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Dump the New Year’s Resolutions!

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It's time to DUMP those New Year’s Resolutions!

As the current year is nearing its end, many people are thinking about making New Year’s resolutions.

Not me… or at least not anymore.

New Year’s Resolutions

I’ve blogged about New Year’s resolutions numerous times over the years, but like 80+% of New Year’s resolutions ever made, the majority of my personal resolutions have usually gone by the wayside (read ‘failed’) by February.

New Year’s Resolutions fail for many different reasons, including:

[Read more…]

10 Resolutions for Better Online Business in 2012

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The end of the year is a fabulous time to set goals that will help you make more money online in the new year (and beyond).

Here are a few New Year's business resolutions you might want to consider adopting:

  1. Ask for help

    We often fail to achieve our goals because we don't ask for help. Don't let ‘not knowing' or ‘not understanding' undermine your potential for success. Reach out and ask for mentoring, guidance and support when you need it. Join a membership site that teaches what you want to learn and has a community forum in which you can get answers to your questions.

  2. Cultivate a positive mindset

    Success is nearly impossible to achieve when we focus on our failures, doubts and worries. View mistakes as part of the process. Learn from them and be grateful that no one died. 🙂 Derive motivation and inspiration from the success of others.

  3. Be realistic

    Making a million dollars in the next 30 days is unlikely (despite what scam marketers tell you) unless you win the lottery or your rich uncle croaks and leaves you his fortune. Recognize that reward is in direct correlation to effort made.

  4. Learn something new

    Do some reading or take a course to improve your writing skills. Read a book to improve your self-confidence or your self-discipline.

  5. Adopt new methods

    Investigate different strategies that you can adopt to grow your business. Add product sales to your Adsense site. Add Adsense to your affiliate blog. Offer one-on-one coaching to your repertoire. Turn your blog into an exclusive membership site. And for Pete's sake, quit relying on Feedburner alone and install that Aweber code!! 🙂

  6. Focus on your target market

    If you sell medical and health products to boomers, spend more time where they hang out online and less time tweeting about Kim Kardashian's antics.

  7. Know your numbers

    Analyze your best traffic sources, best-selling products and blog posts from the previous year. Focus on those to make additional recommendations and sales to your existing audience.

  8. Get more social

    Social media marketing will continue to explode in 2012 and is clearly the best way to get free traffic to your blog. Ramp up your Facebook and Twitter activities to grow your reader and customer base.

  9. Respect your time

    Learn to automate every process that can be automated. For example, use Aweber's blog broadcasting to automatically deliver your latest blog posts to your subscriber list and Twitter. Be sure that each of your blog posts, Flickr and YouTube uploads also get posted automatically to Facebook. Increase your productivity with simple and inexpensive webmaster tools.

  10. Celebrate your accomplishments

    Savor and enjoy every step you take, no matter how small it seems. Give yourself a pat on the back or reward yourself in some way. Success isn't really success unless we enjoy it.

I hope those suggestions help you make more money online during the year(s) to come. My best wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy and Prosperous New Year!

P.S. Please help out a fellow blogger and add your suggestions in the comments section below.

Note: This post was originally published in 2010 and has been updated for 2012.

Make Your Resolutions a Reality

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Did you make one or more resolutions for the new year?

Well, according to a Marist Poll released in December, you're in the minority with only 33% of Americans saying they made a resolution last year.

And of those who did make resolutions, 65% reported that they had kept it for part of the year while 35% didn't even get out of the gate.

If you want to be one of the very small minority who actually makes their resolutions a reality, read the following tips.

  1. Put it in writing. That means actual hand-writing, not typing up a list. When thoughts go from brain to hand, pen and then paper your feelings of commitment to your goals increase.
  2. Be realistic. I believe in setting big goals, but ‘make a million dollars' starting from zero is probably a pipe dream. Try ‘increase my income by 1 (or 2 or 5) thousand dollars a month'. Pick a figure that will relieve your current financial burden yand give you some breathing room.
  3. Brainstorm. How will you achieve your goals? How much time you have to work on your goals? Will you work one or two hours a day during the week, or work on the weekends? What resources do you need? Hosting? Education? Someone to help with the kids while you work? A partner with writing skills to augment your technical skills, or vice versa? Write down everything that comes to mind.
  4. Create your plan. Organize your ideas from ‘Brainstorm' above into an list of steps ordered by sequence and/or priorities.
  5. Set deadlines. A goal without a deadline is just a wish. Saying ‘start a blog' is meaningless unless you add a timeframe, i.e. ‘start a blog by January 10th' and ‘write 10 core articles by January 20th', etc.
  6. Commit. Sign your list of resolutions and place it on a bulletin board where you can see it every day.
  7. Reward success. If you tend to chastise yourself for missing deadlines, turn that thinking around, because punishment is a lousy motivator. Plan rewards for yourself instead, so you'll have something good to look forward to when you do achieve your goals.

