If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

This post was guest written by Tom from StandOutBlogger.com. If you are looking at improving your blogging, then head on over to Stand Out Blogger.

I was thinking the other day about a few of my projects, some past projects, others current. I was thinking about what I had done that had been successful. And to be honest there were quite a few things that were successful - but now the project wasn’t anymore.

When I looked into it more, I realized that whenever I started to see success, to see affiliate sales, traffic increases, new feed readers, I would note the success and almost see my work as done - stopping what had been working for me, the thing that had given me the success.

It seems quite silly really. Why would you stop doing the things that are bringing you the best success? But if you think about it, most people do it. It is like the business that advertises, promotes, begs like crazy to get customers through the door, and when the customers finally start streaming through the
owner is suddenly too busy to keep promoting, and doesn’t see the need in spending money of advertising - because they have so many customers.

But What Happens When The Stream Of Customers Stop?

Since the majority of the customers came from their owners promotion efforts, when the promotion stops - so do the customers.

So what does the owner of the business do?

Start advertising and promoting! A cycle starts to become prominent, and the business stays at the same level.

What Would Happen If You Promoted Your Blogs Through Your Busy Times?

I know that when your blog is new, you always start out spending a heap of time submitting to directories, commenting on blogs, building links - doing whatever you can to generate the first trickle (or flood) of traffic. But as soon as the traffic starts to flow, you start to spend less and less time on the things that saw your blog grow - and you wonder why you blog never goes to the next level. You are stuck with the same traffic, same commentators, same income level.

I want to challenge you (and myself) to step things up a level, to start promoting our blogs like crazy, spend time on the content (like we did at the start), writing quality articles that are actually beneficial to our readers - not just something that we whipped up in 5 minutes because we hadn’t made a post
in 3 days.

When success starts to happen, and you are getting some exposure, your traffic is increasing, you have hit you rss goal, and you have some one interested in buying one of your ad spaces, don’t rest in your success. Instead use it as inspiration and keep pushing forward. Keep doing all the things that you have been doing up until then, and let your success breed more success!

This guest post was submitted by Matt Smith who blogs about The Art of eMarketing. You can check out his RSS feed here.

If you are in the affiliate marketing or Google Adwords business, then you should know that having a lot of clickthroughs is not the only thing important if you do want to make money out of the PPC (pay-per-click) industry. Having an effective landing page (the page where you send your visitors to) is equally important and would actually make or break on the result of either having a potential customer sign up or purchase your product or service. Without a good landing page, then your business is useless. Below are a few tips on how you could create an effective landing page:

*Do not take your potential customers directly to your homepage if they would not be able to find what they’re looking for there. Make sure that you take them to a page or a site that would have the correct and complete information on the products/services that they saw in your ads. Never ever let your potential customers search for the information, instead bring them directly to it!

*Avoid Redundancy. Make sure that your landing page does not contain the exact same information that people find in your e-mails or ads. Do not give everything away in your e-mails to potential clients; just give an overview so that when they reach your landing page, they would not read the same words they have read in the e-mails you sent.

*Be Consistent. It’s as easy as posting an image within your e-mail that is the same as the image seen on your landing page. This would help in making your ad look more professional and would also help your visitors know that they are indeed in the right page. Consistency also ensures that there would be no disconnect with your potential customers.

*Be Direct. It is best for you not to beat around the bush especially when it comes to the information in your landing page. True, your customers or visitors may want complete information but then again they would not want to spend too long a time in reading information that are not straightforward. Not being straightforward when it comes to giving out information may even confuse people and in the end, they would opt not to sign up or buy the products or services you are offering even if they are interested.

In other words, get rid of those words that would only distract or prove to be useless to your landing page’s visitors. Make sure that all the information you post to your landing page would be needed by your customers.

Remember, following all these tips on how to create an effective landing page would not give you the results you want immediately. The saying: “Practice makes perfect” does apply to this process and so make an effort and test your work first. If something is not working, change it and see whether plan B works. Do not despair. Keep on trying new things and you’ll see that you are just a step away from coming up with an excellent landing page.

