Copyblogger is about to go on our annual holiday hiatus. We’ll be taking a break from posting while we catch up, get rested, and get excited about what we’ve got in store for you in 2010.

You may be taking a little time off yourself. Or you may still be going into the office, but the last week of the year is often a time when routine tasks slow down or stop altogether.

So what’s the smartest, most productive use you could make of the next seven days?

Here are five ideas that will let you take what some people think of as “dead time” and use it to jump start your year in 2010. Doing any or all of these will get you energized and excited for the year to come.

1. Create a quick product

The biggest obstacle most bloggers face when they want to make money is they don’t have anything to sell.

And the biggest obstacle to creating something to sell is that it seems overwhelming. We feel like we’ve got to distill everything we know into a 400-page ebook or 30-hour marathon audio course.

That’s why I was so impressed by a recent post from Dave Navarro about creating a product over a weekend, and his follow up post on
how to know if it’s the right time to create a product.

If you’ve got even one or two slow days coming over the next week, take Dave’s advice and create a small, low-cost product. It doesn’t matter if you have four blog subscribers, three of whom are related to you.

A few people may buy it, and that’s great. They’ll tell others about it, and that will start attracting the targeted audience you need in the future (generating more sales).

More importantly, it will elevate you in people’s eyes as a solution producer and not just a blogger. Big difference.

2. Write a series

If the idea of creating a product is still too scary, put it on your calendar for January. And instead, every day for the next seven days, write a post for a series for your blog or email newsletter.

What should your series be about? It should be about the most compelling, thorny problem your audience regularly faces that you’re passionate about fixing.

Solve some problems worth solving. Don’t wimp or waffle around, and don’t sell yourself short. Give your audience real answers they can start using right away.

3. Reconnect with your favorite bloggers

Sometimes the “social” in social media threatens to eat every minute we’ve got to give.

If you find yourself with a little down time next week, spend a few minutes and reach out to some of your favorite bloggers in your topic. You know, the ones you haven’t had any time to read in the last six months.

Read through their last 4 or 5 posts. Look through their archives or popular posts. Make some intelligent comments. If something useful presents itself, link to them in your series.

4. Create some audacious goals

I know, I know, nothing is more boring than telling you to set goals around this time of year.

But here’s the thing. Wildly exciting goals lead to wildly exciting results. (Not always, or even often, the precise results you visualized. Don’t let that worry you.)

Some time before December 31st, take an hour and write down the most perfect imaginable day for yourself. Where you wake up (and with whom), what you see, what you have for breakfast, what you do and where you go and how you do it. How you feel about everything you’re doing and seeing. How you look. What you smell and hear.

Use every ounce of writing skill you’ve got to make this description vivid. Sell yourself on it.

And try not to be too “realistic.” Let your dreams soar a little.

Then set a reminder in your calendar to take a look at this “perfect day” once every three months in 2010. Each time you revisit it, re-copy what you’ve written, making any tweaks you want to.

I promise you, in December next year, you’ll be a little spooked by some of the “unrealistic” things you wrote down this year, and how much more realistic they’ve become.

5. Sign up for some high-quality (free) education

If you haven’t joined us yet for Copyblogger’s free Internet Marketing for Smart People e-newsletter, you should sign up for it now. It starts with a 20-part course on some of the most important building blocks to marketing your product or service online.

The newsletter will give you the marketing tips and techniques that work in the real world, including the smartest strategies for marketing with social media. And we do it without the annoying sleaze and hype you see from too many other “gurus.”

If you’re planning on putting one (or all) of these into action by December 31, let us know in the comments! (And then come back on January 1 and let us know how you did.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

You remember the last time you channel surfed? We all do it when there’s nothing good on TV — nothing that holds our attention.

Well, you can’t channel surf with a book. You can skip pages, put the book down, or stare off into space, but that book isn’t changing (unless you have something to write with or a pair of scissors in hand).

