A new and ever growing trend in America today is to work from home. It helps many parents to afford to be able to stay at home while still managing to pay their bills, and live the lifestyle that they enjoy. You may be able to save extra money by not having to pay for daycare services, car maintenance, gas, or food to eat out everyday. You can save a lot of money by avoiding them with a home based business. The one down fall that you may begin to experience that you were not prepared for is the number of increasing distractions that you will have to deal with, as you deal with both home and work. These distractions can make or break the success of your business.

Setting a schedule or routine for your day can be a life saver. Purchase a calendar or personal notebook where you keep important deadlines listed. This can help you decide when you need to focus on certain projects, and how long it should take you to complete each project. You will have less of a chance to forget about an important task or deadline that needs your attention by a certain date. Making a list of all of the tasks that need to be completed each day can help you to decide how much time to devote to each task on that particular day also.

If your children are younger, you may find it easy to spend more time playing with your children or taking trips to the park, instead of focusing on your money making venture. You will need to set down a routine where you limit yourself to so many hours each day for work and so many hours to taking care of household responsibilities. Remember to give yourself extra time to get children down for a nap or the unexpected things that can and will happen during the day. You do not want to feel overly stressed if a trip to the grocery store takes an extra thirty minutes or Your daughter has an emergency trip to the mall for that skirt that she can no longer live with out. Planning an extra hour or more everday will help you stay on a schedule while letting you have a little time for the daily complications of life.

Set your office or computer out of the way of normal household traffic. This can lead to more interruptions that will take away from your business tasks that you need to accomplish. If you have older children, it is a good idea to make sure that they are busy when you start to work, so they are less likely to interrupt you. Let them know that daily you will be working on business during specific hours and that you do not want them to interrupt you unless it is an emergency.

Setting time schedules and balancing your life may be more difficult when you choose to work at home but you will feel deeply rewarded by the money that you can save and by being at home where you feel that you are fulfilling your first priority to your family.

Article services and search engine SEO can be used together to provide a powerful means of attracting a high volume of traffic to your website if you know how to do it.

It is not possible to provide a course in SEO or in article marketing or writing in an article such as this, but you can get the rudiments from appropriate web pages on the internet that are interested in showing you how. Initially, however, here are a few tips on how to make a start in combining these two powerful facets of internet marketing to your advantage. To make it work you have to get up and do it, and not expect it to come to you.

Achieve Nothing by Doing Nothing

My father used to say to me that nothing will ever be achieved by doing nothing but thinking about it. He said that when he was fighting on the destroyers in the Russian convoys protecting the merchant ships attempting to maintain supplies to the Russians in Archangel in 1942 it would have been easier to do nothing, but a job had to be done and they all did it by knuckling down and getting on with it, no matter what it cost.

Compared to that I find spending a few hours on a website simple and trouble free, and I have never forgotten the lesson he taught me. I work the hours I need to complete a task: the clock does not exist. The failures in internet marketing are those that give up too early. If you havent finished your days work by midnight, then stay up till you have finished whether it is 2 am or later. OK, you might have the day job in the morning but nobody said it was easy, unless you believed the guys who offered you to get rich quick.

My dad didnt help supply the Russians by bunking down at midnight. You wont make a success of your new internet business by doing the same. Thats the reality of it. However, if you do knuckle down, and if you do apply the effort, then you will succeed since all it takes is the hard work then the rest will happen if you do as you are advised. Do what the winners do and you will join them.

Get Writing: Or Get Me Writing

If you can write then start writing. Write at least two articles a week on the subject of your website. More if possible. If you can write 50 then do that, but you will get success with just two. I have proved that to myself. If you cant write, get a ghost writer. If you cant afford a ghost writer contact me and I will help you if I have the spare time of the 24 hours I have each day.

You must also have more than one website, so get yourself two at least. The more the better, but two will do to start with. If you cant afford two web hosts, then get one that allows unlimited subdomains and you can have as many independent websites as you want. eMail me for info on parked subdomains if you dont know how to use them.

Optimize each page on each website as well as you can, and link one to the other. The topics or niches should be complementary, so that one is relevant to the other. Optimize the links between the pages on each of your sites to maximize your internal Google PageRank, and design the sites logically. If you use classic search engine SEO techniques, and tie them up with good internal and external linking strategies, you should soon start to see your traffic steadily increasing.

