic limits but you don't have to leave home. You can promote your web site worldwide, every Internet user in the whole world is potentially your customer (and you call this a small business!).

7. High income potential -With your own affiliate business your income level is limited only by your desire and effort - not by corporate salary scale structure or the whim of your boss.

8. No inventory to carry - You can sell any item, large or small without having to worry about storage space. You could sell trucks from a one-bedroom apartment! You don't have to the worry or expense of insuring stock or having extra security to protect it.

9. Low running costs - Apart from a modest budget for advertising and a small amount to pay for your internet connection, you have nothing much in the way of overheads. You work from home, so the big expense of renting premises is avoided and it is possible to get income tax reductions to cover some things such as part of your electricity and phone bills.

10.Always open for business - As an affiliate, your business keeps running and pulling in profits for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even on Bank Holidays. You are open for business even while you are asleep. You don't have to worry about business hours or delivery deadlines, all that proceeds on autopilot. You don't have to worry about scheduling staff holidays: you don't even need any staff!

Networkers' Calendar - March Edition

Finished the monthly edition of the Networkers' Calendar for March and will check it over tomorrow before circulating it.


Decided to include an article about blogging written by Christopher Knight. Think I'll look for some more stuff on blogging and maybe include it next month. I'd better also get on with writing some more articles of my own.


Got my very first commission cheque in the post today. It was from IMC (The Internet Marketing Center) It was strange seeing that familiar blue on white logo actually on paper instead of onscren and I was wildly excited. My husband just gave me a pitying look and asked if I knew how much the bank would charge me to convert the US dollar cheque into Sterling. The answer is "don't know, don't care, it's my first cheque" but he couldn't understand that. You have to live it to understand. I've had money put direct into my Pay Pal account but there is something special about a cheque. I'm sure it's just the first of many!

Here's the feature article from this month's newsletter.


Article Marketing For Bloggers - 4 Tips To Build Traffic For Your Blog
By Christopher Knight

Bloggers blog. That’s what they do. A blog is short for ‘weblog’ and it’s really an online journal that can be updated easily and frequently without any knowledge of HTML code.

Traditionally, article marketing has been used by authors who are promoting their books or information products. Lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend of bloggers using article marketing to grow the traffic to their blog and you should too.

Three reasons why it makes sense for bloggers to engage in article marketing:

1) You’ve already got a lot of content produced in each of your blog posts. 200 words should be your floor for each article that you produce. In some cases, you already have enough words per post to create 10-50 articles instantly. If you don’t, then stitch posts together of a similar theme until you have 200+ word articles to put into article marketing distribution.

2) A blogger has the same traffic building problems that any typical website has, and therefore article marketing can help your blog in the same ways it can help a non-blog website. Benefits include qualified traffic coming to your site year round, quality backlinks being built without any messy recip-linking campaigns, and you’re expanding your reach to other experts that might not otherwise have found your blog.

3) Bloggers by nature are more Internet savvy than your typical author. With this said, most bloggers already understand how to create revenue with pay per click (PPC) advertising programs. As such, you already know how to produce keyword intelligent titles for their articles. This guarantees maximum traffic impact for each of your articles.

If you are already a blogger and are new to article marketing, here’s how you get started:

1) Produce a cache of 10-25+ articles from your existing blog content.

2) Submit them to the major article directories and any that are niche-relevant to your field of expertise. You may also wish to submit them to ezine publishers directly from your niche.

3) Rinse and repeat until you have 250-1,000+ articles in distribution this year. Hire a college student or editor if you don’t have time to get this strategy into practice as it’ll be well worth it.

4) Watch your traffic counter slowly rise, day by day as your articles work hard for you delivering qualified traffic to your website year round.

Article Marketing as a strategy will not break your traffic counter on your first month of investing in this strategy…but, I guarantee if you engage in this strategy, your blog will grow in traffic and popularity beyond the traffic you were already creating by simply blogging. You knows, you might even increase your sales, land a new job, or improve your rank in the search engines as a side-benefit from your article marketing strategy.

About The Author:
Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ directory. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links in tact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Big Guilt Trip (AKA Money Doubler Blues)

Well, We Paid 4 You seems to have stalled. The admin is making valiant efforts to resuscitate the programme but I think my money might have followed the cash I wasted on Double Bot, Matrix Twisted, Cycle It Fast and Profit Sharing Hits. You would think I might have learned my lesson the first time and I have no excuse.

Fortunately, after stopping cycling (before it ever started, actually), Double 50 have refunded my investment. Even I have more sense than to invest again in a cycling programme which never managed to cycle. To be fair to the admin (that goes for We Paid 4 You as well) they do seem to have been stitched up by Stormpay but I am going to invest the money I recovered into good old Empowerism.

So far, I am very happy with Studio Traffic but I think I'll leave it until next month before upgrading further. Can't stretch my budget too far! I'll take the refund from Double 50 as a reprieve and I'll try to do better in future.

Back to my writing now, must get the monthly newsletter finished and sent out.

Back To Blogging

Can't believe how long it has been since I last visited my blog.

Been very busy. Have now written several week's worth of items for my new newsletter (not the monthly Networkers' Calendar, a completely new weekly one). Surprising how long it takes. Also worked on several new writing projects.

The worst thing I did was get sucked into joining two new money doublers. One is trundling along slowly and the other has stopped for the time being for reasons I can't exactly fathom. There was another one, The Private Society, which I saw reviewed and fell for partly because of the black and silver website. That went into "hiatus" mode while I was still trying to get my money out of IntGold after they changed all their rules. That was a complete pain: they let me put my money in but I couldn't get it out without faxing copies of my passport, utility bills etc. When I found out the Private Society had collapsed, I thought it must be fate looking after me. Why, oh why did I then throw my money away on the other two?

One good thing was that I had a tip to join Studio Traffic and I am very glad that I did because it's a neat way of earning money for doing very little.

I still have the problem of getting side tracked. Seems like the minute I take my eye off the ball, someone has run off with it and replaced it with a dozen other balls which I have to run after. Had definite plans for today. Started out out ok but that only lasted a couple of hours. then I saw a forum post about how to publish my blog at my website. Needless to say, it all went horribly wrong and I have wasted hours and got into a bad mood.

Oh well, its only 9.30 am, plenty of the day left for me to screw up. No! Must be positive. I am going to achieve loads of great things today. First of all, this blog is going to get published.