Do Affirmations and Positive Thinking Work?? I was looking through my journals from 2007 and I was a goal-writing maniac. The funny (or depressing) thing about reading back through that stuff is that I was making pretty lofty goals for the timeframes I was giving myself, and I wasn't hitting any of them. I was also doing a lot of affirmation stuff and physically writing down affirmations everyday… such as, "I make $10k a month online…" But… the interesting thing is, a lot of my affirmations that I was saying back then, and most of my big goals that I set for myself back then I have now achieved, and even surpassed. If you read this post, then you know about my "goal pictures". I actually haven't updated that for a long time and I was looking back through it and it turns out I've bought every single one of my goal pictures in the last year… I didn't even realize it… down to the exact model of car that I was opening up and looking at every morning for months… While I definitely don't believe in the "law of attraction" at face value, of course money doesn't just come to you just because you want it, there is definitely something to consciously spending time thinking about and visualizing yourself achieving your goals. Having said all that, I work a lot on my business. It takes both. An Interesting Email From a Reader… Along these same lines, but on a different note, I got an insightful email from a reader a couple week ago that basically asked: "It seems like everything you try seems to work and do well… what are the skills that you attribute that to?" The first thing that came to my mind was my 2-3 years of "failure" where I worked and worked on my first website writing content and trying different ideas and nothing happened. The quick answer to his question though, is sales, marketing, & copywriting skills. Maybe not so much the actual skill of writing up a sales page, but more of just having an understanding of the sales process, and what makes a potential customer want to buy something. This comes into play whether you're writing a product review as an affiliate or the sales page for your own product. Hey… This Post is Called "How to Make 2013 Your Year"… So Tell Me You're right. I guess this will be easiest to put in list format. Here are some of the things I think are the most worthwhile to focus on in the coming year:

Your Marketing Skills: Sales, conversion, copywriting… it's essentially the same thing. Being able to get in the mind of a potential customer and speak like they think and position a product as something that will help them solve a problem is the most fundamental skill  to making your online business a success. This is what allows me to have an ebook outsourced by a great writer on a certain topic, and then create the "marketing" stuff for it, AKA anything the customer can read to make their decision, and have it be a success even though I'm not an expert per se on that exact topic. It should also go without saying that the product is actually high quality and will actually help someone interested in that topic. I'm working on a course module specifically on copywriting and the marketing skills I'm talking about that I'll add to StraybloggerTraining sometime early next year. Your Own Paid Product(s): Your own products can be a membership site, a video course, an ebook. I hate to toot my own horn some more, but my Niche Video Tycoon-type sites still churn out consistent sales every day. It's a solid system… you create a course or ebook for your niche, then setup articles & Youtube videos around the topic that send traffic to your sales page(it also builds you email lists at the same time). The Niche Video Tycoon course is also a part of StraybloggerTraining. If you're apprehensive about creating your own product or ebook… GET OVER IT. You become someone worth listening to when you decide you're someone worth listening to. Email lists: Like I just mentioned, I have a bunch of little sites that get anywhere from 1-10 optins a day, and some of them I totally ignore/forget about. One list just recently hit 1000 subscribers and I haven't sent a promotion to it in over a year. I wrote 3 emails around a subtopic and then picked a product to recommend on email #3, and sent the emails to that list over the course of a week. It did a little over $300 in commissions. Not huge, but awesome at the same time. Building email lists ties nicely in with having your own products… but you don't have to. A blog with a lot of content can build a valuable list over time as well. Productivity/Time Management: Chances are if you're reading this, you already know enough about internet marketing to build a very successful site/business over the next year… the main reason you haven't yet is because of productivity or time management problems… And you know it. When it comes to working for yourself, you have to own your time. You can't hold out for weekends or ideal 6-hour blocks of time, because those just aren't going to happen in the real world. You have to be able to put in a productive 30 minute work session when you have the chance, as well as figure out how to get 10-20 hours of real production out of yourself each week. I'm also working on a set of productivity videos for StraybloggerTraining that I'm hoping to have all done in the next 6 weeks or so. Kindle ebook(s): I know I already mentioned your own product or an ebook, but I wanted to mention this specifically. I've published several ebooks on the Kindle marketplace over the last year, and once a book is selling well, it is hands down the most passive form of online income I have in my business. I think everyone should give it a try, but at the same time make it a book worth buying if you're going to do it. The first group of participants in the Kindle Publishing Workshop that we've been doing for the last month are getting their first books published and it's going great. I'm hoping to launch another session of the workshop this month… probably towards the end. A lot of the participants have mentioned that the best part of the workshop is the built-in accountability which pushed them to actually take action and get their first book done. A Long-Term Authority Site: One of the best long-term models is obviously an authority site. No matter what Google does SEO-wise, if you have a site with a lot of content that people like, your traffic and income will continue to grow.

There you have it… Start thinking about some of this stuff and some of your own goals you want to accomplish next year. A Little Giveaway: I haven't done this in awhile, so I'm going to now… If you 'like' this post on Facebook below, and then leave a comment about what you should have done better in 2012 and/or what you plan on accomplishing in 2013, you'll have a chance of winning a $50 Amazon Gift Card. The winner will be selected randomly from the qualifying comments this Sunday night at 11:59pm, Dec. 9th. The post How to Make 2013 Your Year appeared first on StrayBlogger.