Skimlinks

Lots of people don't understand how to actually turn a blog into a money-making machine. While I would assume most blogs are not made with the intent of wanting to quit your day job and become a full-time blogger, there are basically 2 ways to generate money from a blog and make that dream a reality: 1) Get lots of traffic, utilize ads 2) Post links and have the sites pay you if someone buys or clicks on what you post I learned this after attending a very informative discussion hosted by powerful women in the blogging industry. However, today I discovered a new website called skimlinks which is a genius idea. Basically makes #2 more tangible. As described from CEO Alicia Navarro in a recent interview: "Skimlinks is a simplified affiliate marketing service for publishers. It automates the process of creating and maintaining affiliate links on your site. It aggregates 19 affiliate networks and 11,000 merchant programs into one account, giving publishers instant access to every affiliate program. Publishers just need to add one line of code into their site footer once, and their whole site, including all archival content is immediately enabled. Publishers do what they normally do: write posts and link to retailer products, eg. a review on a pair of shoes and then linking to the shoes on Macys.com. Then when a user clicks on this link to Macy’s, Skimlinks checks to see if the link can be turned into an affiliate link, and if it can, it automatically turns the link into its equivalent affiliate link on-the-fly. Its seamless to the user, and means all your archival content is monetised and kept up to date always, without any effort on behalf of the publisher." Check it out and see if it can help your blog!


Skimlinks

Moving in and setting the grounds rules

My boyfriend and I recently moved into a new apartment together. Most of the furniture and decorations came from his apartment since he had been living on his own for the past few years and I have changed roommates on a yearly basis. We both made a few joint decisions on new purchases such as a couch, leaning desk and a sofa in our home office. However, he has a taxidermy collection which whether I like it or not has been incorporated into our design and style. Granted I have a side business and have tons of my supplies always scattered around, they are temporary and don't take up entire wall spaces which his collection most certainly does! Recently, we got into an argument since he surprisingly made a new purchase without my full consent and understanding and he expected everything to be fine. When I confronted him about this it didn't go as planned and it was quite upsetting. Moving in together has definitely highlighted certain pet peeves or habits that we both probably hadn't noticed earlier or had a problem with but I think it's always best to communicate as much as possible to ensure that both parties are on the same page with everything. Moving forward we are going to make much more of an effort to talk through our decisions to avoid any future blow ups. SheKnows published a great article which shed light on a few important issues:

10 Unbreakable Rules for Moving in Together