Did you know what the single most common New Year’s resolution is? For 82% of people, their resolution is to make some kind of healthy life changes.

That’s a great resolution to have, but if you’ve ever set New Year’s resolutions yourself, you know how rarely they actually carry through into practice. Still, setting resolutions each and every year is a popular activity, because it gives people a chance to reimagine their life in a positive way.

Let’s face it: sometimes life gets boring. And that’s especially true if you’ve been stuck in the same routine for goodness knows how long. If you feel like it’s high time to shake things up and make a change in your life, you’re not alone.

Of course, not all life changes are necessarily positive, even when they’re self-imposed. So to inspire you with your own great ideas, here’s a list of four healthy life changes you can make, starting today.

Invest More Time in Your Oral Health

For the first of our healthy life changes to discuss, when was the last time you went to the dentist?

Getting dental care probably isn’t the first thing you think of when you consider ways to change up your normal routine (don’t worry, we’ll get into some more fun ideas later). But before you can enjoy your life to the fullest, it’s imperative that you be in good health. Plus, for all too many people, their normal routine involves actively ignoring signs that their health is failing or avoiding doing things to properly maintain their health. If that’s you, then the best healthy life changes you can make will involve prioritizing your health.

But why oral health, specifically, you ask? Because the health of your mouth and teeth offer clues about your overall health, and problems that start in the mouth can rapidly affect the entire body. This is why general dentistry is such an important part of regular healthcare, even for typically healthy people.

Like many parts of your body, your mouth is always teeming with bacteria. Before you freak out, recognize that most of those bacteria are harmless, and many are beneficial and even necessary. But some bacteria aren’t as necessary, or as friendly, and can cause disease. Add to that the fact that your mouth is the entry point for both your digestive system and your respiratory tract, and you can see exactly why oral health impacts the rest of your body so significantly.

Fortunately, your body has its own natural defense system to guard against rogue bacteria and diseases. Combined with proper oral healthcare, you should be able to avoid diseases caused by this bacteria without any issue. However, if you’re like many people, you may not brush your teeth twice each day, or even floss regularly. While brushing more than once daily might feel excessive, doing it twice isn’t that much more of a commitment, and the payoff can be huge. Flossing and using a high-quality mouthwash don’t take much time or effort, either, but they also go a long way to keeping your oral (and overall) health in line. Do some research and look for toothpaste and mouthwash made from gentle, healthy ingredients, and check out customer reviews before purchasing instead of mindlessly choosing whatever’s on the shelf.

Taking proper care of your teeth and your oral health at home is incredible, but even so, it can’t replace regular visits to your dental clinic. Besides having a big impact on your body’s overall health, your oral health is like a window into the condition of the rest of your body. Conditions like diabetes, HIV/AIDS, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and even certain cancers can all show early warning signs in your mouth, sometimes before they become noticeable anywhere else in your body.

This makes your personal dentist an important figure in your medical life. Not only will they provide deep cleanings for your teeth and monitor your oral health, but they may also pick up on early signs of disease that manifest in your mouth first. Of course, no one wants to think about that kind of thing. But if you were to get sick, you’d want to know sooner rather than later, while there’s a better chance at a speedy recovery.

Seek Any Medical Treatments You’ve Been Postponing

As we mentioned above, too many people actively avoid doing everything they should to care for their health, or seeking medical attention for ailments. For people like that, healthy life changes need to involve clear steps taken to improve their health and wellness.

Whether you were represented by a personal injury lawyer for an accident you haven’t fully healed from, or you’ve just started to notice a suspicious pain somewhere, postponing medical care is rarely wise. Yet people often avoid seeking medical treatment even when they suspect it might be necessary. In fact, according to a study published in 2014, almost one-third of all survey respondents reported that they actively avoided the doctor. Even people with serious health problems, who experience obvious symptoms of a severe condition, are known to avoid seeking medical care.

As you can imagine, avoiding medical care can result in late detection of disease, reduced survival, and prolonged suffering that might well have been preventable. Yet people who do it often feel that their reluctance to see a doctor is justified.

The study mentioned above sought to understand why people avoid medical care, and it came up with three major reasons:

1. About 33% of participants claimed to have unfavorable or distrusting views of doctors, healthcare organizations, and the medical industry.
2. Next, just over 12% said that they didn’t really feel the need to seek care, often because they expected their condition to improve over time on its own.
3. Lastly, many participants (around 58%) claimed to experience more economical barriers to seeking care, such as high cost of care, a lack of health insurance, or simply not enough time to go to the doctor.

