The holidays mean parties and dinners and family gatherings, which means you have to look your best because there will be lots of family pictures and videos!

If you’re like me, you’ve already shopped for your holiday party outfits and have accessories in mind, but have you thought about your glasses? Would it be fun to shed your everyday frames for something more festive? For as little as $8 you can order Holiday frames from ZenniOptical to match your holiday outfit!

Now, I have to admit that ever since I’ve ordered my first pair of glasses from ZenniOptical I’ve been obsessed with finding frames to match my favorite outfits, so it’s no surprise that I would buy a pair of frames for a special occasion.

Green is my favorite color, and since it’s also a signature color of Christmas, these green plastic fashion frames are perfect for the holidays. Especially at only $9.95!

ZenniOptical has gone above and beyond my expectations with every purchase I’ve made. My glasses ship fast, the prescription is perfect, and I’ve gotten loads of compliments on my funky frames, so you can bet I’ll be ordering some festive frames this holiday season!

It’s not a big secret that the economy sucks and people are struggling with their finances. Being the resourceful people that we are, bloggers are looking for ways to make more money from their blog to compensate for higher costs. The video and white paper below show how Dragon Naturally Speaking works and how it can help bloggers make more money.

In addition, bloggers can get 25% off Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard!

Nuance is allowing us to offer our readers a 25% discount coupon code exclusive for Dragon Naturally Speaking, but you must click the image below and use the coupon DNSMSBG. The code will not work from any other sources so Get Dragon Naturally Speaking using Discount code DNSMBG by clicking the image below.

This is an excerpt from a white paper discussing how bloggers can earn more money through several different monetization and freelance writing services. It shows that bloggers that utilize Dragon Naturally Speaking can earn more money through these various services and how fast these extra earnings will pay for the software itself.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Blogger Break Even Analysis with High PayPerPost Earnings

In this article I’m going to walk you through another scenario focusing on how much extra you could earn if you wrote for PayPerPost.com. Now at PayPerPost.com, the amount of money that you earn for your writing is not paid on a per word basis.

PayPerPost.com offers up opportunities, they call them opportunities, but you can also think of them as piecework or a job, and these “opportunities” typically have a minimum word count. The minimum word count is typically 200 words for your average article. In general, the average article at PayPerPost on a high earning blog pays about $28. Sometimes they pay a little less, and sometimes they pay a little bit more.

Now if you are paid $28.00 to write a 200 word article, which breaks down to about 14 cents per word. That is about 200 times more than what you can make at textbroker.com. I mentioned that only for comparison purposes, because PayPerPost.com limits you to writing three articles per blog per day. That means that you can’t write there all day long for your single blog. (If you have additional blogs, you might be able to write additional articles on those other blogs.)

But if we assume, just to have a comparison to our textbroker.com example, if we assume that you could type articles at PayPerPost for fifty minutes straight, earning 14 cents per word, and you could type 35 words per minute, and then you could earn a $245 dollars per hour at PayPerPost. Now obviously, there’s not that much work there, but this does point to the rate at which you can earn things with the work that is available. That $245 would be the earnings you could make from about 8.8 Opportunities at $28 per Opportunity.

So bear with me with this example.

So what can faster typing skills do to help you earn more money and PayPerPost?

Well if you could type at 150 words per minute with Dragon Naturally Speaking, and you currently type at 35 words per minute, then you could earn about $805 per hour more!

Reminder - This would assume that you could type articles nonstop at a hundred and fifty words per minute for fifty minutes. For most of us, that doesn’t mean a whole lot.

But to put this in better perspective, if you earned $245 from writing about nine articles, and those articles were each 200 words long, then you would have written a total of 1800 words.

• 1800 words can be typed and 50 minutes at 35 words per minute
• 1800 words can be typed in 12 minutes at 150 words per minute

Dragon Naturally Speaking can essentially save you 38 minutes when you write nine articles.

Now with those additional thirty-eight minutes, you can spend more time:

• promoting your blog,
• networking with people,
• researching other projects,
• taking on other work from other networks
• building up a new blog to command $28 per article!

You can pocket your $245 from twelve minutes worth of work. You can then spend the rest of that hour, working to ensure that the blog you publish those on performs very well. But the point is this, Dragon Naturally Speaking can save you so much time, that it will pay for itself very quickly.

Your average part-time blogger may easily afford to pay for Dragon Naturally Speaking with the additional profits that they would earn from using Dragon Naturally Speaking in less than 30 minutes worth of blogging.

Plus just think of all of the time, that you would now have to make yourself and your site even more successful!

To read more, the full white paper is available at: http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/category/software/dragon-naturally-speaking/

I’m not a fan of Wal-Mart. Every few months, I give it another try, thinking that I’m going to save loads of money and have a grocery shopping epiphany. Instead, I end up searching for a gallon of milk that isn’t spoiled, asking the baker if there’s a loaf of bread without mold anywhere in the bakery, and coming damn close to yelling BINGO on my Wal-Mart BINGO card before making it to the snack aisle.

In short, I remember why I’m an avid Target shopper. How quickly could you yell BINGO if playing at your local Wal-Mart?

When Mike works weekends, he always brings home breakfast, and my favorite is bagels and hot chocolate from Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m usually in front of the computer blogging when he comes home in the morning, so he knows to head into the office first and give me my hot chocolate while it’s still hot.

