Part time work allows for a lot more flexibility, as it doesn’t require you to be somewhere 9 till 5 every day of the week.

Many part time jobs are in fact quite flexible and allow those that embark on them to work in the hours that fit around their current existing schedules.

This is a great option for mums as they can work around the lives and schedules of their children.  For example they can still be there to take the children to school and still be home in time to hear all about the events of the day!  A 9 till 5 job would not allow for this as usually the employee would have to leave earlier than the children to beat the rush hour traffic and wouldn’t be home till after them, again due to the traffic or a maybe a meeting that ran on longer than it should have done.

Many part time jobs, however, may begin before office and school hours, meaning you are still there to take your children to school and still available to pick them up in the evening.

Part time work is also a great option for those who study.  We all need a little extra income and those that study may need it even more in order to cover their course fees.  Try to look for a part time job that benefits your studies and lies in the same field, as this will work well on your CV when it comes to the end of the education period and those involved wish to dive into a fulltime career.

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At WorkAwesome, we love supporting genuine causes. And what’s more genuine than a book that doesn’t just speak of saving lives, but does?

Meet End Malaria, the cool new book by bestselling author Michael Bungay Stanier with other business thinkers, which is out this September. The book, published by The Domino Project, saves people’s lives–literally. I can finally say, here’s a book that you WILL love while you do your bit to show your goodness toward humanity.

What Exactly is End Malaria?

Actually, it’s End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life. This cool new book is creating a buzz in the Web-land and is written by 64 thought leaders–including Tom Peters, Gary Vaynerchuk, Sir Ken Robinson, Brene Brown, David Allen, Michael Bungay Stanier and Mitch Joel–who provide ultimate hot tips on the topic of Great Work and how to do more of the stuff that matters.

See the full list of contributors here.

It is jam-packed with utmost productivity tips, doing what matters and killing other stuff that just acts as your time filler. Now that’s the type of meaningful work we folks at WorkAwesome love too!

The book has a tie-up with Malaria No More. $20 of each sale goes into the organization. But before you discard this as “just another charity stunt”, think about this:

$20 from each and every sale, that means the full Kindle price and 80% of the hard copy is an input toward this genuine gesture. None of the contributors or the publishing house are taking any money from sales, and Amazon makes no profit.

The project sends $20 to buy a mosquito net to a family in need and supports life-saving work in the fight against malaria.

The book’s divided into eight main areas of insight, including: Create Freedom, Disrupt Normal and Take Small Steps. If this doesn’t interest you, we don’t know what does!

Yes, I am a Good Human! Where Can I Buy End Malaria?

The Domino Project is the publisher of this book and what makes them unique is the way they “do books”. Therefore, End Malaria is only available on Amazon online. But we’d say it makes things all the more easy–just one click away!

Buy here.

Other Places of Interest

• End Malaria Day
• Book Trailer
• Press Release
• Box of Crayons

Get it and save a life–this book’s choke-full of wisdom on how you can do more stuff that makes a difference to your life and the lives of others.

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Supercharge Your OS X Desktop: Wallpaper, Icons, & Other Hacks (Windows tricks included)
I like to include useful posts from Guiding Tech (full disclosure: I own that site) now and then in the Awesome Links posts. I decided to look up and check which of them brought the most visitors from WorkAwesome. Turns out this post on OS X desktop customization had struck a chord. Check it out if you missed it last time. (The post includes tips for Windows users, too.)

The Essential Zen Habits of 2010
Zen Habits has to be one of the must-read sites for anyone who follows the productivity niche closely. This link points to all of the best stuff offered by Zen Habits from 2010. Easily one of my favorites.

25 Ways to Wake Up Early
Waking up early is usually one of the prime candidates for our new year resolutions every year. We know it’s good for us — but most just can’t do it. This piece from Life Optimizer got my attention as I try to get that resolution back on track myself. Even if just one of the 25 ways does the trick, the time spent on reading the article makes it worth it.

The Art of Positivity (and How it Saved My Life)
Blogging maven Darren Rowse opens up in this post at FeelGooder like never before. The insight he offers to his readers into his past is just amazing. It’s a fascinating story of how someone who was so frustrated that he wanted to throw him in front of a truck went on to become one of the most well-known and respected professional bloggers in the world.

Managing Money, Time, Energy, and Information: Five Powerful Tactics from My Own Recent Experience
From one top blogger to another. In this post, Trent from The Simple Dollar blog (one of the most popular personal finance sites out there) talks about the way he managed time, money, energy and information after his wife returned to work. A must read for productivity enthusiasts.

