4 Work Habits to Increase Productivity and Personal Well Being

If you are like most people, you occasionally find yourself feeling stressed, disorganized and just plain achy during the work day. This can lead to a lower productivity level and affects your overall mental and physical well being. There are several things you can do throughout the day to combat these feelings and increase productivity.

Organize Your Desk and Your Day

Planning your day according to priority level of work to be accomplished clears your mind of clutter and allows for a steady flow of productivity. Granted, from time to time a special project or an issue with a client interrupts your schedule, but having your priorities in order allows you to pick up where you left off with ease.

By the same token, a disorganized desk tends to be overwhelming and clutters the mind not to mention wastes time when looking for documents. Keeping a neatly organized desk promotes smooth work flow and eases stress. Another helpful tip is to leave the next project or the next step in the current project in the middle of your desk at the end of each work day. This gives you a reminder the next morning of where you left off the previous day and sets the new day in motion.

Play Music at an Acceptable Level

Background music can do wonders for productivity and your overall mood. Without realizing it, you will find yourself working to the beat. You mind is more relaxed and more able to concentrate on the task at hand when you are in a comfortable frame of mind.

Stretch Your Body

If you work at a desk all day, your back becomes sore and your legs may even become stiff from time to time. Standing up at least once an hour and performing what you can in that position will help to stretch your muscles and relieve any stiffness you experience throughout the day.

Step Outside for a Few Minutes

Take a few minutes a day and get some fresh air. It’ll do your mind and body some good. Take a little mini walk around the parking lot. You’ll feel refreshed and ready to get back to work. If possible, take your lunch break outside. If there is a park nearby, take advantage of it.

Learn the Language of SEO – Definitions of Common Terms

Whether you are an internet marketer or an offline business going online, you are going to hear about search engine optimization (SEO) very early on. SEO is the term online marketers use to refer to the process of getting as much traffic as possible from search engines like Google. It can be confusing to try to understand this new foreign language that everyone online seems to feel so comfortable with. So rather than struggling to translate everything, learn a few of the basic terms to give yourself a head start.

Here are some of the most common SEO terms that you’ll hear.

SERPS: This stands for “search engine results pages”. These are the pages you see after you type in a search phrase into Google or other search engines. They’re the results of your search. For anyone with a business online, your goal is to be as high up in the SERPS as possible for any search phrases associated with your business.

Meta tags: Meta tags are words that appear in the html code for a page, but do not appear on the page itself. They tell search engines specific information about that page. The most common meta tags are for description (of the page), keywords, and author.

Title tags: These are the words that appear in the tab or bar at the very top of your web browser. They are the “title” of the page that a user will see when they look at the top of their browser.

Alt image tags: The alt image tag provides the “alternative text” for an image. Since search engines can’t read an image, you should always provide some text that describes the image as well. It will show up if the image can’t be displayed and will also show if someone mouses over it.

Hyperlinks: A hyperlink is simply a link you can click on that connects one place to another either on the web or even within a document, such as a slide show. Hyperlinks can be attached to text or images.

Anchor text: This is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Marketers typically use keywords that describe the linked page as their anchor text, which can help in ranking higher in the SERPS.

Internal links: These are links from one page on a site or domain to another. The opposite is an “external link” which involves linking to a page on another website. Both types of links are important for SEO.

Longtail keywords: A longtail keyword is a search phrase that consists of 2 or more words. Usually, the longer the keyword phrase the more specific the information is that the searcher is looking for. In general, it is easier to rank for a longtail keyword since it will have less competition.

Keyword density: Keyword density is a measure of how many times a specific keyword appears on a page in relation to the number of words on the page. If the keyword density is a high percentage, it can be a warning sign to Google that the page is low quality or spam.

Organic traffic: The free traffic you get naturally from search engines and other directory listings is referred to as organic traffic. The opposite is paid traffic, such as the people who arrive at your site by clicking on one of your ads on another site.

Spider: Also referred to as a “crawler” or “robot”, spiders are software programs that the search engines use for locating and indexing all the pages and websites on the internet. Spiders follow links from one page to another and will revisit sites, indexing new pages as it goes.

There are many more SEO terms that you’ll hear as you learn more about getting traffic from search engines. Don’t be afraid to ask for definitions and explanations of a term you don’t understand. Even the most seasoned internet marketer comes across terms they are unfamiliar with. It’s all part of the learning process for getting more traffic.

What Are the Best Placements for High CTRs?

Over the years, webmasters have tested literally hundreds of different placements for their AdSense ads to find which ones get the highest click-through rates. Instead of starting your own testing from scratch, it can really help to start with a proven placement and make improvements from there.

Here are four placements that have been proven time and time again with high CTRs.

The "Above the Fold Double Sidebar" Placement

Above the fold, put two small placements in your sidebar. This will basically look like two ads right on top of one another.

This creates the impression that the ads themselves are part of your navigation. Because it's above the fold in places where people are used to looking for navigation bars, your ads get a lot of visibility.

Split test left versus right to see which gets you the highest clicks.

The "Look At This Ad First" Placement

According to the Google Heatmap and many webmaster anecdotes, this placement often makes the most money. Unfortunately, it does detract aesthetically from the site.

The ad unit is placed above the content, dead center in the page with no text wrapped around it. In order to read the article, the person has to actually scroll down past the ad.

In other words, they're forced to look at the ad. This generally results in pretty high CTRs.

The "Right Under Top Nav Banner" Placement

If you have a top navigation bar, placing a banner ad right under your navigation bar can get very high click-through rates.

People who glance at your top navigation bar are also very likely to see your ad. In fact, some people may even just accidentally click on your ads.

Experiment with text ads versus image ads in this placement. Also experiment with using text links.

The "Inside Content Large Rectangle" Placement

This placement usually doesn't get as high a CTR as the "Look At This Ad First" placement, but it's aesthetically more pleasing to the eye and still performs very well.

It's ideal for sites that want to earn income now, but still want to build a long-term brand. Rather than optimizing just for getting the most clicks possible now, you're getting as many clicks as you can while still building some customer loyalty to your site.

Basically you place a large rectangle either on the left or right hand side of your page and have the text just wrap around the ad. This gets very high click throughs and looks quite decent.

These are four of the top tried and true placements for getting good CTRs on AdSense. As always, results will vary based on your site and niche, so always split test for yourself.