As the new year approaches, I’ve been obsessing more and more about what 2010 is going to bring me – or rather, what I’m going to achieve in 2010. I’ve got some pretty hefty goals set and one of those goals is to get so organized, it will make me want to puke. To say that I like to have my ducks in a row is an understatement. I need my ducks perfectly aligned and if one feather is out of place, I don’t run at optimal speed.

My passions and interests have changed drastically over the last decade but one thing that always stays the same is the fact that I’m an organizing freakshow. I love to be organized and I love finding new ways to become even more sickenly organized.

Motivation and inspiration are two big things for me. I need one to jump start the other, but I need to be organized before I can even begin to be either. I continuously make more money each month and I can thank my insane organizing skills for the majority of it.

Working online involves a lot of juggling, no matter what, and it’s not a skill that everybody has. Some people actually work better when their desks are piled miles high with random papers, dirty dishes, nail clippings and remnants of snacks from weeks before. If that’s you, no need to read further.

On the other hand, if you’re like me, here are some handy resources to check out so you can get your organizing skills in shape for the new year:

Organizing Your Home Office – Links

A designer’s tips for organizing the home office with some style – 5 tips for organizing a home office.

Nicole Balch is the Queen of making organization pretty. Check out her studio to see what I mean.

There’s nothing like some pleasantly eye-catching file folders to encourage you to get organized and stay organized.

Clutter is evil. At least for me it is. That’s what the unclutterer blog rocks, and in particular, the office organization archive.

Lifehacker has some worthy home office hacks to think about while you’re in organizing-mode.

If nothing else in your house is organized, at least your computer should be. Read How to Create a Minimalist Computer Experience.

20 Time-Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow – Even if you’re not a web designer, there are tips in this post that can not only help you organize your Mac or PC, but they can save you loads of time especially if you deal with a lot of images while blogging.

Organize your browser. Organize your desktop. Organize your folders. If you’re bold enough, branch out from your office area and organize other areas of your house too. It’s much easier to keep each room clean and in order when the rest of the house is too. Otherwise, the clutter creep will rear it’s ugly head in no time flat.

If staying organized isn’t your strong suit, keep these resources handy and plug away at them as you have time. You’ll find that the more organized you get, the more time you have to get more organized! Or spend time with family and other important things like that…

So what are your favorite organizing tips or resources?

Information overload is quite common in the online world. It’s also very common to get overwhelmed with all the tasks that come with working online. There are so many options! Which ones do you choose?

Time is money, right folks? No matter how good you are, Santa isn’t going to bring you more hours in the day for Christmas.

If this is you, here’s a little exercise you can try to help you determine which things you should focus on and which things you should drop.

You’ll need to think about everything you do that you consider part of your business building methods and compile them all into a list.

The items that may be on your list could include but are not limited to:

• buying advertising
• article marketing
• social media marketing
• affiliate marketing
• selling your own products or services
• blogging
• posting in forums
• recording podcasts, interviews, etc.
• offline marketing
• email marketing
• building membership sites
• setting up squeeze pages
• cost per click advertising like Adsense, Chitika, etc.

For this to work, you’ll need to know how much money each task brings in. This may be hard to monitor in some cases so just do your best and “guestimate”.

Now, take everything that currently makes you money or will be bringing money in soon. Write each thing down on a piece of paper with plenty of space between each item. (Some things may overlap a bit since certain tasks will directly and indirectly affect other tasks, but that’s OK for now.)

Beside each one, write down how much money it makes per day, per month, per year. Then write down how much you think it can potentially make you per day/month/year.

Once that part is done, go back through each item and list how much time and effort each thing needs to keep bringing in that money. For example, blogging may take you 1 hour a day whereas buying advertising may only take a few hours a month.

Now rate each item on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is “I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than do this.” and 10 is “This is so freaking fun!”

After you have everything written down, take some time to decide what your top 5 items are. If you didn’t have many to begin with, choose the top 3. Those are the money-making methods you should be focusing on.

That doesn’t mean you need to stop doing the other ones, just don’t spend a lot of time or effort on them right now. You can outsource those tasks to someone else, or wait until your top items are on auto-pilot and you have more time to spend on them.

If they really don’t help your business at all, cut ‘em loose.