Now work your plan!

Did you make a resolution? A plan to keep it? Do you have any additional tips for our readers that will help them keep theirs? Please share by leaving a comment below.

Best of success to everyone in sticking with their resolutions (goals) for 2010.

How to Make Money from New Year’s Resolutions

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The New Year is looming large and it's time to think about how best to profit from all the New Years resolutions that will be made — and eventually mostly broken so you can profit from them again next year. 🙂

Here are the top 10 resolutions along with corresponding affiliate programs and Clickbank best-sellers that you can promote.

1. Spend More Time with Family & Friends

Polls indicate that more than 50% of those surveyed make a promise to spend more time with family and friends in the coming year. Help people do that with programs like:

2. Get Fit

Nothing does as much good for a body as a regular fitness program. Exercise extends life expectancy, lowers blood pressure, improves your mood and even reduces the risk of some cancers. Too, one of the fastest-growing trends in the fitness industry is involving children in exercise. Great online fitness programs and ebooks include:

3. Lose Weight

More than two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, so it's not surprising that one of the most popular New Year's resolutions is to lose weight. Programs to help folks shed those extra pounds include:

  • Fat Loss 4 Idiots ($30.37/sale – Clickbank)
  • eDiets (up to $50/sale – CJ)
  • Drugstore.com (10.00% commission – Linkshare)

4. Quit Smoking

The average smoker trys and fails 4 times before they quite for good. Help them kick the smoking habit for good this year with:

5. Enjoy Life More

Considering the pressures of a bad economy, job uncertainty and all the other stressors facing the average person today, it's no wonder that “enjoying life more” has become a popular resolution in recent years. Help them do just that by introducing them to a new hobby or leisure time pursuit, i.e. scrapbooking or photography; or engaging in current pursuits like travelling more and listening to music. Even better is when you can help them find a great deal!

  • Hotwire.com (2% commissions – Linkshare)
  • 500 Scrapbooking Sketches ($/sale: $12.79)
  • iTunes (5% commission – Linkshare)

6. Quit Drinking or Drink Less

Alchoholism is rampant in our stressed-out societies. If you want to help prevent some of the incredible damage that alchoholism wreaks on individuals and their families, share your knowledge and support with others to help them overcome this devastating condition… or just convince them to drink less while opting for BETTER quality.

  • HypnoBusters (50% commissions – Ejunkie)
  • My Way Out (15% commissions – Independent)
  • Wine.com (5 – 20% commissions – Linkshare)

7. Get Out of Debt

With the economy falling apart at the seams, people losing their jobs everyday by the tens of thousands, more and more folks are realizing the need to free themselves from the burden of debt. You can help them with programs such as:

  • Leo Quinn's “How to Own Your Paycheck Again” (up to 50% commissions – Independent)
  • Ultimate Debt Relief Guide ($22.60 per sale – Clickbank)

8. Education – Self-Improvement

Once again, a weakened economy is forcing many to look farther afield to improve their educational standings, and as in any typical year there are others who just seek self-improvement.

9. Volunteerism & Charities

In good economic times, many people commit to helping others. In tough times when many are out of work, volunteering is a good route to finding gainful employment.

10. Get Organized

This is one of those resolutions that I have every year… check out this blog post and you'll see why. 🙂 Help people like me reduce the clutter and get organized with

As always, you can search for programs and information related to these and other topics on the major affiliate networks, such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare and Google.

New Year’s Resolutions: Your Turn

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I made my ‘short list' of New Year's resolutions public which is one of the ways that I stay true and on track with my goals.

So, now it's your turn. 🙂 In what ways do you plan to grow your Internet and affiliate marketing business this year? Will you…

  • Build a web site? Re-design your existing site for improved conversions?
  • Set specific goals to increase your income?
  • Start a subscriber list? Find ways to build your current list bigger?
  • Invest in training or adopt a mentor?
  • Start a blog? Learn to use social bookmarking techniques?
  • Produce more or better content?

