This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

I’m finding one of the keys to being productive is to be able to take advantage of the small breaks of time during the day.  If you found yourself with 5 extra minutes, could you use them?  How about an extra 60 seconds?

Those small breaks of time can add up to quite a bit over the course of a day.  I have two main suggestions:

• Be able to do a lot from your phone.
• Keep things open on your computer.

:: Be able to accomplish a lot from your phone

I discussed this a bit in part one of the series (“get control of your email“), but it’s worth mentioning again; a good phone is worth far more than the initial expense.  During the day, many of your small breaks of time are found when you’re away from home.  Some examples:

• Waiting for your child after school/dance/sports
• Waiting to see the dentist/doctor
• Waiting for food to arrive at a meal
• Waiting in line for tickets/check-out

I’m sure you can think of many others, but that’s a start.  When I have extra time in one of those cases, I do one of the following on my phone:

• Process some email.  I don’t usually convert any into tasks (I leave that for when I get home), but I can read, respond, archive, delete, etc.
• Catch up on Google Reader.  I can knock some reading off my list, and “star” items for later if I need to read them more in-depth or write about them.
• Read some Tweets or catch up on Facebook.  You can access Twitter and Facebook from almost any phone.  If those are important to you, then this gives you a chance to catch up.

Right now the iPhone is still your best bet, but some of the Android phones (like Verizon’s “Droid”) are catching up really quick.  Ultimately, any decent smartphone will do the job for you.

:: Keep things open on your computer

If you find yourself with a spare minute or two, you don’t want to waste a chunk of that time opening programs, logging in, etc.  If possible, leave those programs open all the time.  When you find a spare minute, your tools are right at your fingertips and you can get things done.

The problem with this is that leaving too much stuff open can slow down your computer and cause other issues.  I wrote a long post about this back in January, but here are some tips:

• Leave it on. Don’t shut down every night.  Reboot once or twice a week to keep Windows fresh, though.
• Use a fast browser. I use Google Chrome 90% of the time, and Firefox for most of the rest.  They use less memory and run much faster than Internet Explorer.
• Clean up your computer. There are a lot of small (free!) things you can do to speed up your computer.  Here’s tips for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Mac.
• Buy more memory. RAM is dirt cheap, simple to install and will make a huge difference.  At this point, you should have at least 2 gigs in your computer.  If not, go get more.  Not sure what you need?  Go to crucial.com and use the “scan my system” tool.  They’ll tell you exactly what you have, offer some choices, and they’ll sell it at a fair price.  I use them quite a bit.
• Get a new computer. This is last on the list for a reason, but it’s worth mentioning.  If your computer is more than a few years old, you can get a new one that is much faster for $500 (or less).  It’s something to consider.

If you find yourself with a bit more time and you’re caught up on email/reader/etc, Chris Brogan has a list of things to do if you have an extra half hour.  It’s got some good tips to try to keep you ahead of the game.

What else do you do to take advantage of those small breaks of time?

This is the eighth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 8 – Take advantage of the small breaks of time is a post from: MickMel

First released in March as a limited beta, Google Ad Manager is now available to anyone that has an AdSense account.  According to Google’s blog, Ad Manager…

can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

If you sell ads on your site, or run ads from more than one company, this is likely to be a very useful tool.

I’m just getting my feet wet with it, so I can’t say much from personal experience.  How about you? Have you tried it yet?  What did you think of it?

Google Ad Manager now available to all is a post from: MickMel

I apologize for not posting very much lately.  I’ve been working with a handful of bloggers to try to get their traffic (and revenue) beefed up, and I’ve not had much time for this site lately.  The techniques I’m using are really working quite well, and now I’m opening it up to other people.  I don’t want to try to assist too many people (it takes a personal relationship with each blog), but if you’d like some help with your blog, let me know.  Here’s the simple version of how it works:

1. I manage your blog (WordPress updates, plugins, SEO tweaks, ad placement, etc).
2. You continue to write your blog posts.
3. I get a 25% split of your ad impressions.

To help explain this idea to potential clients, I’ve set up a simple site outlining how it works.  The first question that most people have is: “Wait.  I’m trying to earn more revenue, and I’m not sure I want to give up 25% of my revenue.”  It’s a fair question.  However, my clients (so far) have all been very pleased, as they’ve started earning much more than the 25% that I get.  Here are some stats froma recent client I’ve started helping.

