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As I said over on Porn Resource on Monday, this week is going to be one crazy time for me.

During the week I'll be travelling thousands of kilometres seeing clients and visiting family and a very sick friend who lives a long way from here. As if that's not bad enough yesterday my partner and I spent three hours a long way from home doing nothing while a mechanic fixed the work that a local guy in the town where I live had done for me last week.

It's not often that you see the back of your SUV covered in oil so when I spotted it at a rest stop I knew there was something wrong and the look on my partner's face when he opened the bonnet just confirmed it. There was oil everywhere in the engine compartment and we weren't going anywhere till it was fixed.

Several hundred dollars and three lost hours later it was fixed and we were on our way again ... but we wouldn't have been delayed and the engine in our SUV would not have spewed oil everywhere (and almost destroyed itself in the process) if only the original mechanic had done the job right in the first place.

Unfortunately for us he wanted to cut corners ... he wanted to save $50.00 and use an old gasket instead of replacing it with a new one. So he did and ultimately it will cost him even more than it cost us because we'll never take our cars back to him again and like all good consumers we're sure going to tell our friends about our unpleasant and costly experience.

So what corners are you cutting in what you're doing here online? I admit that I've cut corners ... we all do it from time to time ... especially if we're doing work for ourselves. There's just so much to do and so little time in which to do it that we have to rush and try and take shortcuts so we can survive but are we actually doing more harm than good to our business?

When you're rushing and taking those shortcuts that you think you have to take to get the job done you run the very real risk of missing something ... of forgetting to include important things in whatever you're doing.

Back when I was running a link list it never ceased to amaze me at just how many webmasters either forgot to include their affiliate code in links to their sponsors or failed to add any sort of link to their sponsor's banners or their calls to action. Linking to images on their hard drive instead of on their server was another very common occurrence.

And while you may think that those mistakes I just mentioned are all the sort of blunders that newbies would make ... and they are ... many of them were made by quite experienced webmasters simply because they were in a rush to get a job done so they could move on to the next job.

In some instances those mistakes were much like what the mechanic did with our SUV ... he took a short cut ... he wanted to save money ... so instead of replacing something important he tried to re-use what had been working ok but should never have been used again. And he hadn't checked his work once the job was finished ... if he had he would have seen that there was a major problem because it was visible to the trained eye.

How many times have you re-used a template again and again only to discover that at some point in time a problem that you didn't notice crept in and all you have been doing is wasting time and money by replicating that problem over and over again?

Perhaps a space appeared in one of your sponsor codes that you never saw and for weeks you've simply been changing the content in that template but you haven't been making any money because you've been sending signups that the sponsor couldn't link back to you.

Perhaps you've been replicating a template where the most clickable link to your sponsor isn't actually linked to anything other than a 404 page or perhaps your using the same template for a different sponsor and a different niche and one or more of your links sends surfers off to a site that they would never sign up for.

We can make all those mistakes ... and whole lot more ... if we're in a rush to get the job done or we think we can get away with cutting corners and never do any checking. The simple fact is that you need to check and re-check everything you do and condition yourself to never cut corners.

Sure, saving time is important but you're only going to damage yourself if you don't take the time to check the work you're doing.