No, I don’t mean what if your business fails. I mean what if one of your best merchants suddenly cancels their affiliate program? What do you do?

I’m asking this today because a program did that to me today. Fortunately, they were only adequate, not spectacular, but it’s frustrating to have no warning at all that links must be removed. Fortunately, in this case they were not the only possible merchant, so it’s not a disaster, merely a frustration.

Even if you’re only promoting one company on a site, you should try to have a backup plan for just in case they cancel their affiliate program. AdSense may work well in some cases, but you need to be prepared for those times when you need something more.

I’m going! Ok, so it’s online and therefore very convenient, I’m still delighted that I’ll be able to go. I wasn’t sure I would be at first. There was a chance that I’d be watching my two young nieces, ages 4 and 2, in addition to my kids at the time, which would have made paying any attention rather difficult. Fortunately, that situation has been delayed until early November, so I’m free! eComXpo is October 6-8.

It’s quite affordable if you’d care to join me. Just $29.95 for the basic ticket, and you can go for all 3 days. If you want to go to the presentations it costs more. It looks like a lot of fun to me. It’s too hard at this point for me to attend one of these events in person, since my kids are so young, so online strikes me as the perfect way to go.

I found this kind of interesting, so I’m sharing it. Pew Internet says that adoption of broadband is slowing quite a bit. About 53% of home internet users now use broadband, up from 50% last December. This is greatly slowed from the year before.

Why does this matter to your business? The demographics are quite interesting. Most people starting out on the internet start out with dialup, then go broadband as their skills and needs increase. Those who stay on dialup tend to be older and poorer.

The thing to remember is that this is not a license to design websites that require broadband to load in a decent time. If your target market is more tech savvy, you might have a reason to do bandwidth-intensive projects, but if you want a more general appeal, be careful. And if you expect older customers or those with less money, definitely watch your download times.

No matter how encouraging it is to see that more than half of all users will probably have broadband, remember, that’s nearly half that DON’T. Broadband users don’t expect every site to have tons of features that require the speed they have, but dialup users can’t be expected to cope with features that do require broadband. Keep your customers in mind when you create your website.

My productivity lately hasn’t been what I would like it to be, so I’ve set myself up with some weekly goals. These are things I haven’t gotten anywhere near achieving lately.

I chose weekly because, let’s face it, daily is too subject to stuff happening, and monthly it becomes too easy to become discouraged or kick back until it’s too late to accomplish everything. Weekly seems like a good compromise.

I set my goals high because I would love to get my income climbing. I’m at a good level, considering that I’m earning more than my husband, but I know I can do much, much more. If I find that I’m acheiving the goals too easily, I can raise them. If they’re too hard after several weeks of trying, I can adjust them.

Doing this has motivated me already to get going on some solid link building, which I’ve been neglecting lately. I did this weeks’ allotment tonight and made a note of where I stopped. Link building is probably my least favorite activity, but with a regular goal it becomes easier to face. Much better than just sitting down for a few hours once every month or two trying to make up for what I should have been doing all along.

Content creation is generally easier, although there’s always the chance of writer’s block. Of course, with the range of sites I have, there’s always a new topic to consider if I just can’t write on one site or another.

Just dealt with estimated taxes for the first time. I think I want to have an accountant next year, because I still have no idea how much I should have paid. I would love to find a good tool for figuring it out online.

My situation was more complex than average because my income jumped from where the withholding on my husband’s job could cover my taxes to where I needed to start paying estimated taxes. That’s a good thing, but it meant looking at the annualized version, and that gets complicated. I’m good at math, but this was quite the headache. I think if I do this again I’ll set up a worksheet in Excel and see if that makes things any better. It shouldn’t be difficult to do.

Story: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050905/sfm048b.html?.v=1

This could be an interesting one for affiliates. Linkshare has had quite a few problems lately, so I don’t know if this will make things better or worse. Rakuten must have big plans; they paid $425 million for it. Like many other affiliates, I can think of lots of things I’d like to see from Linkshare - less trouble with payments, drop the visual confirmation from the signin, quit messing with the validation nonsense that no other company seems to need… lots of things to fix there.

Fortunately, it is my understanding that they aren’t going to mess with things until after Q4, which just makes good business sense. You don’t play with the major shopping season. What happens after that could be interesting.

I’ve been trying to get some sites up for Christmas, which is a lot of work. For a little while, I was probably spending too much time at that, but now I’m getting things more in control.

The balance between family life and running a home business is not easily maintained, especially when the kids are young and need a lot of attention. My daughter now goes to preschool two days a week for three hours each day, but it’s a parent participation program, so two days a month I have to help out in class, so there really is not much of a time savings there. But it is wonderful for my daughter and she loves it.

I took yesterday almost entirely off. Didn’t even check my email until after 9 last night. I don’t do that often, but it’s something I want to do more. It’s so much fun taking time to be with my family.

The balance shifts constantly. Sometimes it’s easy to take time off, but other times, such as now when I have a goal to meet it is very challenging to keep up. My daughter almost never naps now, and my son is still a baby and needs lots of care. Feedings take a lot of time. It amazes me how much less television I watch now - although with the new season about to start there are a few programs I’ll be watching. I want TiVo!! Soon as the budget permits, that’s on the list. My sister has it, and it’s wonderful. Much easier than a VCR, even with its few disadvantages. It’s kind of a pain to only be able to watch something prerecorded or what is currently being recorded, as there are times that there are two shows on at the same time I or my husband would like to watch, but that’s fairly rare.

In a few weeks I might just be taking an actual vacation. Just 4 days camping with my family and my sister’s family. Our kids are about the same ages, so it’s lots of fun for them to be together.

Well, enough playing around here - I need to get some work done while my daughter is in a mood to entertain herself!