Build Up Your Website

There are several offsite actions you can take to improve the chances of your web pages appearing high in the Google listings for the keywords each page is optimized on. You should have at least 10 pages on each site, preferably more. It is easy to keep adding pages if you design one page to use as a template for the others, and add all the links to it that you want to have on every page.

Then all you need do to add a page is to change the article content, page heading, page title and graphics Alt text. The change the keywords, de ion and title meta tags and you are all set. You can do it in 10 minutes. Imagine: a new web page every 10 minutes!

Now write articles on the topic of each new page on your site and submit them to as many article directories as you can. You will get an initial page rank rush, or at least a rush of clicks to your site, until Google starts to take note of all the duplication of your article on multiple web pages (article directories). It will then begin to penalize these in the Google listings but not, and this is VERY IMPORTANT, not from the directories because Google cannot decide what content article directories hold. Your articles will remain on each directory until it decides to remove it that could be years hence.

Do the Hard Work and Reap the Benefits

These are the basics of how to use article services and search engine SEO. The hard work is the writing and generating of the websites and web pages. However, if you are like my dad, and get on with the job even though your hands are frozen solid to the breach block of a five inch gun of a destroyer in the Arctic Ocean at 3 am on a cold February morning, then you will succeed. Work will get you there, not paying hundreds of dollars for software that does it all for you it never does. Get the right guy to point you and you should be OK.

How to increase your influence and effectively manage your board of directorsso it doesn't manage you

If knowledge equals power, what does information equal? Influence. And that's what you want when interacting with your board of directors: the ability to influence how you are perceived as a leader, and how your company is perceived as an enterprise. And you control your influence on your board, by providing the right info at the right time in the right format.

Of course, you've got to be honest and up front with your directors and clearly portray the state of your business. But no one has the time or the attention span to tolerate vagueness or fluff in board reporting. Clear board reporting helps keep the company on track and the board confident and aligned with your goals. Here's what you need to report to your board of directors. Add whatever you and your executive team find appropriate to the list below. Note that each departmental update will require one to two pages in the board pack.

All Departments

For each department, you need to talk about the goals achieved last month, goals not achieved last month and why, and the goals to be achieved this month.

Now I'll walk you through the specifics on what you need to be able to address for each of your departments.

Sales/Business Development

Deals closed and terms of each deal.

Specifics for ideal customer/partner in each customer/partnership category.

Sales strategies employed.

Why deals were lost: Did the sale go to a competitor? Which one? What was their proposition and why was it better than yours? Was the sale lost because a new decisionmaker joined the fray? Why didn't you know about this in advance?

Customer Service

Number of inquiries responded to for the month, percentage breakdown of customers vs. prospects.

Average time to resolution on each customer inquiry.

Percentage of customers who have contacted customer service repeatedly and how often.

Plans for self-serve and/or live-person customer service.

Engineering

Technology used, integration issues, expertise needed to employ and improve it.

Technology's stability, scalability, and extensibility potential.

Testing approach, hosting approach, and strengths and weaknesses of vendor.

Release schedule and key features per release.

Marketing

Leads being pursued, and the amount of time it takes a lead to become a prospective customer.

Customer acquisition, retention, and up-selling strategies.

Recent and upcoming key marketing activities, such as mailings, conferences, trade shows, and press coverage.

Product management issues, if any. Do keep in mind that separating marketing communications from product management issues helps clarify reporting a great deal. Remember that marketing has three silos: sales support (lead generation and qualification), marketing communication (PR and collateral), and product management.

Upcoming Web-site revisions and high-level details.

Finance

Stock options to be approved for issuance.

Head count (permanent and temporary) today and projected for quarter.

Burn rate today and over next three quarters.

Any current or potential employee issues.

Balance sheet, P&L, statement of cash flows.

Even if you don't have a board of directors or advisers, you need to get updates on each item listed above to accurately track your business and to hold your department heads accountable. These updates keep everyone focused on results, help foster accountability, and, last but not least, help the CEO and department heads clearly report progress. Additional board-related benefits include increased trust, improved ability to affect board voting, and increased influence overall.