Whether you need serious attention, like arthritis treatment, or you’re generally dealing with mild discomfort from an untreated medical problem, postponing or avoiding care can only lead to more discomfort. If you’re concerned about finding a doctor or healthcare service you can trust, you can seek referrals from your family, friends, and neighbors. You could also talk with a patient advocate or physician referral representative in your area. When you find a doctor that comes recommended highly, you can check their credentials through the American Medical Association or American Board of Medical Specialties. Finally, it’s a good idea to find a specialist for the condition you’re seeking treatment for, as they tend to be more knowledgeable and qualified for specific treatments than general practitioners.

If your hesitation to seek medical attention is because of financial constraints, you should look for an affordable health insurance plan that will cover the treatments you think you might need. A local social worker can help you figure out how to enroll in Medicare if you need to rely on government assistance.

Whatever you do, if you suspect you may need medical care, make it one of your healthy life changes today, whether you’re enrolling in Medicaid or going to the doctor. Life is too short to go through it in poor health, even if it’s only mild discomfort.

Go On an Adventure

The first two healthy life changes we discussed were strictly concerning your health and wellness. After all, while no one really enjoys going to the dentist or getting a physical exam, both are often a prerequisite for enjoying the rest of your life to the fullest extent possible. When you want to make a change to the way you live your life, often the best place to begin is your health and your diet.

But it can’t be all work and no play, so next on our list is going on an adventure: simply go somewhere. Like a responsible adult, of course — remember to bring things like a good poison oak rash remedy if you’re going out in nature — but choose a direction to go in and just go. You can plan ahead if you like, but if you really want to shake yourself out of your routine (and your comfort zone), be prepared to keep it flexible.

The only things you should decide for sure are how much money you’re allowed to spend and how much time you have before you must be back. Choose a time to start your return trip and make sure you can afford meals for that long, but then decide along the way where to go in between. Again, flexibility is key to adventure.

If you have a limited budget, determine what your spending priorities are. Do you hope to find some little-known restaurants to tantalize your tastebuds with, or is admission to all the state parks and tourist attractions in a 50-mile radius more important? You don’t have to decide exactly where to go to set a budget. Just set aside certain amounts of money for different categories.

Next, you should consider whether to go it alone or not. You can certainly adventure by yourself, but you will make it even more memorable by bringing a friend along with you. Of course, if you’re going on an actual adventure, such as rock climbing or snow skiing, bringing a partner would be a good idea for safety’s sake.

Make sure you bring a camera so you can capture some incredible memories. Just avoid using it too often. You want to see the beautiful views with your eyes, not just through the lens of your camera.

While you’re out, make it a point to talk to strangers. Yes, we’re instructing you to talk to strangers. You’re a grownup, it’s all right. Ask passers-by for their suggestions about where to go, what to see, and what the best places for food are in the area. When you walk into stores and restaurants, say a friendly word to the other customers and patrons there. Maybe ask them what their favorite book on the shelf in front of them is, or what they like most from the restaurant’s menu. Just avoid being a pest. You can tell when someone doesn’t feel like visiting.

With tips like these, you’ll be introducing some fun and healthy life changes before you know it.

Switch Up Your Environment or Move Somewhere New

Do you ever get tired of the house you’re living in? Maybe you once shared your current home with a toxic partner, or perhaps you even grew up in it, and staying there is making it hard to move on and create healthy life changes. Or maybe you’ve just been in one place for too long, and desperately need a change. Either way, whatever your financial constraints may be, there’s something you can do about it.

For starters, you can sell your house and move somewhere else. If you’ve lived in the same neighborhood all your life, maybe you just need a change of scenery. Selling and moving is a really big commitment, but it all depends on how much you think it would help, and how committed you are to creating healthy life changes for yourself.

Of course, if you’re like many people, you probably don’t feel like getting a new home is within your budget. But if you currently own a home, or even if you’re just renting, you might be able to save money and get a change of space by downsizing. Maybe your house is simply bigger than you need it to be, or maybe your apartment is too fancy or in an expensive area. The cost of living is cheaper in different places, and by settling for a slightly smaller, less luxurious home, you might be able to get one that’s perfect for you at a price you can afford. And if you currently own your home but you’re not sure where you want to live, you’re even better off: you can sell now, and use the money you make to rent cheap apartments here and there until you find a place you want to call home. Condos for sale on the waterfront will be calling your name.

But maybe you aren’t ready to move, and just want your house to feel different. If that’s the case, then there are plenty of things you can do to feel more at home in your home. The following are some fun ideas you can use to make your house feel more fresh and inviting:

• Install an indoor chair swing. It’s like a porch swing, but it hangs from your ceiling inside.
• Install an outdoor garden fountain. Nothing says tranquility like a fountain.
• Go green by bringing a bunch of plants indoors. House plants, of course.
• Upgrade your bedding, especially if you’ve been using the same sheets and blankets for forever.
• Get new dishes and silverware, and throw out or sell the ones you have. It’s an easy and impactful change.
• Buy a pretty bookshelf for your living room, and start collecting books.

