We’ve all heard ourselves say it before: next year I will get healthier, leaner, smarter, richer, more philanthropic. Or a variety thereof. I’d like to hear from anyone how manages to meet all their new year’s resolutions, because they more often than not fail. The reason why we can’t seem to keep our promises to ourselves could be as simple as setting the bar too high, hitting the ground running too hard (sometimes literally), and ending up too hurt and demotivated to continue (figuratively). According to Dr. Koestner at McGill University, we’re likely not going to stick to our goals for 2010.  So, if we are doomed to fail at realizing our new year’s resolutions, how can we increase the chances of actually making some positive changes that last well beyond being recycled for next year’s new year’s resolution?

How to turn New Year’s Resolutions into a Reality

• Don’t be vague: saying you want to “lose weight” doesn’t define an achievable goal. As long as you lose a pound, you’ve lost weight, but that doesn’t mean you will be any happier. You’re more than likely trying to lose more than that, if you’re putting that goal on your 2010 to-do list. So, setting a realistic goal (for example, lose 1 pound per month), could work a whole lot better.
• Once you set your goal, you need a way of keeping track. Getting to July and realizing you should have lost 7 pounds by then, make $100 more a month, or write 70.000 words just sets you back so far that you give up on your goals entirely. Break the bigger goal up in manageable chunks, and schedule them. I’m already almost fully booked for January, so unless I schedule some goals it is just not going to happen.
• When it comes to scheduling the first 10.000 words you are going to write towards completing your novel by 2011, start with scheduling the first 2000 for the first week of January. Perhaps writing 5000 words by the end of January will also meet your New Year’s Resolutions, so figure out what might work best in your schedule in order for you to keep your commitment to yourself. Then, schedule it, and stick to it.
• How to avoid breaking your promise: if you set the goal of losing a pound per month, consider scheduling gym time like another appointment. If someone needs you for something during your gym time, just tell them you are already booked and will need to schedule another time. I find it far too easy to give in, and give up on my personal goals, when other people need me, whether for work or professionally. However, a commitment to yourself is just as important as any other one, so start treating is as such.

With a few days to go before the new year, this is an amazing opportunity to set new goals and plan out your ideal 2010. A little while ago I wrote about CompactCal. It illustrates how the time to plan your goals is now: with a handy overview of the entire year, in a vertically organized way, you can create a plan you can actually stick to.

The first bad weather of the season plus a number of holiday functions this month found me without both a serviceable pair of boots or dress shoes. Unfortunately, as most of you will agree, money typically gets tighter during this time of year with gift obligations and entertaining guests. The current economic situation, though less dire than a year ago, only amplifies this.

Assessing my fiscal position, I decided to eschew brick-and-mortar stores and shop online. I have been taking some salsa lessons since early September, but I need to finally bite the bullet and get some proper footwear. Last week, a friend and I went to a Salsa gala and I am definitely due for a new pair of shoes if I want to take this new hobby seriously. I found an online store with a good selection of shoes, which doesn’t require me to leave the house. Trust me, it’s not appealing with the snow pretty much blowing horizontally on some days. The store I found is called Shoebuy. They have a large range of brands with fairly reasonable prices. The nice thing about internet shopping is that with a little bit of searching, it is possible to find some pretty good deals through coupon and promotional codes.

These are codes thank you enter into the field provided at the checkout. Alternatively, some codes require you to enter the site using a particular link/address. Regardless, as these stores do not typically have the overhead of most brick-and-mortar stores (salespeople, rent, etc.) they can still make a profit while offering steep discounts to consumers. These codes are one way they do this.

In some cases a few generous souls will even dedicate some of their time to compiling these codes. The best example I found for shoes was Shoebuy Coupons. This site offers both promotional codes and coupon codes for the store. These codes are free and give varying amounts off an order. Just click the aforementioned links here to go to the coupon site, from there click on the link given for the deal you want to get, and then enter the code (if applicable) given at the checkout.

They are offering up to 65% off certain types of shoes. Note that most deals of this nature are time-limited, but the coupon site constantly updates with new deals as they appear.

I’ve bought Capezio ballet shoes when I danced ballet, so now I might stick with this brand and go for this pair:

The next Christmas party I am attending happens to be a potluck, so I suppose my next shopping trip has to be to a real life grocery store. However, if you happen to be snowed in I recommend Grocery Gateway. If you happen to go out for food, and if you live in Canada, don’t forget to check save.ca for discounts on items you might be needing this month.

Happy e-tail shopping!

Ironically, reading blogs about productivity can often be the perfect reason for procrastination, and actually diminish our actual productive output. There is one blog, however, that seems to avoid just that. It is the Ultimate Productivity Blog, and also the ultimate minimalist blog.

