2009 Here I Come!

Happy New Year

I was only mildly hung over this morning.  Woke up at a friends house after staying up all night playing Con Quien, drinking Corona’s and eating ceviche.  All around a good time but next time I’m going to sleep before 5am.  I planned on getting a bunch of stuff done today, including setting up a BANS site that I’ve had an idea for, but I ended up doing squat.  I did help my youngest sister setup her own blog so the morning wasn’t a complete waste.

The year 2009 is here and it’s time to get things in gear again, so I’m going to make a list of things-to-do this year that I can reference and look back on at the end of the year.  This is going to be a rather broad list, easily attainable and should go towards producing long term residual income.

1. Master WordPress – Over the last year I’ve come to rely more on WordPress.  I’ve played around with other content management systems but I keep going back to it as it is best suited for what I’m trying to do and it’s just to easy and powerful to ignore.
2. Spend more time with Social Networking – I really need to get that aspect more involved in what I do.  Social Networking has exploded in the last two years and just dabbling in sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon make me think that Social Networking is going to be at least as important as SEO in the next year.  These sites bring traffic.  Period.
3. Block out distractions – I’ve learned I can’t watch Monday night Football and grow my income at the same time.  And, the same task takes about four times as long to boot.  I can do what I need to get done quickly, then watch Football, listen to music, eat or whatever it is that is causing me to take a long time.
4. Focus more on Content – This one is easy.  Just create content and the rest should fall into place.  Google keeps teaching me that thin affiliate sites with zero unique content will not be rewarded in the long run.  Time to roll out Plan B.
5. Break Down Tasks – I will make my tasks shorter and easier to accomplish this year.  Sometimes I can be a bit to ambitious with what I want to do.  Then when I figure out how long something will take, I tend to move on.  I think this blog is a good example of breaking down tasks.  One article a day, properly SEO’d, content driven without a ton of emphasis on immediate monetization and in a year I should have close to 400 quality articles.  Maybe Google will love me then?

That’s a broad plan for starters.  I think the key one is breaking this all down in to short tasks.  Make it easy.  Keep it simple.