Yes, it’s that time of the year again. You may or may not like New Year’s resolutions, but since New Year’s Eve is literally around the corner, it is worth to give change a thought. Especially, since, we’re closing a year so full of changes. To make the process of picking your perfect New Year’s resolution, and more importantly, to help you stick to it, I have put together a vast list of brilliant resources on the subject. Forget the financial crisis: 2009 is just gonna be great! So, without further ado, here comes everything you’ve always wanted to know about New Year’s resolutions, but never dared to ask.

My personal favorites

The Psychology of New Year’s Resolutions

• 75 percent of people will fail with their New Year’s Resolutions, according to this article written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. at Psychcentral.com. The article is pretty deep and scientific, so you’d rather read it before the new year’s party.
• Psychology Today’s blogger Michele Weiner-Davis says that your New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t focus on yourself, but on your relationship with your significant other. “Why don’t spouses sit down together and truly think about where they want to be six months or a year from now, setting relationship-oriented goals that can make marriages richer, healthier and longer lasting?” she asks. Hmm, I guess she has a point. There has to be room for that kind of improvement, too.
• The Simple Dollar has put together a list for Defining and Sticking To a Successful New Year’s Resolution. Not only financially. The piece is from 2007, but it’s still a good read.
• U Turn Ahead’s 8 Tips for your New Year’s Resolutions’ success is also more than a year old, but it is very worthy of reading nevertheless. My favorite is #2: Spend some time thinking about the specific change you want to make. I agree, sometimes it is not as obvious as it may seem.
• Sharon Michaels’s How To Make A New Year’s Resolution You’ll Keep is a well-written article, without any really unique content or thoughts. If you want to reassure what you’ve already read in the previous articles, then give it a go.
• Michael Riley at MyCentralJersey.com argues that New Year’s eve may not be the best time to pick resolutions for the whole year. He may be right.

Lifestyle

• High Plains Buddhist’s Ten New Year’s Resolutions are funny, wise and provocative. I’m not quite sure how Buddhist they are, though. But maybe this is not even important in this case, is it?
• Living the Good life’s New Year’s Resolutions are, on the other hand, surely of religious motives. If “Pray more often” is a New Year’s Resolution you are about to consider, don’t miss this blogpost.

Fitness

• Fitness and working out has always been a favorite among New Year’s resolutions. So why don’t you head over to Fitness.com, and have a look at their list? I promise they won’t stop at Take the stairs instead of the elevator. They’re just warming up for the rest.
• Momlogic.com’s New Year’s Resolutions sound slightly more attractive for a lazy guy like me, even if improving the health factor still remains in focus.

Fun

• I guess that (if you have read at least some of the articles I suggested), by now, you are really confused concerning your own New Year’s Resolutions. No worries, help is on the way! Generate your New Year’s Resolutions by a single click of your mouse at Dagblog.com.
• Finally, indulge yourself with a whole lot of useless trivia on New Year’s eve and on New Year’s Resolutions. You deserve it!

So when I say I’m starting and building up things from nothing, I mean it. But while I’m starting from zero in terms of revenue, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t have any blogging or internet-background. In fact, I do. Let’s see what base can I build this future revenue on.

Technical background.
I’m not a programmer or coder, but I do have knowledge of basic internet techniques. And despite the tools and techniques being basic, I think it’s also fair to say that the level of my skills on this field is far from basic. This is what I know:

I do have a pretty solid knowledge of html. I’ve been making/editing/writing/designing websites since 1999. The fact that it was basically 10 years ago is a big eye-opener even for me.

I also know a lot about CSS. In the late 1990s we were designing pages using tables, and there are times, when I still prefer this technique to CSS. On the other hand, CSS is a must have in 2008.

I know php. Bear in mind that I wouldn’t dare to show my php code to an official programmer, as it’s probably bad-bad code. Anyway, it’s working fine, and while I can do it myself, it’s free.

I know MySql. SQL is a great thing and MySQL is probably the most user-friendly implementation of any sort of database management system. In fact I not only know some MySQL, but I actually enjoy writing queries, the more complex the better. Frightening, huh?

I know a few basic Apache techniques. Although I’m far from being an expert in running web servers, but I know how to create search engine friendly URLs with .htaccess and stuff like that. It comes in handy sometimes.

JavaScript and Ajax. Since Facebook appeared a couple of years ago, I was keen to learn JavaScript and Ajax. Frankly I’m not a great fan of either of these techniques, but I can solve basic problems using these two. For more complex problems, I usually look for ready-made solutions, that I only have to implement on my site.

After carefully tallying all these languages and techniques, it may seem a lot. I tell you, it is a lot. I’ve been actively messing around with codes of websites for at least eight or ten years now. I’ve been learning, and although I refused to study programming at an official course or a university, I continuously try to keep up with the latest techniques.

Domains
Apart from the technical background mentioned above, I also have a couple of domain names (I’m unable to count it right now, how many of them, but my closest guess would be six or seven). I will reveal all of these domains (some of which are Hungarians, but most of them are English), as we proceed with the projects that are ahead of us.

