As you may have noticed, keeping deadlines is my greatest downfall. So, I set out at the beginning of the week to find a way of keeping my deadlines. I had used calenders and “to do” lists many times before, but they never seemed to work out as usually I did not look at them. Eventually, I found a simple website which lets you make to do lists and can be set to recurring or even the time it needs to be done. Todoist really does do everything that I need, and best of all.. its free! Of course, being a website I thought that I would forget to use it, so I decided to make it my homepage so that I can look at it before I do anything each time I open Flock. So far, I am finding Todoist to be a very useful website and would recommend anyone with a memory like mine to use it!

Keeping deadlines is another important element of planning (see here and here), which has always been one part of my life that I always try to improve.

This article was written a while ago by Michael Dunlop.

Making Money With Affiliate Programs

I have asked some top websites how having a Affiliate Program effects there business

I asked Bob, the founder of eXtremePixels, who runs a successful affiliate program why he has a affiliate program and how has it impacted on his business.

Bob: I really think that the affiliate program helps a lot, anytime you can get extra exposure it is a good thing. I have a lot of affiliates that link to the main site and that drives extra traffic. Traffic is key!

Clicky is the only web analytic website that offers a affiliate program, why did you decide to do this and how has it improved your business?

Sean: Affiliate programs are a great way to get some cheap marketing, since you only have to pay the people who create results. Tons of people write articles about us or put our little Clicky “badge” icon on their page simply because we offer this program. Even if some of these links never result in any paid signups, they still drive a lot of traffic to our site and help to build our brand name.

Advantages of Offering an Affiliate Program

- It is FREE, you only pay per sale, so unlike more traditional methods of Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression, which you can end up with no sales and out of pocket.

- In many cases, website owners want to offer recommended books, products or services, if you have an affiliate program they can be rewarded for it and that will make them want to suggest you as a recommended product.

- Helps builds a brand, even if the visitors the program don’t all result in a sale, it will help you build a brand!

- It is all automated! You don’t have to speak with anyone who is promoting your site through the affiliate program, unlike traditional advertisers.

- Affiliates compete to sell your product!

Recap: So let’s get this right, if you can get just 100 affiliates which is super easy! Each affiliate sends you just 50 visitors a month resulting in just 3 sales each! You will have earned an extra 300 sales each month, which is 3600 extra sales a year! Now think, if your product is £2000, 3600 more sales is going to make you super rich!

WAIT! So there going to compete to sell my product! Yes, that’s right! They will actually try to compete for advertising space on such sites as Google, Yahoo and Azoogle.

Step by Step Guide to Setting up a Affiliate Program

- Find a Affiliate Marketplace, my recommendations are Commission Junction, ClixGalore and Affiliate Shop.

- Once you have signed up for at least one of these marketplaces, affiliate marketers will be able to come along and view your product. Some sites such as Commission Junction show details on each product, how well it converts, how many visitors on average you have to send to make a sale and so on.

- Payday! Actually, you do not have to pay your affiliates, Commission Junction will do the payments for you.

It really is as simple as 1,2,3…

Once someone has decided to promote your product, they will do it in either three ways.

- Promote on there related Website

In fact 5 of the 7 people advertising on one of my websites is promoting a affiliate product. They know how many clicks they need to result in a sale so they can then work out if promoting there affiliate link on your site is worth it.

- Market it to there email list

In every industry there are websites and company’s who create a Email List. The power of the list is going to shock some of you. If you have a list of 10,000 emails from people who are interested in teaching abroad. They go and find your affiliate link and decide to promote it in a email they send out to there list. Let’s just say they make 250 sales! That will earn the list owner £25,000! One of those a week isn’t to bad …

- Use advertising to promote there URL

They will complete to sell your product on search engines, if you view the right side of Google “Sponsored Links” you will see 10 adverts, 8 are promoting the same product.

This post was written by Shannon Lilly.

When it comes to making money, online things can be difficult when first starting out. Just like making money online, starting a blog can also be difficult unless you know what you’re doing! For the first time ever we are going to teach you step by step seven different methods to making money online starting to day with how important the design of your blog is!

Let’s begin, come along for the ride!

Design: Believe it or not one of the most important things to making money online is the design of your blog. No I’m not talking about the colors or how it looks to you, rather I am referring to where your ads are placed, how you place them, and how to take those ads and make a residual income off them.

To start you generally start with a couple of different ad sizes / blocks and then gradually move to specific ad sizes after you discover what works for your blog. That reminds me; blogging is about experimenting and discovering what does and what does not work!

Don’t get frustrated; take time to learn every single thing you can about your blog and how visitors react to ads so you can make the most income possible off of it without upsetting visitors.

Now back to the design, over the years we have learned multiple ways to display ads successfully to convert visitors into subscribers and potential advertisers into regulars! It’s your turn now; you can take what you learn from us and use it on your own blog to make a residual income.

In order to show you how this is going to work I will provide two examples one good and one bad of ad placements. These are two blogs in the blogging/mmo industry that I picked randomly for example.

Tyler Cruz:

SuperManDaily:

As you can see I have labeled the Tyler Cruz blog as a good example for ad placements. He has smartly placed his 125’s down the whole left side of his blog while leaving room for his 768 and is his peely ads up in the corner that are becoming quite popular around the blogging industry.

On the flipside you can see the Superman daily has such a big header that there’s really no place to put advertisements or peel away because it would cover over the design.

Depending on what you’re going for each design could work differently but for the example of top revenue income from a blog Tyler Cruz has hit the nail on the head!

You would do smart to follow his example without copying his design!

When it comes to your blog’s design take time to perfect each part of it and make sure that your ads are placed for advertisers to see them prominently. It is not the first thing the advertisers see then it’s not the first thing your visitors will see either, advertisers will want to know that you care about them and that you’re willing to display their ads before content to your visitors.

With that said it’s also important not to spam your visitors by having ads all over the place and nothing else is seen, learn to balance things out and use as many ads you need to make income but not so many that it’s covering over content and bringing the moral of the site down.

If you can do that you’re on the road to residual income success!