I hope you’ve liked the above as much as I have. Do you have any favorites from our Awesome Links series? Any changes you’d like to see? Share them in the comments.

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What Running a Marathon Taught Me About Running a Business
This post by Sullen Hughes over at the FeelGooder blog talks about his experiences as a marathon runner and a business owner, and how the former occupation taught him to excel at the latter. He relates them pretty well; some valuable nuggets for those running a business.

A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life
Bridging the gap between various online identities and focusing on the essential to get meaningful work done is what this post on the Zen Habits blog discusses. It’s a detailed article that also mentions some useful tools to streamline your digital presence and be more productive.

Keep OS X’s Help Viewer from Floating Above Other Windows
If you refer to the Help Viewer in your Mac often, but get frustrated when it floats above all the important windows you’ve been working on, then this post from Lifehacker should help you out. It shows how you can make the Help Viewer window act like a normal window using certain Terminal commands.

The Worst Moments are Your Best Opportunity
Finally, we’ve got none other than Seth Godin talking about the importance of putting yourself up to the task when the conditions aren’t exactly favorable and there are obstacles galore. He’s right…as usual.

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While I think the latter is a conspiracy theory, I do have access to the analytics of a number of large sites (200K to 1.5M pageviews per month), and the rankings drop in the sites that were hit hardest did seem to drop unilaterally, while the sites with minimal damage seemed to lose rankings on a page-by-page basis. How can you protect your site from being flagged as a content farm, regardless of whether or not it is? I don’t pretend to know Google’s algorithm, but I can offer some educated guesses.

What Is a Content Farm?

Not everyone agrees on what a content farm is exactly, but the common denominator is a site filled with low quality articles ostensibly designed to capture search traffic on a particular set of keywords, then monetize them with advertising or lead generation. Some of these sites are “scraper sites” that have no original content, but simply copy and paste articles published elsewhere (often without attribution) and plaster their pages with Google AdSense ads. Personally, I would call these “splogs” rather than content farms.

What I would call a content farm is a site that produces original content—hundreds or thousands of articles per month—with each article expressly commissioned to target a specific keyword. “Original” is relative, since many of these articles are marginal rewordings of more authoritative articles on the web. They’re not low quality by design, but the mandate to produce enormous amounts of content each day pretty much guarantees that most articles will be the equivalent of widgets on a conveyor belt. The poster child for content farms is Demand Media’s eHow. Ironically, eHow escaped making the Top 25 Farmer Update Losers list compiled by Sistrix.

In a content farm, full time keyword researchers create extensive lists of commercially valuable keywords couched in titles (“acne treatment” becomes “Acne Treatment at Home”), and each line item is a content order (article) that gets outsourced to a freelance writer for a few dollars per article, or a full time writer tasked to write dozens of such articles per month. A fairly thorough overview of the workflow of a large scale content farm can be seen in the “AOL Way” document leaked a few weeks ago.

But I Don’t Have a Content Farm!

Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone whose traffic and rankings didn’t go down after Google flipped the switch on the new algorithm. Even people who don’t (or claim to not) use SEO to promote their sites have taken massive hits. I’ve seen the update impact sites with fewer than 10 pages, so for all intents and purposes, a content farm is whatever Google treats as one.

Unless you’re paying for traffic, or getting it from an email list (yours or a joint partner’s), then you need to protect your search traffic. How can you do this when you Google operates in such mysterious ways? Here are a few things you can do.

1. Consolidate content.

If your site has half a dozen articles on running shoes, find the one that’s the top performer, and start migrating content from the other pages to the “tentpole” article; then redirect the old pages. You could look at your analytics for highest pageviews, but since pageviews are often correlated to search rankings, it’s better to look for the highest ranked article in Google by running a site search in the form of “site:mysite.com [keyword]“.

So for the running shoes example, if your site was ShoeWorld.com, you would do a search on “site:shoeworld.com ‘running shoes’”, and pick the page that ranks at the top—as long as it’s a logical tentpole article. In other words, you want a title that’s generic enough to rank for different searches. “5 Features to Quality Running Shoes” is better than “How to Clean Your Running Shoes”.

Regarding the suggestion to redirect the old pages: you’ll need to set up 301 redirects to what will become the tentpole page before you start moving content from the old pages; otherwise those pages risk being flagged as duplicate content—i.e. you have the same material on two pages.