As hopefully everyone of you knows by now, I am competing on the Top Affiliate Challenge with a bunch of smart affiliate marketers. Ian Fernando, one of my teammates, forwarded me an email that he got from the Pepperjam Affiliate Network. They added a 40% increase to their payout for referrals, so if you want to help out my team on the Top Affiliate Challenge, sign up today to earn my team $7.

In return for your assistance, the Pepperjam Network will start you off with a FREE $10 signup bonus. In addition to that, you can make your own blog post with your affiliate link and earn $7 for every person that you blog refers. It doesn’t even stop there, because Pepperjam is looking to expand their network by offering $10 for every blog post you make about the company or their tools. They allow you to do up to 5 posts a month (although I wouldn’t recommend pushing the limit unless you are really strapped for earning some quick cash). They make your job even easier by offering your referrals a free $10 as well, the same offer that I am showing to you.

In simple terms, if you want to earn a free $10, start working on affiliate marketing with me, and most importantly help me earn money for the Top Affiliate Challenge, sign up for Pepperjam today.

This is a guest post by Prem Shashi, who is running a contest with over $1000 in prizes. You can subscribe to Prem’s RSS feed here. If you would like to submit a guest post to be featured on my blog while I am in Nebraska, please visit the contact page.

Are you one of the many bloggers who want to stamp your name in the blogosphere some day? Do you feel like you have too much work to do everyday and you don’t find or have time to do some of the basic things in life because of your blogging career?

I wouldn’t call myself a professional blogger, but would rather introduce myself as an Aspiring Blogger. Now, one of the main aspects of being a professional blogger is being able to find the time to do everything you want to get done in a single workday. So how do these bloggers manage to do everything they want to get done? The answer is very simple. They have good time management skills. It’s not something which they possessed when they started blogging but it’s something they have brought into their work system and molded themselves to do tasks slowly or quickly based on the amount of time they had. It’s very important for any blogger who wants to succeed in the near future to be able to manage their time efficiently.

There’s no better time to start managing your time than the early stages of your blogging career as it might seem impossible to change your work ethics later on.

How to manage your time effectively?

Different bloggers do different things for their blogs on a daily basis, and it’s those little things like advertising, marketing and link building that add up to a huge chunk of your time. I have just listed few tips below which might save you some time somewhere.

Organize yourself – Your blog reflects the person inside you and what you stand for. If you’re not an organized individual it can be seen clearly from your blog and that will be a black mark for you. Organizing yourself and the rest is taken care of.

Time allotment – You know what you do daily for your blogs, so note it down and set certain times to do the tasks according to how busy your day is. Try to do this daily, so eventually you will know exactly how much time to spend on each task.

Avoid Pressure – Most bloggers assume they can do lots of tasks in a day and succumb to the pressure of completing the tasks that they not only leave everything incomplete but also unknowingly end up spending a lot of time. Blogging is supposed to be something which you should do naturally. Stressing yourself out will only make matters worse.

Know your limitations – Every human being has his own limitations. Know your weaknesses and work on it, but don’t waste too much time on it and lose focus of your actual task.

Breaking Point – When you reach your limitation, you might end up being very tired mentally, so always remember to take breaks between tasks. A small drink, snack or even listening to your favorite tunes can inspire you and get you some momentum for the rest of the day thus enabling you to finish your tasks faster.

Believe in yourself – When I say that, I mean you should know what you’re doing is going to be useful in some way for your blog. I see lots of bloggers doing things like Link-Building etc for building PR when they have no clue why exactly they are doing it. In the time you waste doing that, you can spend it writing few posts for your own blog which is more productive.

Spend Time Wisely – In the End, it all comes down how well your blog is doing. If you seem to be spending too much time and not getting the desired results, you should be sensible enough to know that something what you’re doing is not right.

The whole ploy of managing your time is to spend less time and produce greater results. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight, but the ones who are more flexible with their time are the ones who can stand apart from the rest of the crowd.

So, how do you manage your time? Do you take breaks between tasks? Feel free to include additional points or experiences you have gained through blogging……