Tell us what your plans are by leaving a comment below – then commit to the process. We'll be doing follow-up with you! 🙂

Happy New YEAR!

My List of Resolutions is Short this Year

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Last year around this time I shared my New Year's resolutions for 2006 with you.

As resolutions go, I kept some and broke some. However, considering my overall income increased by 17% and I managed to take even MORE vacations than usual, I have to conclude that 2006 was a pretty darned fine year.

So on to 2007. I'm keeping my resolutions pretty basic this year – In a nutshell, I plan to double both the income increase (to at least 34%) as well as the amount of time I take off.

How do I plan to accomplish that? Well, basically, by being more productive, increasing the size of my subscriber lists and the amount that I communicate with my visitors and subscribers.

Pretty simple, eh? And as I succeed in those ventures, I plan to share the “how-to's” with YOU. So, stay tuned!

Rosalind’s Resolutions for 2006

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My New Year's Resolutions for 2006

If you celebrated Christmas, and even if you didn't, I hope that you enjoyed a fabulous holiday weekend – filled with fun, friends and family!

With New Year's just a couple days down the pike, I wanted to share my Top Ten New Year's business resolutions with you in the hope that my plans might give you some ideas for making your own affiliate marketing business more prosperous in 2006.

So here goes.

In 2006, I, Rosalind Gardner, will…

  1. Manage My Time Better. It's easy to get caught up dealing with email and other people's blogs, but those activities rarely increase the bottom line. Therefore, in 2006, I'll put ‘profit' activities ahead of other activities by spending the first hour of each work day writing and creating products, rather than reading feeds and answering emails.
  2. Blog More. I was surprised and delighted in 2005 by the extraordinary surge in traffic RosalindGardner.com received after I started the NPT blog. I will therefore start a blog on my top affiliate marketing site, Sage-Hearts.com, an Internet dating services review site.
  3. Go Video! As Jim Edwards and Marlon Sanders have been telling us for the last few months, Internet video is the way to go in 2006. If people have a choice between reading and clicking a “Play Now” button, they'll almost always choose the latter. I will therefore create and add videos to my sites.
  4. Post More on Other Forums. Since launching the NPT Forum, I've come to appreciate the work of ‘professional forum posters', ie. those who post on other peoples' forums to promote and get traffic to their own sites. I will therefore spend time answering questions in other affiliate marketing forums and determine whether forum-posting is an effective (read ‘profitable') way to spend my time, relative to other marketing methods.
  5. Create a New Product. Many NPT subscribers and my Internet marketing colleagues regularly tell me, “We love your Super Affiliate Handbook. What's your next project and when can we get it?” So yes, in Q4 of 2006 I will release a new product. Why Q4? Well after writing another book about affiliate marketing as per my contract with McGraw-Hill, and all the vacationing I've planned for this year (see #10) it'll be the end of July before I can start working on the project.
  6. Outsource More. Because I'm such a control freak when it comes to my business, this is a difficult resolution for me to make, however it is entirely necessary if I want my business to grow and become even more prosperous. I will therefore outsource some writing projects and get more assistance with site building and basic marketing functions.
  7. Automate More. I love to tinker with graphics and tweak my sites, but those activities don't contribute to the bottom line. So, in 2006, I will seek out new technologies to build bigger, better sites in less time.
  8. Spend More on Education. Although I learn more about this business everyday, this year I will create and execute a plan to better focus my learning efforts. That plan will include attending a few conferences related to those industries in which I work as an affiliate.
  9. Increase My Advertising Budget. Because they're so effective, I've been pretty lazy with some of my PPC campaigns. This year however I will increase the size of my keyword lists, seek out new advertising venues and spend more to attract visitors to my affiliate sites.
  10. Relax and Vacation More. In the past I've ‘chunked' my work and play time in fairly large pieces, ie. work seven days straight without taking a break to go for a walk, then go on a vacation for a month during which I barely answer an email. Although I won't stop taking month-long vacations; the 8-hour back-breaking, neck-kinking, carpal-inducing computer work-marathons have to go! So, this year I will begin each day with exercise and sustenance, and limit desk-time to no more than an hour at a time.

Well, that's about all for now, but if I come up with anymore, I'll let you know!

—

Rosalind Gardner is author of the best-selling “Super
Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in ONE Year Selling
Other People's Stuff Online.

Super Affiliate Handbook

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