If you own a website or websites, chances are you are always trying to get more visitors to them.  For most people, more traffic results in more sales and more income.

For most website owners, a little bit of time each day is spent promoting your websites on blogs, article directories, and web directories.  Today, I just want to highlight three web directories that can help you get traffic quickly, for a small investment.

The first directory I want to talk about is Directory Dave.  It is a paid web directory that costs just under two dollars to list your site, but it has helped me to get some of my new websites indexed quickly.

The second directory I should mention is Directory of Sites.  This site is a bit older and I like the orange template.  But, looks aside, I love the fact that when I list my site, it is picked up rather quickly.  I have even seen some traffic directly from the site.

Last but not least, I should mention Iron Trace Web Directory.  Sure, the name is kind of strange, but I guess it means that you can trace a link from the directory to your site?  Well, that really doesn’t matter - it is a good place to help boost your search engine rankings for just two bucks.

I am new to the investing world. I have always known that it is a good idea, but have also always been quite oblivious as to how to get into such things. I was raised in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck and we never had any money left over to do any sort of investing. So, I was never taught about the stock market or that kind of thing.

When I was in college, I took a few commerce classes to learn about investing. That is where I learned about stock picks and how to make good choices. I started following it a little bit, but living on student loans, I had no money leftover, with which to invest. I knew that I would one day, but it was just not feasible at the time.

Throughout the remainder of college, I continued to follow to ups and downs of the stock market, pretending that I did actually have purchases of my own. Now that I am finished with college and am working at a real paying job, I have slowly started investing a little bit of money. I am happy with my choices so far, and I accredit it to following the market for so long. So, although I am new to investing, I am not new to knowing what is going on.

As my husband and I are going to attempt to go skiing in the Rockies this winter, I went, for the first time, to an extreme sporting goods store. I was amazed at all of the ski gear that they had and I was not even sure where to begin. I thought I had better come back with my husband. Not that he would have any better idea than me, but at least we could feel lost together.

We went back to the store to buy some gear and supplies for our trip. The customer service agent was super helpful and did not make us feel like complete idiots due to our lack of knowledge. I am sure he gets many like us all the time.

As he rung up our purchases, my husband was taking an interest in all the surf gear that they were just now starting to put on display. I pulled him away from the displays, to pay for our purchases. But, I do see another vacation in the very near future. Hmmm…maybe bringing him to this store was not such a bad idea after all.

I recently received a flyer in the mail that had on the cover "Are you ready for this?".  Now, the first thing that came to mind was a dance music song from my past, but I was sure that was not what the flyer was about.  Opening the flyer, I could see it was about health insurance.

There were some pretty tough questions in the flyer that I had never thought about.  Things such as laser corrective eye surgery (for people like me that have glasses), cataracts, and eye diseases.  They compared and contrasted the various vision insurance plans available and I realized that my current coverage was inadequate.

Reading on, what they were trying to sell me was affordable individual health insurance with personal accident insurance to ensure that I was prepared for anything.  I realized that there were a lot of medical expenses I could run into if I didn’t plan for them.

Needless to say, I made a phone call to talk to an insurance broker to make sure that I will be prepared for anything.

I thought I would be smart yesterday and try my hand at using DOS.  If you have had a computer long enough, you would remember, that something as simple as typing in the wrong command could make you lose all your information.

Guess what I did?

Yes, I typed in the wrong thing.  Angered, I decided to leave the computer until today when I could have some help.  I had a friend come over to see if they could do a partition recovery and fix my computer.

Though my friend Chuck had never tried to recover data from deleted partition, he had been able to recover lost volumes in the past and he figured that it would be much the same.

After a couple of hours, Chuck had good news - he had fixed my computer.  I guess I won’t try to use DOS anytime in the future - it just screws things up.

My husband and I decided that, after twenty years, we needed to renovate our home. Some things were getting pretty run down and there were some major changes that we wanted to make to our living room and bathroom. We did, however, decide that we would hire a paint contractor rather than doing the work ourselves.

