To those on the outside looking in, life on the internet looks like a bed of roses with “everyone” making big bucks and living the highlife. Oh, if only that was the case!

The problem with life on the internet is time, and the lack of it, there is never enough time to do what you need to with your sites and also live a “normal” life offline. Many business people have actually seen their lives change once the internet bug takes hold, because while partners and children enjoy the comfort which a successful business can bring, time with the family can be very much at a premium.

The press seem to have built up the online industry into something which is out of the reach of the masses, when in reality it is well within the reach of everybody if they are prepared to work for it. We hear about the multi-millionaires who grace the front pages, the sites which started from nothing and were sold for hundreds of millions of dollars – but this is not real life.

Why do people believe all of the hype about the internet? Nobody goes into an offline business thinking that everyone else is a multi-millionaire, so why is the internet different?

While the costs of operating on the internet have fallen substantially over the last 20 years, the general public does not seem to appreciate this. They see an industry which has spawned hundreds if not thousands of millionaires and they think it is out of their reach. In reality, life on the internet is tough, the hours are long and it can only take on tweak of the Google algorithms and your whole business can come crashing down.

The internet is an ever changing beast and the while the overall market is enormous, more and more of the big players are taking the lions share, leaving the small business sector to fight over the scraps!

We've updated the submission process for ArticleFinders.com so now you can register and submit your articles directly from the dashboard (instead of using a lousy form).

To submit your articles, simply just check out this page for some more instructions.

When we moved this blog to a new IP address (so we host all our blogs on the same Wordpress installation) we also added Gravatars. If you post a comment in this blog and got a Gravatar you'll see your avatar next to your comment (otherwise you'll see the standard Gravatar).

Gravatars are globally recognized avatars connected to your email address. Whenever you post or comment on a site using the free Gravatar plugin you will see your avatar. This way you only have to upload your avatar once. It's reminding me of OpenID since you only have to register once

Blog owners

Gravatars make if possible for your visitors to have their avatar next to their comment making comments more personal. Gravatars are really easy to install. Just download the plugin from the gravatar web site and use it. They got instructions for how to install Gravatars on must blog platforms (even a Blogger hack ).

If you like us are using Wordpress you can set a default gravatar in case the user hasn't uploaded an avatar yet. So far you have to survive with the standard Gravatar avatar since we haven't designed a default gravatar for our users just yet.

Visitors and people posting comments

Now you only have to register your email address and upload your avatar once to have your avatar next to posts in any blog anywhere as long as they're Gravatar enabled. Post a comment in this post to try it. If you have registered and uploaded your avatar at gravatar.com you will see it next to your comment . If not point your web browser to www.gravatar.com and register. It's free and the registration is really easy.

If you want to have multiple gravatars, you simply just register more then one email address on your account and you can have for example one "sad" avatar, one "happy" avatar and one "angry" avatar. This way you can show the readers your mod when you posted. Or you can register one avatar for each one of your sites depending on which site or blog you wish to promote by posting a comment.

At the moment Gravatars have been activated on this blog, Entrecard contests and Finding Public Information. As soon as we've tested the plugin we will activate it on all our blogs (same as for OpenID). Let us know if you like Gravatars or not.