Those are genuine stats from Google Analytics, snipped just a few minutes ago.  Each dot represents one week, leading up to last week.

The beauty of the revenue-sharing is this — you pay nothing.  Nada. $0.00.  Also, because I’m getting a small portion of the ad revenue, you can rest assured that I will work hard to get your blog running as smoothly as possible.

If you’re already WordPress-savvy and doing well, then you certainly don’t need my help.  However, if you’re having problems keeping your site running well, or if traffic just isn’t increasing as quickly as you think it show, shoot me an e-mail and we can chat.

Need help getting more traffic to your blog? is a post from: MickMel

Last month I posted some revenue stats about my sites, along with a few goals.  I thought I’d try to re-visit that data at the beginning of each month.

My goals were to diversify better among my sites, diversify better in terms of revenue sources, and then to obviously generate more total revenue.  I only managed to improve one out of three, but for good reason.

My largest site saw a significant boost in AdSense revenue, thanks to some changes that I made.  As a result, that site now has even more of my total revenue, and AdSense still has about the same amount.

Generate more revenue

This is the biggest one, and it’s trending up.  Total revenue across my sites was up by 10.1% from February to March. Woo-hoo!

Diversify among my sites

This month, my largest site accounted for 90.8% of my total revenue.  Again, this is due to some AdSense changes that I made, which I’ll dig into in a later post.

Diversify away from AdSense

I have no problem with them, but I don’t like keeping all of my eggs in the same basket.

• In February, AdSense accounted for 89.7% of my total revenue.  This month it creeped up to 89.8%.
• FastClick’s share increased from 7.3% to 8.4%, as I made a few small changes there.
• FeedBurner revenue fell from 1.6% to just 0.5%.  I can’t explain that one, as the feed that I use for it is only getting larger.
• In an effort to diversify, I ran some ads from Kontera and Chitika.  They were both pitiful, each earning less than 0.1% of my total revenue.  Kontera is now gone from my sites, and Chitika is just about there.

I still would like to diversity a bit more, but it’s tough.  AdSense is doing so well that I hate to turn away from it at all.  The areas I really need to work on expanding are:

• Direct ad sales.
• Affiliate ads.

My overall goals remain the same — have my largest site generate less than 50% of my total revenue, and have AdSense account for less than 50% of my total revenue.  As soon as some of my smaller sites start gaining momentum, I should see some progress toward those goals.

Monthly monetization update is a post from: MickMel

Google has just announced the release of “Ad Manager” (in beta, of course), to help manage your ads.  This goes way beyond AdSense.  It allows you to manually ad advertisers, add other ad networks, and also integrate AdSense.  The system will help pick the highest paying and best performing ads for your site.

From the Ad Manager site:

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

• Simple, intuitive user interface: Decrease training time and trafficking steps with simplified tagging and inventory management.
• Google serving speed and reliability. Ensure quicker ad delivery and fewer reporting discrepancies.
• Significant cost savings – it’s free!  Pay nothing for ad serving, feature upgrades, or system maintenance.

Right now the system is only open to invited beta testers, but you can apply here.

Google releases Ad Manager is a post from: MickMel

It’s been an ongoing struggle for me, but hopefully making the results public on this blog will help me to force the issue — I need to diversify.  The chart at left shows my revenue sources for February — nearly 90% came from AdSense!

Part of that is simply my love for AdSense, and the fact that it’s just so easy to use.  However, having it be 90% of the total revenue just isn’t very wise.  Jennifer Slegg (“JenSense” to many of you) had a post about this very subject a few days ago, which helped inspire me to post this.

To go along with “every egg in the AdSense basket”, my site portfolio isn’t very diversified.  I run a wide range of sites (around 20 in all), but one individual site earns about 80% of the revenue.  My goals by the end of 2008:

• Have AdSense contribute less than 50% of my total revenue, but not lose any money from them, thus raising the total revenue.
• Have no single site earn more than 50% of the total revenue.

I’ll post again each month with updates on how this progresses.

I need to diversify more is a post from: MickMel