Happy New Years everyone! I don’t know about you about I am feeling very optimistic about the new year, especially since 2013 was a watershed moment in terms of my own online business.

I’m looking forward to sharing with you what is working for me throughout the year and I envisage that these Sunday Roundup blog posts will provide an overview of the latest training, news and reviews that I’ve encountered in the past week. So in essence I will be reporting on great blog posts or trainings I’ve received as well as courses/ products/ services I’ve bought or are in the middle of.

In essence I just want to be accountable and to give a heads up to other great marketers doing great stuff.

So without further ado.

When Johnny Met Sammy

This week I hired my first VA his name is John Philip Lubaton. He was one of 20+ applicants that applied via my Elance job proposal. He’s from the Philipines which has my same time zone (which was important) and had good reviews from past employers. More importantly he speaks great english, is kinda fun to talk to and attends to tasks with friendly professionalism.

In essence, he’s pretty awesome. It’s been a real godsend to have someone do the administrative repetitive tasks that take up 1-2 hours of my day. It has freed me up and enabled me to start my days without the usual stresses I have had previously. With his qualifications his rates are a steal. And if you ask nicely I might see if he’s free to work for you!

Shoot For The Moon!

Brendon Burchard started the New Years with a great rally calls to leaders everywhere asking us to ‘find our moon’, you can read his great facebook post here. In it he quotes some great lines from John F Kennedy

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Can I get a hallelujah?

Where are the great men like John F Kennedy, demanding we give more of ourselves, setting those high standards and huge lofty goals? Well with guys like Brendon, we are in good hands.

Infact he echo’s JFK’s words with these amazing sample of his own:

Let us be more disciplined and true, each day taking action, testing things out, failing, getting up again, failing again, learning, rising and rising and rising ever more. This is the stuff of commitment and character, the demands of real contribution.

I think true leaders know that we have to fail an extraordinary amount of times for us to be accomplished at anything, and that whole process of learning and ‘getting back up’ is what defines us.

2013 Year In Reviews

There are a couple of great 2013 Year in Reviews.

I really dug Youtube’s 2013 Rewind. check that out here and try and spot all the familiar youtube stars in the clip.

I recently read Aidan Booth’s 2013 Year in review and it made me think bigger and wider. As fellow aussie internet marketer gone global I love how he gives such great value and content and you should check out his very cool 12 Days of Christmas or BluePrint Christmas give aways. I haven’t won anything yet but its still very cool stuff.

Jame Clear is another wonderful blogger I truly admire because his writing is so well crafted and useful, since he interplays scientific research with good doses of motivation and personal development. He wrote a great 2013 Annual Review which I think I though was such a good format I’ve used it for my own. He wrote:

There are 3 questions that I’m going to answer in my Annual Review:

What went well this year?
What didn’t go so well this year?
What am I working toward?

I think annual reviews are something we do instinctively as a year closes but when you have to write it down and reflect meaningfully on it I feel that it’s a very useful and potent exercise.

So how about you? What can you celebrate? What will you ponder on and what will you commit yourself to working on this year?

Crunchy Numbers

Courtesy of WordPress’s Jetpack plugin I received a pretty cool animated info pic which was my 2013 Year In Blogging which you can check out.

My favorite part was the crunchy numbers bit (it made me think of food):

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2013, there were 31 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 85 posts.

The busiest day of the year was October 23rd with 97views. The most popular post that day was Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret.

While I’m happy with the amount of views my blog is getting (its definitely growing), however I only averaged 1.6 blogs a week last year. I can definitely improve that!

Talking about numbers, Fizzle posted a poignant and actionable post you can read here about 240 Mornings. It;s about who we over commit ourselves trying to do too much too soon (hands up if you’re guilty of this) and how by getting real about what you can focus on and what you can achieve you can set yourself up for more success than thought previously. Very Cool

Trello

For help keeping track of your goals and projects and breaking them down into action steps, I recommend that you check out Trello. It’s a free online service that I’ve been using lately to manage a group project as well as some personal projects. This 6-minute video will give you a basic overview of how it works. I’ve only used it for about a week, and so far I’m impressed. It’s very intuitive and flexible, so you can start using it productively with a few minutes. And it’s free. They have a paid version ($5 per month), but I think the free version is more than adequate for most people.

I think it has great applications for teams of network marketers, affiliates doing JV’s or even households and chores! So check it out if you’re looking for something along these lines, and if you come up with some creative ideas for using it, please let me know what you’ve done with it.

New Years Templates

Lastly I found a great 2014 Goal Setting Template courtesy of Benjamin Harvey and Authentic Education. The template is very much the same as James Clear’s 2103 Year in review blog post but with some extra distinctions and you can download them and use them for your own goal setting nd reflective practice. Actually I might do that myself and post up the work in a blog post.

I’m actually going on some trips to catch up with Benjamin in March and September for some great workshop intensives this year. So look out for blog post about them.

Ok is that enough of a Sunday Roundup for you?? I haven’t gone into the courses I’ve bought this week but I’ll save that for another blog post!

Before you go, if you checked out any of these blogs or links please let me know what you’ve thought and if you think you got some value form this Roundup please comment below.

Have a great week and check out me next roundup next sunday!