Ultimately, you want to be focusing on things that not only help improve your business but are also things you can see yourself continuing to do without them becoming chores you despise doing.

The whole point of working at home is to have freedom. You want the freedom to be able to spend time with your family, and also financial freedom so you’re not always tied to your desk.

To get to that point, you need to periodically analyze your business plan as well as your daily routine and update it accordingly. This exercise will help you do that.

Every time I read one, I’m inspired and end up thinking about things in a completely different way which helps me continue to grow – both personally and in my business.

A few newsletters back, when talking about Internet Marketing “Gurus”, he said this:

These folks are not smarter than you, they’re not better than you, and they don’t have mystic Kung Fu powers. At most, they’re a few blocks further down the sidewalk.

So jog a little.

Think about that. Doesn’t that give you a surge of motivation and make you want to work hard? That’s one of the main reasons why I enjoy Paul’s newsletters so much.

You want to join the big leagues? Pick up the pace a little. Work a few extra hours. Go above and beyond. Kick some ass!

If you need a nudge in the right direction, read his report “Why Johnny Can’t Sell”. I read it as soon as he emailed his list about it and I’ve read it a few times since. It’s that good.

If you can read at least 10 pages of it and put any of the ideas you get from it into action today, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of the masses.

If you sign up for the free newsletter, you’ll also get “Need to Know” which is another great report I’ve read more than once. That puppy is stuffed to the nines with useful nuggets that any Internet Marketer can use.

When I read magazines, I pay attention to the layout of the pages, the font used, the images, etc. which inspires me to create new designs. I also get inspired by nature – going for walks always gives me ideas and I can’t wait to get home to draw them.

I also love to look at photography which is always really inspiring. I get all my wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT. They have some amazing photos and the one I downloaded today is particularly crazy cool.

I like to minimize all my windows on my desktop and just sit back and admire my current wallpaper. I usually get a lot of design ideas from them. It’s also like having a piece of ever-changing art on my desk while I’m not working.

I might have to keep this Buddhist Temple wallpaper on my desktop for longer than usual since it goes so well with my Buddha head sitting on my desk.

So take a look around you. Chances are there are many inspiring elements right in front of you, you just have to look at them with open eyes!

Can you wait 5 days?

Sure, some quick cash would be nice, but wouldn’t a steadily increasing paycheck be even better?

How about writing a small report, and setting up a short ecourse to promote it?

This post will tell you how so listen up! (This post is also full of free goodies, FYI.)

This method is easy. Yeah, I said easy. It requires work and some of your time, but it doesn’t require a degree to get it right.

This method will also generate as much income as you want it to. The more you promote it, test it and tweak it, the more money it will make. The more you repeat this method, the more your income will grow.

So let’s begin.

Summary:

1. Write a short report
2. Promote that short report with an ecourse (If you think ecourses are old school and overdone, think again!)
3. Build your list

So three steps.

Let’s dive into step 1 – Writing a short report.

If you already have a website in a certain niche, then chances are you already have an idea or two for a short report topic. If not, it’s brainstorming time! Here are a few ways you can drum up some ideas:

• Dig through your website statistics and find out what people are searching for to reach your site. Any “how to” key phrases should provide some ideas. Pay attention to this information because it tells you EXACTLY what your readers are looking for.
• Poll or survey your readers. You can set up a form on your website or send out a request to your email list. Preferably both. If you don’t already have a list, get one!
• Hang around in related forums and find out what people are talking about. This works every time.

Now that you have an idea, you need to make sure it’s a profitable one. The “how to” and “tips” reports are usually winners. People are always wanting to know how to do stuff. They want tips to help them become more successful at whatever they’re doing.

For example:

“How To Create a Profitable Ecourse in 3 Hours”

or

“Copywriting Tips That Will Double Your Sales”

or

“7 Things You Must Do to Save Hundreds On Your Next Vehicle Purchase”

Just make sure that the title of your short report isn’t so far fetched that it’s unbelievable. It has to be compelling, but not ridiculously over the top.

Now write the report!

You can write it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. If you can’t hire someone and you can’t write worth a shit, trade services with someone who can.

Writing a short report doesn’t have to be a huge deal. I can sometimes sit down with my ancient laptop and whip one up in an hour. If what I’m writing about requires a lot of research, it can take days. There are also a crapload of short reports sitting on my hard drive that were started but never finished.