2. Build link nets.

A less labor-intensive alternative to consolidating pages is to build link nets. You still identify the top ranking or top performing page for each keyword you’re targeting; but instead of moving content from other related pages, you edit each of those pages to include a link to the tentpole (top ranking) page. If your rankings took a dive, but you’re confident in the quality of your content, then link nets are a better approach than content consolidation, since they don’t lower your site’s index count (the number of pages the site has in Google’s index).

So if you had a well ranking page on “5 Features of Quality Running Shoes”, you would link to it from your “How to Clean Your Running Shoes” page, as well as from every other page that ranks for “running shoes”. If you have more than two or three pages that would work for support articles, consider varying the anchor text with “cousin” keywords—for instance, you could link to the tentpole from two pages using the primary keyword (“running shoes”), another page with one closely related keyword (“best running shoes”), and another page with another closely related keyword (“running shoes online”). All you need to do is put your main keyword in the Google Keyword Tool, which is sorted by relevance by default, and pick some of the keywords near the top of the list. This kind of internal linking tells Google what the main page is about more reliably than hoping other bloggers will link to the page with the most appropriate anchor text (as opposed to something like “this article”).

3. Check for duplicate content.

First, let’s understand what duplicate content is and isn’t. Google only wants to index unique content so that no two listings in search results are completely identical. While they don’t always success at avoiding redundant listings, they try to avoid indexing results with the same text to the fullest extent possible. What people often call a “duplicate content penalty” is less about punishing plagiarism than maintaining unique listings. I once did SEO work on a very large site where one of their subdomains wasn’t being indexed because its XML sitemap was inadvertently copied the one in the top level domain. It’s very easy to run into duplicate content problems, even when you’re fastidious about avoiding plagiarism.

Do a Copyscape check on all of your published articles. If Copyscape flags something as a dupe, compare it with the alleged source and see if you agree. Copyscape tends to be overly agressive in identifying things as duplicate, so you can reasonably assume that anything that passes Copyscape will be kosher with Google; but you can’t assume that what Copyscape identifies as duplicate content in actually duplicate unless you do a human review. You might be able to get the offending article to pass Copyscape after one or two minor edits, but obviously, if the article really is plagiarized, it should be scrapped. I’d recommend using a 301 redirect rather than actually deleting the article, since Google frowns on sites that delete their pages.

Do You Have a Content Farm?

Let’s face it: some of us are actually running content farms, and are simply in denial about it. Be honest with yourself. Don’t assume that a drop in rankings is collateral damage. If you’re hosting a bunch of user generated content (forums, article aggregators) or publishing RSS feeds from external sites, you may want to rethink and future proof your approach. I recently shut down a site whose only content came from user submissions, since it wasn’t worth the management overhead to make sure that everything was above board. It’s better in the long run to only work with content that’s 100% under your control.

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New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels
The Gmail team has launched what they call “Smart Labels”, a feature that can automatically organize your incoming emails and put them into appropriate labels. Part of Gmail Labs, this feature could greatly enhance email productivity — if it works as well as it sounds.

Understanding – and Maximizing – Your Brain’s Reward and Planning System
An interesting article over at the Intrinsic Motivation and Magical Unicorns blog at Psychology Today magazine. It gives a deep insight into the brain’s reward system and how you can actually use it to your benefit in order to get motivated and excel at seemingly mundane tasks. Well worth a look.

Get Organized With GTDagenda
The Web Worker Daily blog reviews the productivity software called GTDagenda in this post (as we’ve done before). Some of the features look good to me — though I am yet to give it a shot. The interface isn’t one of the nicest ones, but if you care primarily about function over form then you should check it out.

The Complete Guide to Creating Your First Tumblr Blog
Tumblr is a quick and productive way to get started with blogging. If you’re someone who has been avoiding blogging just because it looks like a lot of work and you don’t have the time for setting it up, you should give Tumblr a shot. This comprehensive step-by-step guide (with screenshots) at the Guiding Tech blog has everything you need to quickly create your first Tumblr blog.

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The Easy Way to Get Chrome’s Pin Tab Feature in Firefox
Chrome’s pin tab feature is an extremely useful one. Not only does it increase screen real estate, it also makes sure that the important tabs are nicely tucked away in the corner and don’t get lost in those large number of tabs you’ve got opened. This article at Guiding Tech tells you how to get that in Firefox.

45-Second De-Stress Tips
De-stressing is something that most of us need to do on a daily basis. Remember: Happy doesn’t always mean stress-free. Take a look at these tips on the Lifehack blog; I particularly liked the first one (read a poem). You’ll have to check out the link to see the others they discuss.

