Crucial Business

Beware of Avantlink's Inactive account policy

2012-05-10T16:27:00.000-05:00

For several years along with my teaching, I did affiliate marketing. With backlinks being king at the search engines and economic downturn, I decided to take a break and go back to full time teaching however several affiliate marketing accounts are below the minimum payment so they are still there...

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Beautiful Business Card with Vintage Pattern

2011-08-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

Your Photograph with a Beautiful Border Browse more Fancy Business Cards In addition with my busy work teaching English classes, I've been keeping busy at my Zazzle stores. I've spent most of the month on graphic design especially with vintage patterns and monograms. This business card uses one...

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Seven Reasons Why Many Writers and Visual Artists Make No Money

2011-03-13T18:09:00.001-06:00

Writers and artists have several things in common. We like to create, we're sensitive, and we are mostly independent. We normally think in concepts instead of numbers so it isn't surprising that we often make the same mistakes that hold us back from success. Here are a few reasons why you might not...

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Working from Home: Set Daily and Weekly Goals for Productivity

2011-03-13T09:28:00.001-06:00

Working at home can be changing in terms of productivity due to distractions that exist however working at home has one challenge that is worse for many. You are not supervised. If you require supervision to get work done, you won't be successful working at home because you have to be a...

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Do you Spin your Articles for Article Marketing?

2011-03-12T09:43:00.002-06:00

Due to the recent Panda/Content Farm update at Google, the Article Marketing methods of recent years of writing a short article and submitting it to various article directories for backlinks and new exposure seems to be challenged. While there are many websites accepting articles, most...

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14 Things to Do When You're Having a Bad Day (in your home office)

2011-03-11T15:20:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you have the best of intentions, but no matter what you try you just can't seem to concentrate and that great post that should have taken you thirty minutes to write has already taken an hour and it still isn't complete. Admit it, you're having a bad day. Here are some things to do...

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Six Tips for any Business Person Who Wants to Hire a Freelancer (Outsource)

2011-03-10T20:47:00.004-06:00

In, my previous entry I described for freelancers some common problems now this post includes some tips for businesses who want to hire a freelancer or in other words want to outsource common tasks like accounting, graphic design, website development, or coding. If you follow these tips you will...

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5 Problems you should consider before you start freelancing

2011-03-09T18:12:00.002-06:00

Freelancing is a kind of consulting work where you charge by project. Essentially you work on different tasks which you agree upon with a client and once the work is complete you get the final or full payment. It sounds almost like the perfect situation for someone who doesn't have time for...

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Would you work for free in exchange for a credit and a link?

2011-03-09T06:51:00.000-06:00

I wrote about this topic late last night on my main art blog, but I thought I'd write about this disturbing topic here to get thoughts from this blog's readers. Last night someone posted in one of the groups I am in for Facebook that she was having a contest for the cover of her to-be-released...

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Print on Demand also requires work and patience

2011-03-07T18:03:00.001-06:00

I started selling visual art on the internet, uploading my photos to Imagekind. They weren't that great, but not so bad either. We all start somewhere and we improve through practice any skill. After a better camera (still point and shoot but 10.1 megapixels instead of 3.x), in 2008, I...

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Why do you write or why do you have an online business?

2011-03-05T11:40:00.000-06:00

Why do you write or why do you have an online business? I've slowly come to understand (no, I'm not a rocket scientist), that when you have an online business ( are a self publisher, a visual artist selling for royalties or via PayPal buttons and shipping originals or even just a blogger making...

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Feedback from Mailchimp on Their Terms Regarding Affiliate Marketing in Newsletters

2011-03-03T09:36:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I signed up for Mailchimp and set up three lists and RSS campaigns including sign up forms on Facebook pages. Before adding more signup boxes or designing any special campaigns I had contacted their support asking for clarification on their terms not allowing...

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Selecting a niche for your blog or website: How focused do you want it to be?

