This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley.

Making money online is an attractive business. It allows us to be flexible in our schedule.

We tend to answer to no one but ourselves. We can direct the nature of our money-making projects. And we are generally independent of others.

It’s a kind of employment promised land.

After all, most of us have to go to an office and work with others in order to earn a paycheck, and we rarely get to make our own decisions regarding how we think a company ought to be run.

Still those of us who are lucky enough to work from home and make money online have to still put forward our best effort and maintain focus on our job. Otherwise, we risk even greater losses than those who are employed by larger companies.

In a sense, staying productive at home is more important than ever for the online money-maker.

As someone who blogs from home and makes a humble bit of money, I’ve tried to gather together five tips that have helped me stay productive. Hopefully, they’ll be just as useful to you!

Follow Regular Hours

Sure, you can be flexible to an extent, but keep in mind that the rest of the world follows a pretty regular schedule. If you’d like to do business with the rest of the world, then you’ll have to meet them halfway.

I personally like to do most of my writing in the morning and then pursue contact with potential clients and collaborators in the afternoon.

The point is I don’t work late into the night, because I know most others don’t do this as well, so I don’t want to miss out on any opportunities.

Set Aside a Specific Work Space

In my house, I have my own office. I can close the door to the rest of the house and these allows me to keep my work-life separate from my other lives, if that makes sense.

Of course, everyone’s situation is different, so do your best to establish a space that is devoted to your work. Whatever you do, avoid working in the bed!

Make a List of Objectives

As someone who works at home and is self-employed you should make an effort to create a list of goals for your online money-making plans. Keep a list of long-term goals and short-term tasks that you think you’ll need to complete in order to accomplish your goals.

Each day, figure out what specific tasks you need to do, and then work towards their completion.

Evaluate Your Progress

Every few weeks you should evaluate the work you’ve done so far. Reflect on your achievements and failures. This will help you determine what your strengths and weaknesses are as an online money-maker, which will allow you to adjust your goals and tasks.

A healthy dose of self-reflection will keep you accountable. Think of it as a job evaluation that a supervisor would conduct every six months.

Keep in Touch with Others

Finally, make sure you keep in touch with others, either other bloggers in your niche, potential clients and current clients, or people with whom you work occasionally on your projects.

The constant flow of communication and ideas will keep your mind sharp and help you pounce on the next big opportunity in your niche.

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about top online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

I just stumbled upon Qwiki (pronounced as “Quicky”) and thought to share it with readers since I think it is a site worth visiting.

Qwiki is a web-based encyclopedia website with technology that turns a data collection about a topic into interactive multimedia presentations.

Whenever you search a term on Qwiki, it will automatically provide a robotic reading of a text summary associated to the term drawn from Wikipedia, as well as moving images fetched from other sources across the net including Wikipedia, Panoramio, and Flickr.

Qwiki is currently still in the alpha testing mode and is a project backed by, among others, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who has invested $8 million in it.