Just a Small Nudge Can Give You the Motivation to Form Better Habits
This is an interesting study by Stanford University on why we tend to procrastinate on essential habits like exercising which we know are so important for our well-being. Posted on Lifehacker, the study suggests some ways to successfully form such habits.

Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard?
This week’s last awesome link is an insightful article at Wired. It delves deep into the human brain to understand why we can sometimes take a lot of time to decide on something that’s fairly trivial, and should be decided within seconds. Check it out (and don’t wait too long to decide to, either).

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Or you could still be in the stages of selecting a product or service to market, and you’re finding it hard to distinguish those that generate buzz from those that generate sales. Whether you’ll looking to increase your traffic, conversion rate, or your revenue, the simplest way to get actionable data is to look at your actual or prospective competitors’ performance, and model it. Let’s look at a couple of simple ways to check out the competition.

Look at Ad Spending

Just because certain products and services are widely offered doesn’t mean they’re actually selling. In the brick-and-mortar world, you can tell which kinds of restaurants do well by just looking at their customer turnout, but websites don’t volunteer their sales information. So how do you know if they’re making money?

Regular ad spending is a quick way to gauge how much money’s on the table. If a website is spending an average of $20 a day on AdWords, you can reasonably assume that it’s at least breaking even. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to advertise at a loss.

I just looked up “solar power systems” in the Google Keyword Tool, which reported 3600 local searches per month. Each click would cost me $3.61 if I were to advertise using PPC. So if I wanted to drive traffic to a sales page for a some solar power system products as an affiliate, would it be worth the advertising cost?

SpyFu

Go to SpyFu and enter the keyword “solar power systems” into the “Enter a Domain or Keyword Below” field. In the section captioned “Top PPC Domains for ‘solar power systems’”, the most consistent spenders on that keyword appear to be Solar Direct and Siemens. Since Siemens is an enormous, highly diversified conglomerate that can afford to advertise at a loss in non-core markets, I’ll focus my attention on Solar Direct.

Notice that the company advertised on the up until November, skipped December (presumably not the most auspicious time to advertise a solar product), then resumed advertising in January. When you see consistently colored bars on the ad spending grid from month to month, it means that the advertiser didn’t change its ad copy. This means that either the advertiser is clueless (i.e. didn’t test the clickthrough rates of ad variations), or—more likely—that the keyword and the ad covert well; so they’re probably making money.

If you have a paid SpyFu account, or an account with a similar service like SEMRush, you can drill into the the ad spending timeline for each of the websites keywords—which is awesome, because you can discover keywords that are much better performers than the one you initially entered.

Ads in the Google Search Network

A faster, less systematic way to gauge the commercial prospects of a niche or keyword is to simply enter it into Google and look at the number of ads that display. Generally speaking, if you see a minimum of five ads in the right sidebar, you’re dealing with a topic that’s making enough money to make it worth spending money. The keyword “solar power systems” not only has the maximum eight ads in the sidebar, but another three ads above the organic listings—in other words, every spot Google can sell for it is sold. That’s encouraging. Many keyword research tools like SpyFu (for paid accounts) and Market Samurai (a desktop tool with a free Keyword Research module) will list the average number of ads displayed for each keyword in their listings.

Of course, the flip side of the equation is that you’re looking at a highly competitive market, increasing the possibility that you’ll spend more than you make. The fact that there are 7.5 million pages for the keyword in Google index should be a red flag. This is where doing some further keyword research can help you find a back door into this market.

For instance, if you can find a few related keywords with decent search traffic that have under 60,000 pages indexed, it you might have an easier time than targeting the primary keyword. Never get hung up on an individual keyword. Targeting half a dozen related, less competitive keywords that each pull in 600 searches a month can be more practical than throwing all of your time and energy into a single keyword that gets 3600 searches a month. Instead of obsessing over individual keywords, take a broader view of the overall market you want to target, then look for a sufficient number of high-traffic, low-competition keywords to bring in the number of visitors you need make your sales goals at a reasonable conversion rate.

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In fact, my absolute favorite thing about GTD Agenda is that in addition to the standard tour and features page, they have pages dedicated to how you can use GTDAgenda for different productivity systems (GTD, The 7 Habits and Highly Effective People, and Zen to Done) and different activities (the gym, school, and software development).

GTDAgenda allows you to easily break up your work across Goals, Projects, and Tasks. In addition, you add Contexts to your Tasks and label tasks as Next Options. There’s also checklists, schedules, and a calendar.

