This week has been hectic for me personally, so I haven’t been posting, but I’ve been watching what’s been going on. It’s been pretty interesting.

For starters, Clickbank was hit with a denial of service attack, which was rather unpleasant for anyone promoting them. Looks like they took care of it, although the warning about it has remained on the login page.

Shareasale has added another blog to their site. This one is run by Brian Littleton, their President/CEO. He’ll be blogging about the company and affiliate marketing in general.

There’s a great deal for those of you who do affiliate marketing through LinkShare. You can get a free subscription to Revenue, a magazine for affiliate marketers. Just look on the left beneath the BadaBing in the Spring banner. I’ve read Revenue in the past and found it very interesting and useful. You can buy it at Barnes & Noble too, I hear, but why bother when you can get it free now. I don’t know how long this offer is good for, so sign up soon.

That’s about it for now. I’m looking forward to a hectic weekend here. My daughter’s birthday party is Sunday, but we have to go to her cousin’s birthday on Saturday, so getting everything ready is going to be pretty tough.

Have you been putting off starting your online business? Now may be the time you have been waiting for.

SiteSell offers an incredibly powerful range of tools for webmasters to make creating your online business and getting customers much easier. They track their success by how well their customers do. Just one criteria is how many sites reach the top 3% of sites as ranked by Alexa. They want you to focus on your business, while their tools help you do the rest.

So what is this May Madness offer?

Buy one SiteSell website and you can get a second for just $100 more.

Now you may be worried about trying to develop two sites at once. Don’t worry about it. You have up to nine months to start the second site, so you don’t have to overwhelm yourself.

If you aren’t sure about SiteSell, don’t be afraid to ask them questions! I think you’ll find out that SiteSell is a great solution for your online business.

Hurry! This offer ends May 1.

If you’re an affiliate with ShareASale, you should be sure to take a look at their blog and add it to the list of blogs you read. It’s been up since the start of April and provides a great way to keep up with what’s happening at ShareASale. For example, today is the last day you can get a $5 bonus for signing up for direct deposit with them.

Blogs are a great way to keep up with what’s happening in the affiliate marketing world. I would also suggest reading the 5 Star Affiliate Blog. Linda updates it regularly with information on what’s happening at 5 Star Affiliate, and a little bit of humor.

Of course, there are blogs by all kinds of marketers. Look around and see if any of the newsletters you enjoy have a blog as well. No spam filter to worry about and sometimes the blog and the newsletter will be different.

This looks like a pretty good deal, especially if you know someone else who is selling online. Grokdotcom is selling pre-release copies of their book, Call to Action. You get 3 for $13.95. This is a very limited time offer, ending by May 1 or sooner if they sell too many copies. It won’t ship until sometime in May. No, I am not an affiliate for this book; I just think it is a great deal. I’ve ordered my copies already.

I love it. The FBI arrested an entreprenuer and the hacker he hired to attack his competition’s websites. The hacker performed DDoS attacks on the competition’s websites.

It’s just so good to see websites starting to be taken more seriously when it comes to legal protection. I still want to see it made illegal to automatically steal affiliate commissions by installing spyware - seems like theft, plain and simple from my point of view. I know it’s hard for law enforcement to figure out how to handle these things, so this kind of progress is great to see.

So long as we’re on the topic of laws and government, if you are interested in tax preparation, the IRS is having tax forums in a few cities this year. Looks to be targeted toward tax professionals, so if that’s your area, take a look and get information from the source.

One of the hardest things about running a home business is coping with family. No matter how understanding a family you have, there’s a lot to deal with.

If you have small children, running a home business can be very difficult. You have to find times when the kids won’t mind that you are busy and steadily teach them how to behave when you need to work.

Right now, I have one of the more difficult family situations for a home business, which also makes it very rewarding. I have a toddler, who is about to turn 3 years old, and an infant, who is going to have surgery on his head soon for a condition called scaphocephaly, which you can read about on my other website. This makes succeeding with my home business a very high priority, yet I have to make time to play and care for my children.

Thank goodness for naptime!

When you run your home business, make sure you don’t forget your family. Take the time to have fun and talk with your children and your spouse. Your business won’t mean as much in the long run if you lose contact with what really matters.

How do I cope?

As I said above, thank goodness for naptime! Naps allow me to focus entirely on work without ignoring my children. But when my daughter, Ariel, is awake, I have a rule that she can interrupt certain activities very freely, such as time spent on discussion boards. I try to reserve activities that I do not want to have interrupted for naptimes or after she goes to bed if her nap wasn’t enough. I also make sure she has things she can do to pretend to work with me, or even work with her on my lap as I explain what I’m doing. Of course, none of it makes sense to her, but I do like to think that it will encourage her own entrepreneurial spirit when she is old enough.

My son, being just under two months old, is easier to deal with. Once again, I do a lot of work with him on my lap (yes, I do spend a lot of time with one or both children sitting with me at the computer), typing one-handed while nursing or trying to come up with something interesting for him to look at. There’s not much a two month old can do, so he’s really pretty easy, just very, very time consuming as he loves to eat.

In many ways, the person I have to be most careful to not ignore is my husband. After all, he has to compete for my attention with my business as well as the children, and that’s a lot. He’s very supportive, thank goodness, as well as pretty good at getting me away from the computer when he wants to! But since I can tell him that I need to get things done, it is all too easy to do that to excess and not feel guilty.

Finding that balance between working at home and family time is one of the most challenging aspects of home business. Make sure you make time for yours.

Ok, so the singing isn’t great, but you have to love the words. I spotted this link on the 5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog. Funny how these things spread, isn’t it? Head on over and listen.

I love reading other blogs, especially when they relate well to my interests. I have a bunch of them on My Yahoo page, which makes a convenient way to read everything. There are some great home business related blogs out there.

I got an email today from DentalPlans.com saying that they have shut down the HealthPlans.com program. Just the HealthPlans.com program, but they didn’t emphasize that. Shortly thereafter, I got an email reassuring everyone that DentalPlans.com is still in great shape and still there.

Consider it a reminder to always keep your business communication as clear as possible. A quick read could easily convince an affiliate to take down all their links, even though the DentalPlans program is still there. What a way for a business to lose money unnecessarily! Fortunately, they were quick to respond to concerns and tell everyone that they were only shutting down that part, so I would imagine that they won’t lose much from any misunderstandings.