Some of these domains have basic websites (like blogs) up on them, but since I never really tried to make money off them, they receive no traffic at all. Also, the websites will also need to be changed if I want them to make money in the long run.

The newest of these domains is http://zsoltballa.com, that I registered only a couple of days ago. Since it’s running under my name, I’ll pay extra attention to this one, and I hope that this extra attention will result in great content and also great page ranking.

Tools
I have an internet-connected laptop and a sofa to sit on.

Ideas
I do have a lots of them. Although it’s been a while since I’m online, but I still find Internet amazing, furthermore, mindboggling. I’m constantly thinking of new ideas, new services, new sites. At the moment I have approximately 20 website ideas ready.

If only I could set up five of them in the upcoming year, and make, say, three of them successful, I’d be glad (and wealthy). And I’m sure that I will have another 20 ideas in queue by the end of next year.

What did you have as a background when you started blogging? Was that enough or you would have needed something else/something completely different? I’m looking forward to your answers in the comments section.

I believe in perfect transparency, both in personal and in business life, and will post accordingly.

First things first, I’ll be very clear and specific about setting the goals of this blog (rather the goals of those activities this blog is about than the goals of the blog itself).

The aim is to double my real-life salary with my internet revenues within six months.

As I said, I can’t be too specific concerning my real-world salary (as there is a high possibility that someone from the office will sooner or later find this blog), so let’s say this: six months from now (May 7, 2009), I’d like to make $100 a day from my internet activities.

How about that for a goal?

This income, (a gross profit in my understanding) would roughly equal my 9-5 income. I do not take weekends into consideration (so the goal refers to $700 a week and not $500 a week), and also I’m talking about profit and not revenue. This latter is important, because I’m ready to invest cash in buying PPC traffic to one or more of my future sites.

I always have to keep in mind, that I’m doing it (the blog as well as the whole web-game-thing) only part-time, as a “hobby” (I will have an entire post on the rules later on), so obviously when and if I lose my job for one reason or another, that will modify the deadlines as well.

So if I lose my job (which I have no intention of doing), the original deadline will move to not later than three months from that specific point in time. Obviously, this only modifies the original deadline if it happens in less than three months from now, and that is, luckily highly unlikely. Still, the possibility can not be ruled out.

One more thing: setting a goal for six months is nice, and although it may seem a long period, in business life it isn’t long at all.

But I thought that the work and the achievements are easier to handle if we break our big goal down to tinier parts. These parts, of course, can be modified as time goes by, ideally without changing the original “big” goal. But even if one has to change the big, final goal, these smaller steps help keeping track of the actual achievements, furthermore, they are pretty useful when forecasting whether the big aim is still in connection with reality at all.

I also have to acknowledge that the road ahead is pretty steep. $100 A day is a lot of money. And probably making the first few bucks is the most difficult part of it all.

Thus, my first tiny goal is to make $1 a day by the end of this calendar year. It’s easy to calculate that I want to achieve the first 1% of my goal in the first 13% of my time. It may sound (and seem) weird at first, but taking all the difficulties of starting from zero into account, I think it is more than realistic. If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment.

Anyway, fingers crossed, and let’s get started!

As I’m writing this, there’s absolutely nothing on my website (I registered the domain a couple of hours ago, and now it’s parked free, courtesy of godaddy.com), and as I’ll be posting it on the page there’ll still be nothing much, apart from a basic wordpress environment with a clear and cool-looking skin (redoable, actually).

Blogs with less than 10 posts inevitably feel like torsos, but I always wanted to have a blog under my own name, and the only way I can imagine having a blog with more than 10 posts is to have a blog with less than 10 posts for a certain period of time.

My name, as you’ve possibly guessed it by now, is Zsolt Balla, and I’m from Hungary, Central Eastern Europe (this will be important later on). I do have a proper job, and, due to the nature of jobs and blogs, I won’t be too specific about what that is. This blog is not about my job.

This blog is not my personal blog, either. I have my personal blog, that I’m writing together with my wife for almost four years by now. That’s in Hungarian.

So what is this blog, after all? Saying that this blog will focus on one of my hobbies, is one way to put it. The other way would be that this blog will focus on my professional life outside my 9-5. Because the hobby I’m talking about is building and developing websites. This website is not one of them. It’s just, you know, a blog.

I was alway curious, whether it is possible to make this hobby of mine (messing around with web design and php coding and sql queries and so on) into a decent amount of money, without officially turning a “web developer”, setting up a company or joining an existing one, negotiating with potential clients and selling yourself as the coolest-on-earth tech-guru or marketing-guru or designer-guru or whatever.

You know, the way, we all keep reading of: sitting at home (ideally by your pool or by your mantelpiece in the winters), working a couple of hours a day (which, as it is in my case, can be done outside office hours), and doing what you always wanted to.

Well, after all these years of dreaming, now I’m going to find out if it’s possible.

And this is exactly what this blog will be about.