Don’t be like me.

Finish what you start!

Create an outline then fill in the blank spots. And read this book. It’s free and it’s good. If your head isn’t spewing out awesome ideas by the time you’re done it, I will eat my own shorts.

When your report is finished, you need to figure out a price. Each market is different, and you may be surprised at what price point works best, so this is definitely something to test. If it’s fairly short – 5 to 10 pages – start out with $7 and test from there.

Ok, on to step 2 – Writing an ecourse.

Typically, ecourses – or email mini-courses – are about 7 days long. Or 7 issues. They don’t HAVE to be though. They can be as long or short as you want. There is no “right” answer, but you have to take your readers into consideration.

If you send out an ecourse about gardening, your readers may want some longer, more detailed messages. If you’re targeting internet marketers who are already inundated with emails, you may want to keep them short and sweet, and no more than 7 in a row.

Decide on your topic for each email, then write about it! It doesn’t have to take a lot of time and it doesn’t have to be an award-winning masterpiece. But you do need to make it really good. Make it informative, useful, interesting, entertaining. Make it worth the time it took for your readers to sign up and read it.

If you already have a lot of content for your topic, consider re-purposing it for your ecourse. Break up some articles into smaller lessons for each email, or rewrite them and add a few more exclusive tips or info. You can even add some interviews, worksheets, resource lists, videos, audio, etc. to add to the value of your ecourse.

(I wrote up a more detailed report about creating profitable ecourses for my subscribers. Signup with the form to the right at the top and you’ll have instant access after you confirm your subscription.)

Throw your newly created ecourse into an autoresponder and send the test emails to yourself to read over. Better yet, send them to someone who will proofread them for you. When everything is looking good, it’s on to….

Step 3 – Building your list.

Now this is a gigantic topic and I could write about it for days, but instead, I’m going to point you to some awesome resources that talk about building lists much better than I could.

List Marketing Tips – This is a free 20 page report that is chock full of tips that will not only help you promote your list, but profit from it as you build it.

Triple Opt-In Requests – Another free 20 page report with tips that will help you increase your optins without increasing traffic. (One thing that I did to increase my own optins was to add an arrow with the optin form. Something bright and eye-catching will do the trick.)

Basically, create a really great ecourse that people will want to sign up for, then promote the frick outta that there link!

• twitter it
• put it on every page of your site
• put it in forum signatures
• blog about it frequently
• include it in your email signature
• submit articles to article directories with the link in your author bio
• create a free report to entice people and make it viral
• contact other site owners and offer them a large cut of your profits if they help you promote it
• etc.

If it takes you 2 days to write the report itself, another 2 days to create the ecourse, and 1 day to set it all up (autoresponder, optin page, etc.) then you can start profiting from it in 5 days from now.

Rinse and repeat once a month (or whenever you have the energy for it) and you’ll be creating a profitable little empire for yourself.

And don’t just sit there thinking about doing it, just friggin’ DO IT! I know you can!

Did you enjoy this post? Please click here to retweet. Thanks!

Creating a header for your blog is one of the best ways to make it unique and stand out from the crowd. When you’re trying to come up with an idea for your new header, you may be drawing a blank. I’ve got a few ideas that will help kickstart those creative gears in your head.

Just Text – I’ve seen a lot of great blog headers that are simply text. Using typography to make your blog stand out is gutsy but can result in a beautiful header. Find a snazzy font – there are tons of free fonts available on the web to download – and use your favorite image editing program to create a cool graphic with your blog title.

Add some text effects to make it anything but generic. You can even make it look like it’s 3D, shiny, or glowing. Try using different colors for certain letters, add a copy of the text flipped upside down to create a mirror effect, or create text using other images. There are lots of ways to get creative with text.

Photography – Some headers are nothing but a photo. A scenic landscape, a city skyline, or a row of cute babies smiling for the camera can make a memorable image for your blog readers.

If you want to get even more creative, design multiple headers and have them rotate each time the page is refreshed. This is a great idea for people with photoblogs who like to showcase their own work. My favorite place to get images for my blog headers is StockXpert.

Minimal – If you have a busy theme or you want to direct the focus on something in particular, you may want to choose a header that doesn’t attract a lot of attention.

A simple blog title may suffice, or a small logo. This works well for blogs that already have a brand that is recognizable.

