There’s a good chance you’re reading this article during your workday as a distraction from whatever it is you’re supposed to be focusing on at work right now. Whatever you were working on, which you still need to finish up, is likely open in another window.

“It’s just a few-minutes break. No big deal?”

But I’m guessing this isn’t the first article you’ve read, and when you’re done skimming this, another one might catch your eye, over there on the right. Or you’ll get an IM from a coworker asking for restaurant recommendations in Atlanta, where they’re traveling to tomorrow on business, and you’ll be tempted to give it some thought, after all, you used to live there and they need your help. Add in a few tweets and a scan of your Facebook newsfeed, and before you know it, you just lost half an hour from your workday.

The Internet is the world’s greatest productivity tool, but also the world’s greatest time killer. Even email, which has put all executives on communication hyper mode since the BlackBerry, wastes a lot of time. As The New York Times pointed out in a recent article on Google CEO Larry Page: He doesn’t like email, even Gmail, saying “the tedious back-and-forth takes too long to solve problems.” One time he forced two executives to settle a dispute, which they had been waging over email, in person and before leaving a room. Email probably wastes time in your everyday life too. Say an email comes in from your boss or a new business prospect that you believe requires a grammatically correct, well thought-out, yet email-brief essay. It could take you 30 minutes to write but you could say it all in 30 seconds or less.

If you’re like most people, your email and IM are continually on, churning away in the background of your day. Whenever something comes in, you stop what you are doing, flip to the new message and then jump back to your work. Don’t kid yourself that you’re “multi-tasking.” Multi-tasking is a myth, says Winifred Gallagher in her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. You’re actually switching back and forth between two activities. “The extra effort involved actually makes you less rather than more productive; your overall performance will be inefficient, error-prone, and more time-consuming than if you had done one thing at a time,” Gallagher writes. Get enough messages and you’re never really getting anything done all day. And don’t get me started about how productive meetings are when everyone is BBM’ing.

My goal isn’t to tell you you’re a giant slacker, frittering away your workdays. Instead, think about it in reverse. Imagine how much you’d get done and how many fewer hours you would have to work if the Internet weren’t killing your work time. Just think about what you could do with all that extra time: Go to the movies. Hang out with your kids. Or, heaven forbid, work more, and be so much more productive than your distracted peers that you’ll get promoted faster and make more money.

Here are a few things I’ve learned to do that help me get the most out of my day:

• Turn off IM. Unless you have a compelling reason for real-time IM’ing with someone–for example, you are communicating with a colleague on an airplane and IM is the only choice–turn it off. IM is simply an invitation for people to interrupt your work and ask you trivial questions.
• Check your email only a few times day. Email is asynchronous–senders don’t expect an immediate response. Take advantage of this by turning off your visual and audio alerts, and checking it just a few times a day.

When I do check email, I have a rule that I respond immediately to every email as soon as I read it, unless it’s an email that needs no response at all. This discipline forces me to send short emails; because I want to get to the next message and never causes me to read an email twice. The result is much less time spent on messaging. The same thing for texting and checking voicemail.
 Have 30-minute meetings. With the exception of formal meetings, anything useful in a meeting can be accomplished in 30 minutes, especially when phones, email, and IM are not allowed.

• Schedule time for social media. Keeping up with the news is crucial, and maintaining a social media profile is important for professional purposes. But do it wisely. Make it something you schedule time for. I do it as soon as I wake up, and if possible, while I’m eating lunch. Once it’s a scheduled activity like anything else, it doesn’t become a filler that takes up your entire day.

So take it from someone who founded a number of Start-up companies: Spend your days a little less connected and you’ll be more productive, happier, and have much more free time. Now share this article and get back to work!

3 Tactics All Affiliate Marketers Need To Succeed

There are 3 major tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to increase your sales  in online affiliate marketing.

What are these three tactics?

1. Use unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that are focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can make 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The most effective advertising techniques involve using images or multimedia. Just think of the success companies have had with TV commercials and roadside billboards.

The concept is simple and applies equally to online banner advertising: The potential customer gets a better idea upfront of what they will receive.

Since banners can often generate higher click-through rate than plain-text ads, that means more traffic and more money for you as an internet marketer.

CPM vs. CPC

CPM = Cost Per Thousand impressions (1,000 views of the banner)

When paying by CPM, you generally pay less than you would if you paid by CPC. When done effectively, it can be a better pricing model.

CPC = Cost Per Click (1 Click)

With CPC, you only pay for the clicks you generate (as with Adwords), but this can actually be more expensive in the long run.

Creating High CTR (Click Through Rate ) Banners

Banner advertising can be called “interruption marketing” and your first goal has to be to get the prospect to click on the banner.

Always make sure the banner matches the landing page and try to integrate images into the banner design that match images found on the landing page.

For your banner copy, make sure to use strong “call to action” phrases such as “Warning,” “Scam Alert,” “73/Hour Online Job” or “Single Women Wanted.” Be catchy. Include a short summary of what the offer is about, and use a strong closing call to action – red or orange buttons work well, as do blue or red text links.

For your banner design, you have two basic choices: the do-it-yourself “Ghetto Fabulous” banner, which takes about 10 minutes to create and uses simple stock photos, plain type and text links, or the professionally created (outsourced) “Superstar Status” banners that incorporate flashy graphic design and even flash video animation. Both types of banners work, and which type works best usually depends on the kind of website you are advertising on. The only way to find out for sure is to test.

Most Profitable Banner Ad Sizes

There are a large number of “standard” banner sizes, but among the most profitable are the 300X250, the 336X280, the 160X600 and the 120X600.

Outsourcing Banner Ad Design

Odesk.com, Elance.com and Guru.com are all good sources for finding freelancers who can create banner ads at reasonable prices. You can also use a unique site called 99 Designs that allows you to create a project and choose a winner from among competing submissions.

20DollarBanners.com is another good source, as is Bannerad-design.com, which offers rates starting at just $17. HeyBannerBanner offers designs even cheaper. The advantage of going with one of these websites is that you don’t have to worry about ending up dealing with someone unreliable (the disadvantages, of course, is that the prices are usually a bit higher).