Saving Time Online

This concept is so simple that you may be not realize how useful it is until you give it a try.

Due to the tremendous amount of online research I do each week, I am constantly browsing from site to site.

It dawned on me that I visit the same sites about 80% of the time in between my research.

My regular sites include:

• Forums
• Advertising accounts (pay per click etc)
• Subscription sites I belong to
• Resarch sites
• My own sites of course
• And probably my favorite... google.com

Bookmarks Don't Always Quite Cut It

I have a bookmark list to beat them all.

These bookmarks help out to some extent, but I still find myself fishing around in there trying to locate the right one.

I tried organizing them better but that was only so successful. It simply takes a little longer to look at a list of bookmark names and pickout the site I want to go to.

A Real Time Saver

I finally decided to make my own private page of bookmarks. That is, I created a web page that has links to my favorite sites organized in a way that makes sense to me.

The page is nothing fancy really.

Just a collection of links organized in some color coded tables to visually sort them out. Here is a sample of my custom home page. It ain't real pretty but that's fine with me:

Once you have created it, browse to the .html file on your computer using your browser. It is easy to do. Simply type in: c:\ in the address bar (if the c drive is the location of your hard drive with the file on it).

You then find the .html file and bring it up in the browser window and make it the "Home page" for your browser.

By setting it as my homepage, the page of favorite links is only one click away. I simple click the HOME button and up they pop.

It is amazing how quick you get used to using the personal home page.

You can set the homepage in Internet Explorer by simply going to the menu at the top and choosing:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Set Home Page

Keeping It Simple

If you haven't done so yet, you might want to check out my article on the Pareto principle. This explains why it is important to pay attention to what things are more productive than others.

The sites I keep on my personal home page are the "20%" of the sites which help me accomplish 80% of what I do during the day.

For this reason, I intentionally do not crowd my page with too many other sites.

If I did that, it would defeat the purpose. I want this page to be a very fast reference for me. If I clutter it up too much, then it is only as useful as my bookmark pages are. I would have to search everytime trying to find the right item.

Other Functions On The Personal Page

If you look at the graphic above, you can see that I have a signup box on the page I created. This is for one of my project sites which I haven't finished up yet. I have been creating this other site based on some feedback in another forum and I invariable keep getting requests to be notified about updates on it.

I created a special autoresponder account and when someone emails me directly, I go to my personal home page and then enter their information in the form. This puts them in the autoresponder system which allows me to send announcements out to all of them in one shot.

Some other useful tools I keep on my personal page is:

• Wordtracker -
• " target="_blank" onmouseover="window.status='Click to open this site in a new window'; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''">Read this article about keyword optimization to find out why this is so important for me
• Samspade.org - A domain name lookup site which helps me in research I do

So basically you can put anything you want on this page. If you find yourself referring to something a few times a week, it may be worthy of including it.

If you are looking to save some time everyday, give it a try. You may find it very useful.