Whether you put your house on the real estate or opt to simply redecorate, hopefully, these suggestions will have inspired you with your own ideas.

And there you have it: four ideas for healthy life changes you can implement in your life, starting today. Happy exploring!

Environmentalism has become a critically important issue. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and depletion of natural resources affects every living creature on the planet. Humans are not immune to the effects of these problems. Higher energy costs, pandemics, natural disasters, and toxic exposure can all spring directly from humans’ impact on the environment.

As a result, the general public is very interested in reading about sustainability tips and tricks. Nearly 80% of Americans view humans’ impact on the environment as a major problem or crisis and 85% say that they expect to make at least some sacrifices to reduce the impact of climate change.

As a topic with a high degree of interest, conservation, and sustainability tips and tricks can drive traffic to your company’s website, regardless of your business. Websites that publish at least 16 blogs per month receive over three times more traffic than websites that publish fewer than four blogs per month. While you are developing your content schedule, include at least a few environmental and sustainability tips and tricks to address your customers’ concerns and draw them into your website.

Here are some ideas for approaching topics relating to sustainability tips and tricks for your company website:

Relate to Your Reader

Understand your readers’ concerns about how your business interacts with the environment. This will not only provide content for your blog but will optimize the search results that drive customers to your blog.

If your business has a direct impact on the environment, such as a delivery business, readers will want to know the sustainability tips and tricks you use to use to make your delivery vehicles more energy efficient and how you use route planning to reduce fuel consumption.

Even if your business is not directly involved in an industry tied to the environment, such as marketing or accounting, customers may still want to know how your business puts sustainability tips and tricks into effect to reduce its carbon footprint. For these kinds of businesses, you can write about how your business uses a furniture recycling program to eliminate waste or implemented an electronic document management system to go paperless.

Use Specific Examples

If your blog focuses on sustainability tips and tricks that the reader can use, make sure to include specific examples.

Thus, instead of telling readers to “reduce energy consumption,” you can explain how the majority of energy use in a typical home goes to heating and cooling. You can then provide sustainability tips and tricks to make the readers’ heating and cooling system more efficient such as cleaning their ducts and switching to efficient spiral ducts that are less prone to air leaks.

Written in this way, the reader gains knowledge of both the problem — energy waste — and some possible solutions.

Remember to Make Your Pitch

A company blog is intended to drive traffic to the company’s website. Whether you make a soft pitch or a hard pitch, remember to mention your business somewhere in the blog.

 

A soft pitch is intended to build your brand and define your company’s values. For example, a soft pitch might be to explain how your law firm is committed to environmental protection. This might not serve to directly sell your legal services, but can build up goodwill with potential clients who are also concerned about the environment and believe in patronizing socially conscious businesses.

Polls show that businesses cannot discount this type of brand-building. Two-thirds of customers say they are willing to spend more with companies that have sustainable practices and over 80% of Millennials expect the brands they patronize to be socially responsible.

A hard pitch is intended to get customers to use your goods or services to implement your sustainability tips and tricks. For example, a manufacturer may discuss the natural drop in efficiency as a water heater ages, then specifically pitch the customer on buying an energy saving new water heater made by the manufacturer.

You have to be careful about how “sales-y” your pitch is because consumers are sometimes turned off by infomercials. However, if your blog article setting up the pitch is well researched and presents a logical and compelling case for your company’s products, you can balance both the need to educate the reader and the need to sell your company’s goods and services.

Use Fear Judiciously

Environmentalism is sometimes dismissed as fear-mongering and guilt-tripping. When presenting your sustainability tips and tricks, try to avoid telling readers that they will destroy the world if they do not follow your advice. Instead, explain how a few tips and tricks, practiced widely, can benefit the reader, the environment, and society.

For example, toxic yard chemicals have many detrimental effects such as:

• Poisoning people and animals that apply them.
• Seeping into ground water and be ingested by local residents.
• Robbing the soil of it natural nutrients.
• Reducing biodiversity.
• Causing undesirable organisms to flourish, like toxic algae.

However, rather than focusing on how detrimental these chemicals are to the environment, a natural lawn care company could quickly explain the dangers of artificial pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers and suggest natural alternatives. With the reader primed for a solution to dangerous chemicals, the blog can then pitch both the idea of natural lawn care and the business’s products and services using natural treatments.

Understand the Science

When providing sustainability tips and tricks, you should do some research into the basis for your blog post. Make sure you do not fall prey to urban legends or viral claims without first verifying them.

 

Fortunately, the Internet has many resources for fact-checking scientific claims. Search engines can make quick work of most assertions of fact. Moreover, you can often reach out to experts via social media or email to verify claims that you cannot verify using a search engine.