2011-03-02T14:02:00.001-06:00

Previously, I wrote about different questions that you should ask yourself for selecting the niche or topic for a new blog or website. I wanted to share some thoughts on how focused you will make your niche once you select a general topic or general niche. What defines a website niche? It...

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Mailchimp Newsletter and E-mail List Experiment

2011-03-02T10:22:00.005-06:00

maiThis next step in my attempt to use free blogs and hosting along with custom domains is to set up a newsletter. When you have your own hosting account, you could set up PHPlist, your own email or newsletter script or a plugin for your content management system. You could also use a service...

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Article Writing on Squidoo and Hubpages Study Part 1

2011-03-01T21:54:00.002-06:00

I admit, I've almost been behind the curve on the internet trends and how people get ahead in link building. Whenever I get too stressed out, I dive into my artwork and ignore the outside world until I have a few more works uploaded. In fact I usually avoid watching the news on television and got...

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Selecting a Niche or Topic for your Website or Blog

2011-02-28T13:52:00.003-06:00

If you are writing for websites like Squidoo or Hubpages you don't really need to worry about your niche since the focus is on writing pages and linking them as series. Although it would probably be best to write one series at a time so the topic will be fresh instead of skipping around different...

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Working from Home: What's your focus selling or helping?

2011-02-27T15:48:00.005-06:00

When I started on my internet journey about four years ago, my goal was to help. I wanted to help people looking for my services find me online and contact me easily. I also wanted to provide my English students with quality content and resources for learning English . My goal wasn't to make money...

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Working from Home: Stay Comfortable in your Home Office

2011-02-26T11:24:00.000-06:00

While you might not exactly have a home office as a separate room, it is very important to be comfortable while you work. Being uncomfortable while working is distracting. An uncomfortable work area can be distracting and it may also shorten your attention span. In ideal circumstances, your home...

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Working from Home: Automate Social Networking Updates

2011-02-25T14:01:00.003-06:00

While most of our creative tasks require our personal attention and can be made faster only through careful planning of our activities, however the boring task of sharing links to your most recent blog post or web site article can be automated quite easily if RSS feeds are created. RSS is a...

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Working from Home:Prioritize your home office activities

2011-02-24T09:00:00.005-06:00

I mentioned previously how important it is to consider the days of the week and hours your work at home schedule includes, but it is just as important to properly prioritize your home office activities and other daily tasks. I'm not referring to meeting potential clients for freelance work or...

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Working from Home: Determine the Best Days of the Week

2011-02-22T09:42:00.001-06:00

I mentioned earlier that it is important to determine the hours of the day that you are the most productive in order to avoid distractions from indoors and outdoors, but what about days of the week? Working from home normally means that you are self employed, are a freelancer, work for a company...

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Working from Home: Find your most productive time of day

2011-02-21T09:19:00.001-06:00

Do you work from home? I started working from home about 3 years ago. While I will still teach one or two private English courses, I'm only away from home 2 days a week and the rest of the time I work from home, writing posts, doing site maintenance, taking photos, processing them, etc. Today,...

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How to use your Gmail or Google Apps e-mail with IMAP or POP

2011-02-14T19:50:00.001-06:00

When you set up your Google Apps account for a domain to include e-mail there are several steps involved. It is still a little flaky (sometimes it doesn't connect), but it is nice to be able to add various e-mail accounts to one program like Thunderbird or Outlook Express and see everything....

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Google Sites limits you to 5 new sites per week.

2011-02-14T11:21:00.002-06:00

Today, I learned something new. You can only "create" 5 new Google Sites per week. No, I didn't create 5 new sites this week. In fact I have 5 sites in total (and one is just a template of another site set to private). I created two new real sites and 3 if you count the private separate...

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Adding a Contact Form to Blogger and Google Sites

2011-02-08T10:12:00.005-06:00

As I've made the switch from Self-hosted WordPress to Google's Blogger and Google Sites (still making the switch for several sites), I've had to learn a new way of doing things, workarounds, and accepting that somethings are not possible. One issue that I discovered was the lack of a contact...

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