Dashboard

The Dashboard isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’s comprehensive. First and foremost, when you login, you see your Next Actions and have the option of grouping them by Priority, Project or Context. On the right-hand side, you have your Calendar. Then underneath your Calendar, you have a box of your Contexts. Underneath that, your Projects.

This setup makes it super-easy for you to have an idea of what’s due when, what to do next, and enables you to quickly pick a task to work on.

Goals, Projects and Tasks

GTDAgenda uses three different categories to help to break your tasks down: Goals, Projects, and Tasks.

Essentially, you create a goal and then break down that goal into manageable projects. Let’s say as a freelancer, my goal is to find more clients. My projects might include “write eBook,” “re-do website,” and “be more active on social media.”

From there, you can break down your projects into more manageable tasks.

Next Actions, Contexts, and Priorities

To help you decide what task to do when, GTDAgenda offers Next Actions, Contexts, and Priorities.

Next Actions are, well, the actions that need to be taken next. You can highlight these by adding a “star” next to the task.

Priorities are (once again) pretty self-explanatory, and you can group Priorities based on a scale of 1 through 5.

Contexts are tags that describe where or how a task is completed, such as “home,” “work,” or “errands.”

Calendar and Schedules

GTDAgenda has a calendar-with an iCal feed available that’s perfect for scheduling in specific appointments and events.

Schedules can help you organize your day, by assigning tasks with exact times. Kind of like how Day Planners have both a monthly calendar view, along with a weekly calendar view that breaks your day down into hours.

Checklists

Checklists are mainly designed for recurring tasks — anything from something you do daily, to something you do twice a year (like change the batteries in your smoke alarm). You can even tie your Checklists to a specific goal to help you more forward and develop a habit.

Integration

Email

Frequently get assignments through email? GTDAgenda has got you covered. You can easily connect your email inbox(es) through the settings, choose whether to convert emails to a new project or task, attach a goal, context, and/or priority, then GTDAgenda automatically pulls in the emails.

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a way to set up any filters so that not all of your email would be pulled into GTDAgenda. Also, it wouldn’t let me add my main email inbox, giving me the following message when I tried:

“This e-mail is registered as a Gtdagenda user e-mail. You cannot add a user e-mail (where Gtdagenda sends notifications).”

This struck me as incredibly inconvenient.

Twitter

GTDAgenda can import both public tweets and direct messages that mention your @username, along with being able to import direct messages sent to @gtdagenda from you.

Just like with email, there didn’t seem to be a filtering system for importing tweets. This would be useful in future builds of the application.

Evernote

GTDAgenda offers awesome integration with Evernote. It allows you to attach Evernote notes right to your projects or contexts. I found this to be a great feature — plus it was easy to use.

Mobile Versions

Often the first question everyone asks after reading about a new web app — especially a task management one is, “What about mobile apps?”

GTDAgenda has a mobile web version, along with both an iPhone app and an Android app. All three of these sync with the web app.

Overall, if you’re looking for a task management app that includes the ability to sync with Evernote and also includes a straightforward means to create and manage lists, projects and tasks, then GTDAgenda is worth a look.

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Your Money or Your Life
This post over at the Productivity 501 blog by Mark Shead talks about how he gave up a plush job and sacrificed higher paychecks for a life of satisfaction and happiness. I think a lot of us could take a lesson from this post, and probably change our lives for the good.

10 Tools for Training Your New Virtual Worker
It is said that delegating tasks to a virtual worker can significantly boost one’s productivity, especially if she deals with too many things in a single day. That’s a great concept — but training that worker isn’t always a pleasant exercise. This post on the Web Worker Daily blog offers 10 tools to help you train your virtual worker efficiently and effectively.

Slice and Dice Your Recipe Search Results
We’ve all got busy lives, and finding the time to cook healthy meals often falls by the wayside as a result. Google has made it that much easier to help you create healthy dishes with their announcement of a pretty cool recipe search engine. It lets you conduct accurate searches for any recipe you are looking for. Their official blog post has complete information on how you can make the best use of it. Happy eating!

30 Inherently Useful Tools for Freelancers
Finally, our sister site Freelance Switch has a huge list of useful tools for freelancers. And as you would have suspected, a lot of them are useful for just about anyone who spends time on the world wide web. Do check it out.

And if you’re looking for freelance work, FreelanceSwitch runs the only hand-moderated job board built exclusively around the unique way freelancers find work. While you’re at the site reviewing the tools mentioned above, give the job board a look.