I am my own boss.

• Make my own hours
• answer to nobody
• work as little or as much as I want
• work from the comfort of my own home
• sleep in, stay up late
• get rich quick
• profit from my creativity and experience

What a fantastic list, I wish my hub would give you the answers to these goals but alas I am yet to reach them myself. Sure, I make my own hours, but Im a terrible taskmaster who works 12-14 hours a day, answering to myself is the worst boss of all,the comfort of my own home leads to neat freak attacks so I can function in my workspace and the overwhelming feeling that I dont get out enough, sure I sleep in because I go to sleep at 6am, profit from creativity and experience? Im a decade away from going Van Gogh.

BUT , I do have a rather large network of sites, an increasingly heavy traffic load and an increasingly stronger hold on affiliate marketing techniques and web design.Its just my previous networking and traffic goals were merely towards promoting the art and graphic design of myself and select artists. My goals have expanded immensely.

So the research that led me on the path from Artist, Graphic Designer , Small Business Owner, eBay Powerseller to future dot.com mogul.

Well, Im not sharing all of it yet, but heres some indispendable tips, plug-ins and web resources that have really smoothed my way.

I will assume that you already are taking advantage of social networking sites, free blog sites, free hosting sites, you already have or are saving up for your own domain, and you have a basic understanding of html or at least a competence with WYSIWYG editing programs.

I will work on a beginners guide to building at least a 25 unique address network with interconnecting circular links soon but as early traffic stats show the greatest percentage of my hub visits are stemming from other hub pages that info will be foregone for now.

First, The most commonly used Firefox plug-ins/add ons that increase my efficiency.

Clippings:

You travel all over the web, entering passwords, log in info, leaving your signatures, different signatures for different forums and topics, you stick your link everywhere you can - it becomes a pain to type the same info over and over again. With Clippings you highlight text and then save via a right click menu, you name your clipping and from then on it is accessable via right click contextual menu and/or a shortcut key!

So for example: I simply press "ctrl + alt + v" and my selected hotkey "B" and my signature containing my ebay store address, main domain and blog all automatically appear, I also press "ctrl + alt + v" and "E" and my email address fills a field. You can also use this for common html tags such as <b> or <br /> or <a href=" , A huge time saver!

Did you like that nifty screenshot ?

Well so do I, and I use them frequently in my How-To style posts.

Enter the FireShot

Right click, capture either entire page or visible area and then upload, save.print,edit, email or copy to clipboard, it takes all of a second saves as a .png,.jpg, or .bmp.

Hopefully, when you seriously want to promote your page,blog or hub you take advantage of social bookmarking sites, why bother logging into all those different pages when you can do it with just one click with your toolbar.

Reddit - like it, one button

Digg - 1 button submission, just enter the captcha

StumbleUpon -thumbs up, one button

Nobody wants to give up screen real estate to toolbars, a simple right click and you can hide them all away until you want to submit another page.

So you have completed your page - spread it across the social bookmarking pages, used clippings to post links quickly at your myspace/facebook/hi5/linkedin etc. profiles.

Now submit your link to be queried and indexed by all the major searches all at once.

Ping - Submit your page to approx 50 sources at once:

Spread your blog across your network using Digg.

Simply go into your Digg account, open your profile and click on your most recent Digg! then click the share tab ---> you can post a snippet with a digg button and a link back to your original post, to all your connected blogs, set that up in your account once, and share with one button!

Scribefire

Not sure how I worked without it. Right click to open editor from menu, compose your blog in half screen rich text editor, then one button submit to all your blogs, you dont have to log in to each account anymore, and you can use the larger text editor.

I submit to two Wordpress blogs and two Blogspot blogs without ever leaving my homepage! You can even capture and send any page to your blog, with the blogthis option.

It even has a built in ad generator for use through their publisher system, you set the dimensions and colors, they will serve your ads for you with detailed tracking and stats! Im begining to phase out CJ.com in favor of the ease of use provided by scribefires ad plug ins.

They also offer intext advertising, similar to Kontera here on HubPages.

At this point I like to post bulletins and short teasers in blogs with links out to my various off network blogs, I also add a note to my facebook account.

Myspace is huge for traffic and does tend to draw lots of traffic out to my site, my accounts are art centered so they have worked well in relation to my main intention of bringing traffic to my domain, ebay listings and etsy account.

Dont want to build a myspace account and network, just buy one, I noticed these on eBay lately and they really are worth it, I will purchase soem of the high networks 35,000 friends myself and will begin building these sites for resale, you purchase the unamed URL, add your business name to the end, do a little design and your bulletins will reach thousands of bored Myspacers!

I have spent literally thousands of hours reading peoples opinions on how one should make money on the web, SEO tips and tricks , keyword marketing etc.

The two sites that have impressed me the most are JohnChow.com and JohnCow.com, both show screenshots of their payouts and write in a very understandable style, I highly suggest reading their free e-books which they wrote to try and prove their legitimacy

E-books get a bad rap, since people tend to associate them with direct marketers, plenty of great info is available in e-book format, I have literally a thousand on my hard drive. Just dont ever pay for them without a solid reccomendation. The John Cow e-book is a free download but does require an email sign up, then they send you emails with SEO updates and affilaite tips, -get it, if you dont want the newsletter just block it or use your alternate spam catcher address (you have one of those dont you!) 

The John Cow and John Chow books are really well written and sadly blow any hubpage away as far as credibility and actual rankings and success go.

I didnt link to the John Chow site because he has a big annoying tear away ad on his front page that bothers me, but you should go anyway and read through his blogs. The ad is even pretty cool if your seeing it for the first time.

Taking a page from these guys, this will be my 4th hub posted in 4 days, this hub had a projected 50 rating when I last previewed it - its 7.45 am EST on 11/17/08. true to form I havent slept yet, lets see if my methods work, youll be able to see yourself.

About 4 days later and this hub has reached 94 and has been consistently in the "Hot" hub section including Top 3 - so Ill leave it to grow organically from this point on - the tools do work 

Please feel free to ad tips and resources as Im always excited to here about new methods!