Grunge – There are lots of grunge images and textures that you can download for free. Grab a few, splice them together, and create your own unique header with them.

While you’re looking for some grunge textures, find some grunge fonts to go with it. A dark grunge background with a white grungy text over top would look great on a personal blog.

Color – Using bright, vibrant colors for your header is extremely eye-catching. It could be something really abstract (in which case many examples can be found on free stock photography and images sites) or you can use a mixture of images that add a lot of color contrast.

In one blog header I designed, I took one image of an apple, duplicated it twice, and changed the color of the second two images resulting in a row of three colorful apples. It was simple and eye-catching at the same time and the same idea could be implemented for any niche blog using different images.

If you can’t decide on one idea, why not try more than one? Some blogs are known to change their headers regularly. In some cases this could confuse your readers, but if done properly, it could end up being something that makes your blog unique. Your readers will expect the change and look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Today I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you a few examples of some blog headers that really caught my eye. Hopefully they’ll provide a bit of inspiration for you.

1. The Mom Crowd

2. Blog Design Blog

3. Geeks Are Sexy

4. Friday Traffic Report

5. Karen Cheng’s Snippets of Life

6. Making It Lovely

7. Mark’s Daily Apple

This is actually the old header. He JUST launched a new design and I’m personally liking the old one better. Anyhoo, next.

8. Men With Pens

9. Mighty Girl

10. The Adventures of SuperWife

11. Define Me Clothing

They don’t have to be award-winning designs but it should tie in well to the rest of your theme.

More WordPress goodness to come, so stay tuned!

Quit obsessing about the skills you don’t have and focus on the ones you do have.

I’ve been giving myself a really hard time lately because I can’t do all the things I’d like to. I’m a great piano player – I used to teach it – but I suck butt at playing guitar even though I’d love to play better.

I love to mess around with code on my websites and there are certain aspects of it that I’m pretty good at, but I can’t design a whole website from scratch even though I’d like to.

I love to cook and bake, and making dishes with fresh ingredients is something that makes me really happy, but I couldn’t grow an herb garden if my life depended on it.

So what does this crap have to do with blogging or running a website?

Well, if you’ve been at it for any length of time, you’ll know that it requires an insane amount of work to be even a little bit successful. There are so many aspects to it that it’s impossible for one single person to do all of them well. (Yay for virtual assistants!)

I got to thinking today – which can be a dangerous thing – and wondered why I’m so worried about all the things I can’t do well and decided to focus more on the things that I do very well and will now spend more time doing them even better.

Worrying about the things we can’t do is a colossal waste of time.

If you can’t do something, you have a few options:

• You can hire someone else to do it, or trade services with them.
• Just don’t do it and leave it unfinished. I’m great at that.
• Learn how to do it.

Each solution poses its own problem.

1. Hiring someone can be expensive. Trading services with someone can take up a lot of time.
2. Leaving a task unfinished means loose ends that should be tied up. In a business, this could mean bad things.
3. Learning how to do it yourself can be extremely stressful and time consuming.

I bet you are expecting the perfect workaround at this point. Guess what. I don’t have one. I’m going to cop out and say that you have to choose which solution is the best for you. Ha!

I personally like to do a healthy balance of all three. I’ll get someone else to do the really difficult stuff that I just don’t have the skills/time for. I’ll leave the tasks that aren’t really important or beneficial to my blogs. I’ll figure out how to do the little things that I should probably know how to do anyway which usually saves me time, frustration, and money down the road.

The main thing here is not to have unreasonable expectations. Don’t assume you can do everything by yourself. Don’t feel bad that you can’t do something that others are naturally gifted at.

Instead, pinpoint your strengths and the things you’re great at and use that to your advantage.

I’ve picked up a few things over the years that helps me balance work and family (and “me time”). I have to admit that I don’t always practice what I preach but I do my best and it really does work when you manage to stay focused.

JUST DO IT

How many times have you had a great idea only to let it die because you waited too long to put it into action? Having that great idea isn’t enough. Writing it down on paper isn’t enough. You need to start acting on it right away.

• If you want to start a new site, start by buying the domain name right away.
• If you want to write an ebook, sit down with a pen and paper and create an outline.
• If you want to create an email course, put up a subscribe form and get crackin’ on the first lesson.