That gives the book power. The book controls how you pay attention to it, in a way television can’t.

Because of the links in hypertext, web content is vulnerable, just like television, to channel surfing.

Your content doesn’t have the final say in how it’s structured, because the user chooses which web pages to visit, and what order to visit them. One web page doesn’t necessarily demand her attention all at once.

Your blog is a lot like a television channel, except the net has more channels than cable (meaning there’s lots more competition). You have very little time to make a good impression, keep your reader hooked, and direct her to your call to action. Your reader’s mouse is a remote control, and the instant you lose her attention, she’ll channel surf away.

You have to fight that remote

Anne Mangen, an academic who studies how people read digital texts, explains:

“A click with the mouse immediately changes the visual input so that our attentional focus can be maintained. Thus, our urge to click and the consequent impatient mode of reading can be at least partly explained by reference to psychobiologically hardwired dispositions of ours.”

In simpler terms, channel surfing taps into our innate instinct to change the scenery the moment we get bored. Unfortunately for you, that training translates to the web.

Your reader’s mouse (your blog’s remote control) puts millions of web pages at her fingertips. And that trains her to get bored more easily with your content.

So you need to write and design in a way that will keep your reader so engaged that any urges to click will have to wait until she finishes your beloved content first.

10 ways to make your blog channel-surf-proof

Here are ten helpful ways to keep your reader’s hands off that remote:

1. Give your reader the low-down right at the start. Think about the most popular TV channels. Their content either gives them away in the first few seconds (as being a source for news, celebrity gossip, cooking, nature), or their branding tells the story for them (big-money dramas and sitcoms, mainstream news, Leno). The viewer always knows what to expect. Make sure your brand is just as clear. Your reader always needs to know just what she’s here for.
2. Don’t sound like a chimp. When professionals goof up on TV, it’s easy to gloss over it and follow their next move. But when typos glare at your reader, she’s wondering if she’s on the right channel.
3. Make sure your blog has more to offer than the most recent programming (your last blog post, testimonials page, or sales pitch). That way, you can entice a little internal channel surfing, to the rest of your great content. Ditch the old school reverse-chronological style, and design your blog architecture so that your readers have plenty of cool stuff to do.
4. Keep your programming fresh by writing magnetic headlines, using compelling pictures, and appealing to your readers’ emotions.
5. Keep your writing simple, fast-paced, and dramatic. The final season of “Lost” will attract a lot more viewers than a public access channel featuring lectures from dull, verbose professors.
6. Keep the flow logical. If your plot doesn’t make sense, your blog reader will change to a program that does. So go over all of your transitions and self-edit, edit, edit.
7. Offer cookies to your reader so she has a reason to stick around.
8. Don’t follow the lead of TV commercials. (Your reader is too smart to fall for those anyway.) If you’re going to engage your reader’s insecurities, make sure it’s to offer a solution and mobilize her for success. It’s ok to use a little pain in your copywriting, but do it in an honest and win-win way.
9. Think carefully before you put up ads. Will they add to or detract from the attraction value of your channel? And don’t let excessive ads clutter up your site. The only clutter you find on TV is in the bedroom of a so-called “reality” star.
10. If you have to take commercial breaks (by embedding advertisements, affiliate links, and/or endorsements in content), at least make them infomercials. That is, make them informative, short, and humorous if you can — then get right back to the scheduled programming.

Don’t give up

You have to fight hard for your air time, because as a blog owner you deal in hypertext, which grants your reader tremendous control over what she consumes. She’ll leave the minute she gets bored, so do everything you can to keep her engaged.

Battling that remote forces you to become a better messenger. When you get it right, the connection you make with your readers can be immediate and powerful in ways that aren’t possible with a book or television.

If you’ve got more ways to keep your readers away from your blog’s remote control — share them in the comments below!

About the Author: Melissa Karnaze writes about the intelligence of emotions on Mindful Construct and Twitter.