We decided to look for a good one, using the online yellow pages. My husband did a search on besthousepainter.com and he got quite a few names. We started calling around and were unable to get in touch with any of them. I guess most people take Sunday off - we should have planned for that.

We decided to look for a Chandler home painter in the yellow pages and were thrilled to find a young couple that was willing to start right away. They came in and offered color suggestions and really were such a help. They did a great job and I would definitely give their names to anyone who was looking to hire a painter.

Now, I usually wouldn’t call myself a techie by any means, but when it comes to mobile phones, I would have to say that I kind of am one.  Looking through the five years or so that I have had mobile phones, you would see a pattern of always upgrading to the next, newest model.  Sure, I don’t have the money to burn, but I like to stay on the edge of the curve when it comes to technology.

Currently, I have been using an iPhone for some time now.  If you looked in my home and vehicle, you would see a ton of iPhone accessories.  If it has been made, chances are I have it.  Some would call me a collector, but I do make an effort to use the accessories I have at least once a month.

Lately, I have been reading any iPhone news I can find to see what will be coming out in the future.  Since I am trying to be a little more cautious with my spending, I want to see the reviews of the accessories and iPhone games that I am interested in before I spend any money.  From what I have read, there are some nifty things on the horizon - so I better save my money up for them.

My day at work today was a little different than normal.  Usually, I am the receptionist for a busy architectural office and I answer phones all day.  But today, I had another important (and a little more interesting) task to do – book car rentals for the partners.

You see, there was going to be a couple of different conferences that the partners of our firm would be attending, and as per company policy, they were to each have a rental car.

There was going to be a little work involved for me as the conferences were in three different cities: Orlando, Tampa, and Miami.  I had little problem booking a Tampa car rental and the Miami car rental.  It was Orlando that I was having problems with.

I ended up having to search online for “car rentals Orlando” and luckily I did find a place that could help us out.  With the car rentals booked, all I had left to do was book the hotel rooms… I am sure that is going to be fun.

I had the opportunity to spend a day in the life of one of my best friends today.  You see, the store that he works for has a "bring your friend to work" day twice per year.  They do this to encourage recruitment of employees that have references from their current staff.  The argument is that this way, it is more of a family environment - and the staff will be more loyal.

So, I was invited to this even by my friend Dave and I was excited.  You see, I have never, ever sold bathroom suites before and it would be a change of pace.  I arrived at work to find an apron and uniform waiting for me.

The first task of the day was to learn about the difference between whirlpool baths and shower baths.  In fact, we spent about two hours getting a "bathroom bootcamp" if you will.  In the end, we were sent out with our friend to try and sell some bathroom suites.

How do you think I did?

Well, after fumbling through one sale, I did manage to sell one suite to a customer - and boy did that feel great.  From this experience, I have a better understanding of how Dave’s life is and what he goes through at work.

I have a buddy of mine that owns a car dealership.  He bought it a few years ago, with the intention of making it big – and he has succeeded admirably.

Perhaps his biggest secret is diversification.  He prides himself by offering a multitude of selections when it comes to vehicles.  He carries motorcycles, cars, truck, mini-vans, and other specialty vehicles.  Chances are if you were to visit his dealership, you would find at least one thing that would interest you.

One thing you won’t find at his dealership is a car or truck outside.  In fact, he only has an indoor showroom with all the vehicles indoors.  His reasoning is that he is selling cars that have not experienced any environmental damage.

But he doesn’t stop there.  When you enter his showroom, you will find all the vehicles in car covers, motorcycle covers and even the SUVs in Budge SUV covers.  This not only keeps the dust off the cars, but it adds an extra layer of protection from the sun shining down on the cars and fading the paint.

How is his dealership doing?

Well, his dealership is one of the most popular ones in his area.  But, what is really interesting is that he gets about a quarter of his business from outside of his area- since people know that they are buying a car or truck that is about as new as they can get.