It is published through Tumblr, which is another microblogging tool. It is supposed to be anywhere just in between Flickr, and regular blogging. Short and sweet like Tweeting, meets the ability to share anything and everything, from any platform (including your phone). I am going to look into Tumblr some more, and follow up on whether it might be useful in business, marketing, or writing at a later point in time.

Bookmark the Ulimate Productivity Blog though. I think it is to the point and perfectly true; ultimately… you get more done if you just get to it. So stop reading about how to get more done, and just do it.

My new adventure writing for the Examiner.com is on quite a positive road. I am contributing short articles (or posts, whichever you would like to call them) about topics that are interesting to me regarding the economy. Unlike some other examiners, I am adding a more personal spin to my column, and try to incorporate some humor and personal opinion as well. If people just want to read the news, then they are better off going to MarketWatch, or Bloomberg. I am not focusing on reporting straight up news-y facts, but instead take something from the news and comment on it.

In other words: I am having a lot of fun writing this column. Keeping this in mind, you will understand that my standards for a return on my investment are different from a column I am writing out of personal interest, and for my personal satisfaction, than I would from a more traditional freelancing opportunity. It is important for me to emphasize this, because if you are going to equate my excitement about the extra money coming in from this opportunity with my regular standards for regular writing work, then I would be placing myself in the category of writers who are willing to work for dollars per article. That is not the case. Nor would I ever encourage anyone to do that.

Having said that, I think the Examiner writing opportunity is paying off for me because it is a creative writing outlet that is keeping my fingers on the keyboard. The more you write, the better you eventually get. As I write more and flex those muscles, I am also getting a small, but slowly increasing, return on my time investment.

Yesterday, my page views were over 200, and the income I am getting from that one day is $2.11 (see below).

The other day I reported getting $1.09, after writing a short commentary on Windows 7, and how I doubt it will make any Mac users switch back to a Microsoft platform. After writing this, promptly 7 people commented, even though I only just started writing for the Examiner and am anything but established.

As I am writing this, my metrics for today (and I haven’t had my coffee yet, it’s not even 8:30am) are as follows:

Yes, this is NOT spectacular. But, I haven’t written a word on the Examiner yet today, and it is early in the morning. I’m in the Eastern time zone, so a big chunk of North America, where most of the traffic comes from, is still happily snoozing in their bed.

My income from the examiner for the current week, so far, starting on Sunday, is over $8:

I’m curious to see if today will surpass yesterday’s performance. If it grows at a steady pace, and keeps growing, the income from the Examiner actually has some potential for the future. And as I just take it as a creative outlet, there really isn’t any pressure…

If you’re a writer starting out, or a more established one looking for an additional outlet, and want to write for a good quality website, then I still recommend giving the Examiner a try.

The Internet is a wonderful place to get more knowledge (or doubt… don’t Google your symptoms when you’re sick!), and it has provided a large number of people with more or less stable incomes. Unlike any other venture, making money online can be done with a very minimal investment, and the payoff is potentially very high. Although a “sky is the limit” attitude is good when getting into any type of business or job, you need to still be realistic. Not every online entrepreneur, or writer using the Internet to their advantage, is the next John Chow, who says he makes over $40.000 a month from his blog.

For the rest of us, simply getting started with some blog networks or content networks can seem really appealing. The question is, can you really make money with them?

I’m going to find out!

Much like John Chow has documented his success with his blog, his way isn’t the only way to make a healthy (albeit not as much as John’s pay cheq $$ue) income from the Internet. I’ve been told perseverance and professionalism are the two main requirements for the gig, so it shouldn’t be impossible to generate some sort of result.

Here’s how I’ll do it

After some research, it turns out there are a few main promising online publishing houses that are both attainable goals for intermediate writers, and promise a decent return on your time investment:

1. Suite101.com
2. Examiner.com
3. Trendhunter.com

If you have clicked on any of the links, you will have noticed that I’ve already started contributing to each one of these networks. I’m going to say I’ll count whatever potential success I might have from this point onwards, considering I have not contributed significantly to either one of these websites. Others who have gone before me have written about their success, and another person writing for both Suite101 and the Examiner has reported being quite happy with the results writing for suite101 and the Examiner.

My lofty writing goals

Considering the content produced for any of the sites I mentioned above remains my own property, and I can receive residual payback from articles that stay online for as long as the websites exist and receive revenue themselves, I am hoping to start building up a significant body of work on each one of them.

For the Examiner, remaining a writer in good standing requires you to write at least 3-4 articles per week. However, they are fairly lax on article length, and do not require a higher word count like suite101 does. The only downside of the Examiner compared to suite101 is that you are stuck with one topic. I’ve found, from my limited experience with TrendHunter.com and Suite101.com, that I enjoy being flexible and writing for several different categories. The Examiner takes advantage of a particular expertise you have, and in my case I was taken on to write about the economy. Albeit a good topic with endless streams of material, it can be creatively a little limiting as well, and that’s where my challenge will be.

