I’ve finally managed to create a powerpoint presentation for Header Magic and convert it into a Youtube video

The first video, called Using Header Magic shows how quick and easy it is to create unique, high quality Headers and other  images for your websites.

The good news is that’s it’s much quicker and easier to use than Photo Shop and Gimp

The bad news is that I still haven’t got my act together with everything in place to launch Header Magic yet.

But I’ve even better news for affiliates – I’m working on a plan to provide ongoing income each time you sell one of my software products.

My idea is to regularly update advertising offering new and hot affiliate products from a site, such as JVZoo – to continuously bring in new sales and income for my affiliates.
For affiliates, this may be much better than membership sites – because buyers have no ongoing membership fees to pay – so the drop out rate should be negligible.

Two days ago I installed dotProject then yesterday I added a few projects along with the main tasks needed to complete them.

Today I have been working VERY much more effectively completing over 50% of one brand new project.
My aim was to follow Jason Fladleins idea of creating one product in one sitting to solve one problem.

The product I decided to create is called Image Cropper.
And the project involves doing everything from creating software, buying and setting up a domain and blog, preparing graphics, sales page, download page, activation page, aWeber list plus web form, facebook fan page, google analytics links driving traffic and testing everything.
So no mean set of tasks.

The plus side is that I have 90% of suitable software modules fully created and tested – so that will save weeks of work.
I also have fully working copies of software I am preparing to market – Header Magic, Image Resizer, Clik-n-Snap (sorry these sites are still under construction) – that allowed me to create header and icon graphics in just a few minutes

dotProject has helped me focus on the things that I should be doing to get over half of this project up and running.
You can check out the results so far at ImageCropper.net – sorry the software links won’t be added until I decide on a launch date.
I want to initially use this as a free product for list building

I have outsourced work to prepare a Facebook fan page but that won’t be ready for about week – when I plan to start driving traffic.

I also completed 25% of another ongoing software project that I never seem able to finish – so I’m very happy with that.

At the end of the day, I decided to add estimates of time I have spent on each task to dotProject.
This should hopefully build up into some really invaluable information and help me target my work much more effectively.
Already I can see that if the two projects I have been working on today get completed at the same rate then I over-estimated how long each one will take by 30% and 20%.

I managed to find how to update the time taken for each task – but am still not sure how to enter actual expenditure into the project planner.

If I can keep up this level of productivity, I should easily be able to meet my goal of creating new software products every few weeks.

Yesterday I installed dotProject in an attempt to start managing my time working online more effectively.
Despite previously knowing nothing about dotProject, once I discovered the script came packaged with cPanel and Fantastico, it took me less than 2 minutes to install – just like a new wordpress blog.

A dotProject  user manual is available for download and more detailed information is available online – but so far I have not needed to use either.
First I entered my name and address details.
Then I started a new project, added tasks with time, dates and costs.

It took me about ten minutes to complete the first project for one of my new software products and a bit less for each of the next ones.
Adding task dependencies lets me quickly see the order I should be doing things – and probably for the first time has given me a real picture of just how much work I have to do and how long it is likely to take.

After about 30 minutes work, I now had all the project information I needed in a database.
And dotProject has tools that present it in lots of useful different ways – such as to-do lists and gant charts.

In summary, dotProject can do most everything I am ever likely to want for my online project planning.
It also provides so many extra features I am unlikely to need – such as multi-user, multi-company support.

Despite providing heavyweight features, it is so easy to install and start using – just wish I’d have found it sooner.
The one thing I haven’t yet found is a way to print out the results.
Maybe that feature is there somewhere.
Anyway, it’s no problem because I just use my new Clik-n-Snap software to snap a copy of any results I need and paste them into word for printing

Highly recommended – free, quick and easy to get started.