Blog Tides
Time and Tide
Posted on January 27, 2010
Category: work at home | Leave a Comment
Hi there, and its well past time for another post on here. As managing the time spent in the different areas of this business can be a little difficult, I thought a timely article for the new year would be about the way we use our time and if it can be used any more effectively when we work at home.
Well, the first thing that springs to mind from my own point of view is that I’m a terrible time manager. I’m sure there are plenty of good time managers out there that would simply tell me to do this or that and my time will be much more efficiently used. Problem is that I am not a structured person in that respect, I’m more creative. That means I naturally resist any attempts to structure my time. I’ve tried it in the past when I worked in IT and it was a disaster. I wasted more time in writing down and calculating what I was supposed to be doing with my time than what I was actually doing with it!
There are different types of people in this world and what you have to understand is that we all work our own way. Round holes, square pegs and all that. The people who advocate time management are generally the kind of people who work really well with that model. Its perfect for their needs and they are most efficient when they are managing their time to a tight schedule.
Other people, like myself, are the opposite and actually work less efficiently when we are restricted in that way. So is there another solution?
Yes and no.
It all depends on how well you can stick with a project and not need to continually flit between several different ones through boredom. I find that I can stay with one project for a while before I get fed up and want to do something different. So to use my time as efficiently as is possible for my way of being, I try to start the day working on the project that is most important to me. I stick at it for as long as I’m able and then take a break. Then I move on with a second project until I get fed up and take a break.
This might sound horrendously inefficient to the time manager types, but it works for me and that’s far better than the alternative. So if you are having issues with your time, then you first have to figure out what works best for you and then go with it no matter what anyone else says.
Only you know how you work the best and anyone else is only coming at it from their own perspective, which may not match yours! Stay successful!
Admin
BlogTides
Halloween Affiliate Sales
Posted on October 26, 2009
Category: affiliate marketing | Leave a Comment
Hey, its Halloween soon! So I hope everyone’s ready for a great evening on that special day of the year. There will be plenty to do for families, kids and adults. But on a business note, did everyone who is involved with making money from the Internet manage to cash in on the commercial side of this festive event?
Well, the general idea is to jump on any popular date in the calendar when people are in the mood to buy stuff and, well, sell it to them! That is, after all, what most of us are here for, aren’t we?
I’m often asked what are the best ways of monetizing a site or blog to get the best out of certain festive occasions, such as Halloween or Christmas, not forgetting those other big hitters like Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day etc. Well, the simple rule of thumb if you don’t actually have your own e-commerce site selling your own stuff is to set yourself up as an affiliate and sell other people’s stuff to your blog’s visitors.
Its not difficult as long as your blog has got a good stream of organic search traffic who are generally looking for the products that everyone wants for the occasion. For Halloween, it has been fancy dress costumes, masks, makeup and everything else that goes with Trick or Treat for the kids and adults too (the grown ups parties that follow…). Also, there are always the small gifts that people like to buy each other and there you can really let your imagination rip!
With Christmas coming hot on the heels of Halloween, you need to be ready with whatever sector of the gift market that you intend to target as well as Christmas trees, decorations, party supplies and the whole nine yards. But that’s a subject for a later post. So here’s extending everyone my congratulations if you were successful with Halloween stuff as I was, and good luck for the forthcoming season of goodwill.
Admin
BlogTides
Additional Pages
Posted on September 28, 2009
Category: blogging | Leave a Comment
Welcome back to Blog Tides. I’ve been thinking on some ideas for this blog and it struck me that there is a lot of scope for expansion into the areas of specialized topics. I’ve noticed a lot of sites or blogs appearing that have taken the stance that they will grow by accepting guest posters to boost the site’s page count and content volume. That’s good from the user point of view as it provides search traffic with a more worthwhile landing page where there is relevant and hopefully interesting and well written content for them to read.
Will I be doing this here on this site?
I’m considering it as an option for boosting the site’s content for sure, but there is one drawback that I can see. That is one of trust.
Generally, bloggers are looking out for one person, and that’s themselves, so when they get a chance to gust post on someone else’s blog, they are going to place at least one link in that post back to their own blog. Now there’s nothing wrong with that and its the least the hosting blog can do for getting some free content.
But that trust is more often than not abused by the posting blogger. Horror stories abound, where the guest posts a badly spun article that is showing up on a multitude of other blogs, thereby attracting a duplicate content penalty for the hosting blog. Then their linking strategy leaves a lot to be desired.
Why bloggers think that they have to place three links in every post they submit to other blogs is beyond me!
That practice screams “paid post” to the search engines who will come looking to scrutinize the hosting blog and maybe even give it a penalty. Whether the links are to legitimate sites is another cause for concern. Some bloggers who submit bad articles all over the place are little more than spammers themselves and care not one whit that they might also be linking to bad neighborhood sites. Yup, another penalty or worse, the hosting blog gets deindexed for its trouble.
So allowing guest posters on here at the moment is not all that attractive to me. Unless there is an easy way to moderate what is being posted, I’m not interested in hosting duplicate crap that is full of links to other people’s crap sites.
So my alternative is to write my own articles, which is what I do anyway, being a writer! To this end, I don’t have to link out to anywhere if I don’t want to and I know my content is original, relevant and interesting.
So I have made a tentative start by creating the first of my topics with a main article, called Zone Diets under which I will publish a series of closely related articles. Once done, I’ll move onto another topic and build up that way.
Sure, its slower and more ponderous and it’ll likely take a while to build this site up to anything like the content powerhouse it’ll need to be in order to rank well in the SERPs for the terms it will be targeting. But at least it’ll be all me and under my control.
Admin
BlogTides