However, we’ll see where this takes me, and I plan to keep reporting back what the payoff from my writing adventures are from these websites. I’m seeing this as something I can do for fun in my spare time, between freelancing gigs. It’s also a great creative outlet for articles that are too short for print, but are still interesting and fun to research and write about but do not fit within the scope of this blog.

If you would like to try this out with me, let me know how it goes! Anyone interested in applying to write for the Examiner.com, and if you found out about them through me, then please use my referral number in your application: 5918

A couple of days ago I joined TrendHunter.com! I’ve started submitting some fun or funny things I’ve observed around me, and it is looking like a great outlet to write about anything and everything that interests me, even when it doesn’t really fit into the scope of this blog, or any of the other blogs and magazines I am writing for.

There are hundreds of cool things added to Trend Hunter every day, but if you want to follow my trends, you can see them piled up easily in my Trend Hunter portfolio.

Google has partnered with NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), to support the “National Day on Writing”. This will be held on October 20th, when the gallery of submitted work will be revealed to everyone who would like to read it.

Writing by anyone, from people from all walks of life, as welcome for this project. One of the galleries showcasing all the writing work will be provided by Google Docs, and you can submit your writing to be part of the Google Docs Gallery. In the mean time, anyone can submit their writing to NCTE. The Google Docs theme is “The Internet and its impact on our lives.” You can contribute to the Google Docs gallery, or to one of the very many other galleries that are part of this project.

The purpose of the Day on Writing is to highlight the variety of writing people are engaging in today, and according to the NCTE website, it will help teachers help others write better. It also provides them with a body of research to see whether our writing is getting better, or if our art is slumping to new lows.

I’m not sure yet if I will be submitting something to one of the Galleries, but if I am, I will definitely post it here. What do you think… should I submit a piece of my writing to honor the Day on Writing?

There are a mix of strategies people use, and each of them starts with having a professional website. Once you have this though, you do need visitors to have a chance of landing a new client through your site. Getting ranked high in Google can be hard, and I’m always on the look-out for new ways you can improve Google rankings and outsmart the competition.

In the ‘old days’ of the internet, directories popped up where you could register your website and increase the numbers of visitors to your website. Their popularity has tapered off a bit, but there is one in particular you should be aware of and really consider signing up for: “Best of the Web” (or BOTW).

BOTW has been around since 1994, making it an internet dinosaur. This also makes it still trusted by Google, which is basically the search engine we are all trying to impress.

Here are the five reasons you should list your site with BOTW. Google Tutor also posts discount coupons and promo codes for BOTW here.

The benefit I like most about listing with BOTW is the fact that most competitors will not bother doing this. Google also likes the directory, so you’ll automatically boost your ranking. I call that killing multiple birds with one easy stone.

When researching an article, or a possible article idea, how far will you go for research?

I marvel at journalists who are courageous enough to throw themselves into areas of war and conflict. However, it is not just the war correspondents who are brave… albeit less life threatening, it does take a certain amount of courage to sprawl yourself naked onto a table and be enjoyed as a human platter, like this ‘sushi model‘.

For me, being a writer allows me to crawl into a different skin once in a while, and escape from my own identity. Perhaps we write to have an excuse for a thrilling adventure, or we feel the need to chronicle these escapades… who knows. Either way, some of the best stories require the most interesting research. Getting up close and personal is generally a must for a good article, and this makes me wonder: how far are you willing to go for a story idea?

Yesterday I remembered how I used to bring my books to the dinner table and continue reading while eating at the same time. As I looked back at my childhood, I pitied my mother who was forced to eat in silence because I was unable to put down my books. So much for quality time, eh?

There were times she told me to put the book down and just eat. But often she would let me do as I pleased and as a result I ranked up an impressive list of read books. Then I went to university and topped reading literate altogether. My bachelors degree was in Biotechnology and Economics, so when I actually got around to reading my textbooks, and I was done, there was little time and energy left for one of my passions: literature.

Then technology started to catch up and I subscribed to audible. Always on the look out for more ways to get some reading done, I found DailyLit. This website sends you a short installment of a book by email or RSS feed either daily, every weekday, or three times a week. If you are already spending too much time on your computer, here is another reason to stick to your screen even more. However, it is an incredible way of getting some ‘forced’ reading into your day. The installments are relatively short, so they don’t take much longer to read than an email. The real reason I think it though is the ability to read it one a mobile device, such as a BlackBerry or iPhone. Now we’re talking literature on the go! It’s like the Fast-Food of Literature!

Although, if I’m at home, I still prefer curling up with a good book on the couch, in bed, or in a bubble bath. Reading is a treat for me, and although I don’t read at the dinner table anymore, I can still shut out the world for hours at a time with a good paperback.

One more reason to get you reading: DailyLit has a number of free books? Mostly the classics of course, but worth checking out. I just signed up to receive “Die Leiden des jungen Werther” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Which book are you currently reading?