Just do it! Once you start that first step, continue on and keep making steps, even if they’re baby steps.

Something John Reese said in his blog post How To Get Everything You Want in 24 Hours really struck a chord with me.

“You must do something every single day towards accomplishing your goal. It doesn’t matter how big or how small this effort has to be. It just has to be something.”

That is a great post to read if you have trouble taking action. I even printed that quote out and have it by my computer at all times. Every time I look at it I want to work!

END DISTRACTIONS

Who doesn’t love Twitter? Even though Twitter can be a great tool for building contacts, relationship and traffic, it can also be a huge time suck. Instant messaging, email, reading RSS feeds – all those things can consume a huge amount of time without you realizing it.

Sometimes I just have to turn all those things off if I want to get any work done. Other times, I allow myself a certain amount of time to use them. If you want to get really serious, you can time yourself to see just how much time you spend on things that aren’t benefiting your business. SlimTimer works perfectly for me. Scary how much time you lose to certain things each day!

ONE THING AT A TIME

I can’t tell you how many text files I have on my computer of articles/blog posts/ebooks I’ve started writing but didn’t finish. I’ve been in the process of cleaning them all up and I’ve achieved a lot in the past few weeks but I’ve implemented a few “rules” for myself to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand again.

I keep my computer desktop completely clean except for one folder, “To Do”. When I start a new project, I save it to my desktop. I will not allow myself to put it into my To Do folder until it’s complete. When it is complete, I rename the file to add “done” at the end. Then when I go to publish new content, I have all my “done” files in my To Do folder.

This works for me because I despise clutter and I can’t stand icons on my desktop. I’m a bit strange that way. I can’t stand anything on my counter tops either and fridge magnets are a huge no-no in my house. Poo on clutter, including half-finished text files all over my desktop.

Sometimes it’s hard to finish a project while you’re working on it because you come up with even more ideas while you’re in the process. This gets overwhelming and leads to complete burn-out so I’ve trained myself not to think about anything else while I’m working on something.

KEEP A SCHEDULE

Whether your kids are still at home with you or are going to school during the day, you need some kind of schedule or routine. My routine is always changing and needs to be very versatile. My kids are still young and most of my time is devoted to them so I might have a few months in a row where I get up early and work before they wake up, then I might have a few months where I work after they go to bed.

If you’re just flying by the seat of your pants, you should consider adding some kind of structure into your day. Starting a schedule for myself has added to my productivity immensely.

I’ve tried a lot of online tools like Google Calendar to keep a schedule, but I always come back to my handy dandy notebook. I love my daily planner and I would probably cry like a little girl if I lost it. A lot of WAHMs like to use Remember The Milk which can actually be used with Google Calendar so it’s worth checking out if you’re in need of a little routine-making action.

CONCLUSION

We’re all different. We all have different situations at home and we all have different goals and tasks that need to be accomplished every day.

It’s important to make the best of your time so that you can find a healthy balance for you and your family. Nobody said being a work at home mom was easy, but it can be very rewarding. The trick is to find what works for you.

Something else that always happens to me over the holidays is I seem to lose my groove. My work groove that is.

Even though I have done quite a bit of work in the past few days behind the scenes, I haven’t done as much as I wanted to.

That’s why I’m glad I read this post at John Reese’s blog. He doesn’t update often, but when he does it’s always a worthy read. He always makes me stop and think which ends up alternating my train of thought indefinitely (and in a positive way I might add).

I’m horrible for putting things off until the last minute, or constantly telling myself “I’ll do it tomorrow”, but after this morning, I think things will be changing.

If you’re a big procrastinator like me, you’ll definitely want to read that post.

Something else you’ll want to do is have a clear idea in your head about your goals for 2009. In fact, you should write them down and keep them somewhere accessible – somewhere you’ll be looking at frequently. I plan on using one of my awesome multi-colored funky girly notebooks to store my 2009 goals in and I’ll be keeping it right beside my computer on my desk so that I never forget.

I’ll also be creating a plan to help me reach each of my goals along with a reasonable yet challenging timeline. I want 2009 to be my best year yet and I’ve been a busy little beaver acquiring all the tools and knowledge need to accomplish that. I would love for you to make 2009 your best year as well.

Let’s kick some recession ass!