I realize a lot of bloggers need something a little stronger than hot chocolate, so click the icon below for a free sample of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee! And don’t forget to follow Dunkin’ Donuts on Twitter!

I’ve only been wearing glasses for a few years. When I was in middle-school the eye doctor told my parents that I was faking because I wanted glasses, because you know that wearing glasses when you’re 13 years old is so cool, so I never actually got any until I was in high school and my family switched doctors.

The thought of contacts makes me cringe, so I’ve never minded wearing glasses, but I can’t say I ever wanted them until I was introduced to the $8 eyeglasses from ZenniOptical.com. For $8, you can get a pair of stylish and study frames, plus single vision lenses, delivered to your home in about two weeks. For a little more, you can upgrade your lenses with tints and coatings or get frames made from metal, stainless steal, acetate, or plastic.

In the past few weeks, my husband and I have ordered four pairs of eyeglasses from Zenni Optical for less than $50. I bought funky green and purple frames, while he stuck to more traditional neutral colors, but if he changes his mind, he could order a new pair every month for a year and those twelve pairs combined would still be cheaper than a single pair through our insurance!

I’ve recommended Zenni Optical to my readers, to my friends, and just this evening, to my mother-in-law. As long as Zenni Optical is around, we will never buy eyeglasses through our doctors office again!

Tonight may be the night. The perfect night to pull out the electric blanket! It’s going to be about 40 degrees outside and I refuse to turn on the heat. If it were up to me, we’d spend the winter in our robes and slippers, snuggled up with our electric blankets instead of giving our money to the gas company.

I love my new blog design. I was in kind of a blogging slump before the design went live and it has really rekindled my love of blogging and I have lots of ideas swirling around in my head.

Before I start posting like a mad-woman, I decided to check on my domain and hosting to make sure that my new design will stay life and keep running smoothly and realized that I’m really getting taken by my current host! I started to do a little research at Webhosting Geeks and got some really great tips from their webhosting blog on finding a new host!

The best advice I found is to stay away from free services, limited options, and cheap hosting. You’ll always be disappointed in the service. Also, when choosing a host, take into consideration the size of your website and number of email accounts you’ll need. That can quickly bump you from one hosting package to another or steer you away from one host that can’t handle your needs to another that can.

The most important thing to remember when choosing a host is to review Top 10 Web Hosts. It’s an independent review of the most popular hosts including features, price, bonuses, and ratings! You can even rate and review your own hosts to help others choose!

The Webhosting Geeks really helped me make up my mind that now is the time to change hosts and provided all the information I needed to choose the host that is right for my site. If everything goes as planned, my readers will never even know I’ve made the change it will be so quick and easy!

Mike and I go to the eye doctor for an exam and new eyeglasses tonight, and Mike is all worried that our new doctor isn’t going to have a good selection of frames to choose from. I told him not to even worry about it, because we can get our prescription information from the doctor and order from www.ZenniOptical.com.

Zenni Optical is getting rave reviews for their cheap prescription lenses. Basic prescriptions lenses plus frames start at just $8, and you can add all the same coatings and scratch protections that you would at the optometrist for a fraction of the cost. All you need is your prescription information from your eye exam and you are on your way to taking your eyeglass style into your own hands!

I’m always attracted to the funky frames, but hold back and choose something more conservative because they are so expensive. Now I can stock up on different styles and colors for only $8 a pair; and yes, all three of the frames pictured above are only $8 each. It’s not a slick ploy to get you to their site with only a handful of frames at rock bottom prices. They have pages of frames from $8 to $26, which is still a sliver of what you’d pay at the doctor’s office.

I heard a commercial on the radio this morning for Secret’s new Flawless deodorant with five “facets” of flawlessness. It’s the same stuff you hear from all the deodorant companies….wetness protection, goes on clear, lightweight formula, renewing fragrance, skin conditioning, blah blah blah.

I admit to being a slightly sweaty girl, so I’m always buying a new deodorant to try, and while the five facets of flawlessness are nice and all, the real reason I want to rush out and buy the new Secret deodorant is because of the Secret Diamond Giveaway, which I’m pretty sure trumps my giveaway.

When you buy a specially-marked Secret Flawless deodorant you have a chance to win a flawless one-carat diamond worth $15,000! If your slather your deodorant on in the morning and a fake diamond falls all, you’re the big winner!

I’ll throw an extra stick of deodorant into my cart for a chance to have a big sparkly diamond to wear around my neck. Even if I don’t win, maybe the five facets of flawlessness are all they say they are and I won’t pit out my favorite dress shirt!

Starting next payday, money won’t be so tight.

Mike is officially a paramedic, heading his own crew and working overtime at his new paramedic pay! It was a sizeable raise and we have big plans for the future, but first we sat down and took the BillsIQ test to see how financially savvy we are. I’ve taken the test before and my score has actually improved since taking advantage of all the tips and resources available from www.bills.com. From the best credit card offers to tips on consolidating debt, the test not only gives you a good idea of the current state of your financial knowledge, but steers you in the right path towards improving your knowledge and credit score.

Our main goal is to pay off all of our credit card debt and start saving for a down payment on a home. First, I’ve made a little deal with Mike since he’s been begging for a new laptop. Any increase at payday gets split between bills and a fund for his new laptop. Once enough is saved for a laptop, he’ll be a happy camper and all extra money goes to credit cards.

We’re hoping that this gets Mike a new laptop by Christmas and our credit card bills paid off in six months!