How to Squander Your Time and NOT Make Any Money Online

I have been reading quite a few blog posts recently about how to organize your limited time and making sure that your time can be focused and maximising your online income from the little time you have available. If I have learned nothing else in my time blogging and generally writing online is to make sure that you write about what you know. I certainly cannot claim to be a guru in terms of making money online and my time management skills are spectacularly poor. So, it surely makes sense to share my knowledge in this respect.

Here are my top tips on how to squander your time and not to make any money online:

1. Make sure that you do not have a plan. In order for you not to make any money your actions should be as unfocused and as impulsive possible. Make sure that you chase every new and interesting opportunity that comes your way.
2. Believe that you will fail. This way you will not see through your projects to their completion - after all what's the point, they are only going to fail anyway! 
3. Try and do more than is humanly possible. Start a large number of projects similtaneously and flit from one to another so that you do not actually achieve anything.
4. Don't check your affiliate links - that way if anyone clicks on them and buys anything you won't make any money.
5. Try and sell products that are already dominated by a few super affiliates. You know the ones - make money online products, slimming, etc. There is a high demand for these products, but loads of competition. Unless you have time available and a different angle to your competitors, the chances are that you will not make a cent with these.
6. Become obsessed with your stats. Check them minute by minute. Scrutinize every single visit to your website/blog/Squidoo page.
7. Obsess over your Clickbank balance. If you are trying to make money with Clickbank, then checking your balance every few minutes, willing it to increase, occasionally shouting obscenities and poking the screen in frustration just does not bring you any sales. Yes, I have tried this strategy on several occasions.
   
8. Allow yourself to become easily distracted. Here are a few ways of becoming distracted on the internet and idling away your time - search Wikipedia for some useless facts you have mused over, search Youtube for videos of that band you used to like but not heard from in ages, search for more ways to make money online that don't require time and discipline........etc, etc.

Follow these and I can absolutely guarantee that your time will fly by and you will not make any money whatsoever!!

So, what's your top tip for wasting time and not making money online?

A Change of Direction and a Grand Plan for my Internet Earnings

In the past few months I have been following a journey to making money online. So far my earnings have been fairly modest, but I have ambitions to increase this substantially. My recent purchase of One Week Marketing has forced me to re-evaluate what I am doing and thinking whether I am actually using my time effectively. And it is time that has been a particular limiting factor in me earning more money. This had led me to adopt the mantra:

Don't Work Harder, Work Smarter!

These are my current sources of online income:

Surveys
Ebay
Paid to Click
Paid Blog Posts
Blogrolled
Cashback Shopping
Scour
Adsense
Bukisa
Squidoo
Zlio
Today.com
Affiliate income


The purchase of One Week Marketing has shown me what is possible with Internet Marketing, so I have decided that a change of emphasis is needed. I am intending to switch my focus to Internet Marketing following the One Week Marketing method which focuses on making use of free methods such as Squidoo for promoting your affiliate links.

I am intending to focus primarily on a few niches with a view to setting up my own sites at some point in the future with opt-ins. My theory is that I can use the campaigns that I launch now to link in to my own sites when I get to that stage.

In order to make sure I am using my time effectively I need to look at what I am doing and how it contributes to my plan. I am making One Week Marketing the focus of my efforts at the moment, so the majority of what I do needs to feed into this. Therefore any articles I write should link to my OWM campaigns, and if I write these articles for HubPages, Bukisa, Associated Content, etc., then I also have the potential to earn from these articles.

Surveys have formed a large part of my money making efforts. I am currently receiving between 15 to 20 survey invitations per day!! If I were to complete all of these then this would take me around 5 to 6 hours! I have decided to scale back my activities with surveys gradually, concentrating firstly on those that are close to payout. Once I have reached payout with all of them then I will stick with 3 or 4 panels and ditch the rest.

I have decided to ditch most of the paid to click sites - frankly, life is too short to spend my time clicking on ads for pennies. The only one I am keeping for the moment is Hits 4 Pay as I am not that far of the $25 payout. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never the small amount of cash I have accumulated with the others.

Likewise with cashback shopping - I used to diligently visit these sites and click on those advertisers that would give you pennies for visiting their site. Again, I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never see this money, as it is really not a good use of my time.

Despite the fact that I have made only £0.80 so far with my Zlio shops I am sticking with them for now. I have some ideas for promoting them which I want to try out in the near future. If these don't pay off then I will let them go as well.

I am disappointed that Today.com have changed their rules so that I now receive $2 per 1000 visitors to my Today.com blog. They have now allowed some other options for making money, such as some limited affiliate opportunities. If this was the focus of my activities then I probably could make some money from it if I really put my mind to it. However, it isn't. I have decided just to put up some occasional posts, just to keep it ticking over.

There is Ebay of course - I keep finding stuff around the house to sell so it makes sense to continue with this.

There we are, that's the plan. Any thoughts anyone on how use time effectively when making money online?

Being More Focused: Part 2

This weekend brings to an end two weeks of focusing on Ebay. The benefit of this is that I have managed to bring in a reasonable sum of money, although I did not manage to list as many things as I would have liked to have done. I still have a number of auctions due to finish over the next few days. I think that I will list just a few more things this weekend to keep things ticking over.

The downside of this approach is that traffic to my website and blogs has nosedived as I have not been able to put in the time to traffic exchanges (Entrecards and Link Referral) and forums.

I have decided that I will spend the coming week updating my website, Extra Cash Review. The main things I have decided to work on are try and improve on navigation of the site and to check all the referral/affiliate links. Also some of the information on the site is out of date, so I need to update this.

My income from Ad Sense has been pretty poor so far and it has been suggested to me that I need to look at the placement of these, so I will see what I can do with these as well.

Time to be More Focused: Ebay Week

I have come to the conclusion that one reason why my online earnings have been so poor recently is that I have been applying a somewhat "scattergun" approach to organizing my time. I tend to sit at my PC and just think "what can I do today to make some money?" instead of actually being more organized and focused. The net result is that I don't actually achieve very much. So I have decided that I should try and focus on one thing at a time on a week by week basis and that way I might actually achieve something.

I have started by going back to basics and concentrated this week on Ebay. So I have been scouring the house for stuff that we no longer use and is in good condition. I have decided that extend this to next week as well as I quite a lot of stuff to go. Also I have quite a few things that I bought in a little while ago that I need to try and sell. I will try and get as many listings as I can into Turbo Lister then if need be I can upload to Ebay over the coming weeks so that I am not having try and dispatch an unmanageable number of items all at once.

So that's next week taken care of - more listing and scouring the house for more stuff!!