Providing misleading or incorrect advice can expose you and your company to all kinds of different problems, including:

• Negative publicity: Your business could be accused of lacking expertise in providing sustainability tips and tricks or, worse yet, misleading readers.
• Loss of credibility: You, as a blog writer, and your business may lose the trust of readers.
• Lawsuits: In a worst-case scenario, if your sustainability tips and tricks lead to injuries or property damage, your company could be sued.

For example, suppose you promote your company’s roof coverings by saying that they are environmentally safe and non-toxic. If it turns out that the chemicals in the roof replacement material give off toxic fumes, your blog post might be used as evidence that your company was misleading consumers about the safety of your products.

Take the Time to Explain Your Sustainability Tips and Tricks

Keep in mind that readers do not have the same level of expertise in your company’s products that you have. Consequently, you should take the time in your blog posts to explain claims to environmental, sustainable, and conservation benefits.

For example, a tree removal company can provide environmental benefits, such as:

• Preventing the spread of disease and pests from an infested tree to healthy trees.
• Limiting the susceptibility to spreading wildfires if the tree is dead or dying.
• Reducing water consumption by removing non-native or water-intensive trees.

However, for a tree removal company to just make the general claim that it is environmentally friendly and sustainable will confuse most readers. They would view tree removal as environmentally unfriendly without further explanation.

However, by taking the time to explain how your services improve the environment without adding a commensurate cost, such as carbon emissions, you might be able to persuade readers to become customers.

Be Creative

Readers searching for sustainability tips and tricks usually want to find something new. Rather than recycling the same claims that can be found all over the web, try to insert something new or, even better, present something that is contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Adding something new to the conversation gives your blog two advantages over the competition.

1. Your blog post might go viral as readers share your unique take.
2. You might draw links from other reputable sites.

Both of these benefits will not only give your blog post higher search engine visibility but will also build your company’s brand as forward-thinking and creative.

For example, while writing a blog for an equipment rental company, you might identify the reduction in waste by renting equipment rather than buying. However, you could also get creative and explain how using the newest rental equipment for each job guarantees that the reader conserves energy with the most efficient equipment available.

Give Away Something for Free

People love free stuff. Moreover, they usually do not respond well to bait-and-switch tactics, like a blog that lays out a problem but ends with “to learn my sustainability tips and tricks to solving this problem, buy my book.”

For your sustainability blog, you will likely need to balance free stuff with paid products. After all, the purpose of your company’s blog is to make money, directly or indirectly. However, companies can find many ways to give away something for free including:

• Free advice: The easiest way to give something away for free is to give away free advice. To be viewed as truly valuable, however, you may need to give away free advice that is not widely available. For example, insider advice or life “hacks” that your business has developed can be the kind of free advice that goes viral and drives even more traffic to your website. For example, an online retailer might offer sustainability tips and tricks like corrugated cardboard recycling into compost and reusing its packing peanuts as drainage material in large planters.
• Free solutions: Even if your products can mitigate or solve the problem identified in your blog, you can also suggest other free solutions that the average consumer can carry out. So, in addition to suggesting your company’s new air conditioner to reduce cooling costs, you might also suggest like opening windows on cool summer nights and closing blinds or curtains during the hot summer days.
• Free incentives: Coupons, discounts, and giveaways are always appreciated by consumers.
• Free downloads: Content, like infographics, charts, worksheets, and even kids’ activities can reinforce your educational message and build your brand as readers print out the content and hang it on their refrigerators.

Engage with Your Readers

Once you write your content, you should plan to interact with your readers. The level of engagement that readers expect has been set by social media. As a result, readers are accustomed to posting comments and receiving replies from the business, if not the blog author.

This will give you and your company the ability to begin and sustain a conversation about environmentalism and sustainability. You will have the opportunity to add information that might not have fit into the blog post. Your readers can respond with some specific tips and tricks of their own that might even improve your blog post. For example, a blog post for a pawn shop about shopping second hand might start a whole conversation about the kinds of products that a second-hand shopper can find the best deals on.

When posting sustainability tips and tricks, you might receive corrections and legitimate criticism, which is always useful. However, you will also need a policy for moderating comments received on your blog for comments that are abusive or harassing. The keys to developing a policy for moderating comments are to make your standards clear and enforce them fairly. Using automatic filters for certain words can help keep the comments from getting out of control.

Promote Your Blog

Promotion of a blog will be key to using the blog to drive traffic to your company’s website. An unpromoted blog just sits there waiting to be discovered by search engines. While this can eventually help draw readers to your site, this can be a slow process.

Instead of taking a passive approach, you can take a few active measures to increase your blog’s visibility:

• Search engine optimization: Identify keywords that users enter into search engines and include those keywords in your blog. This will help your blog rank among the search results for those keywords. For example, if your used sports equipment business’s website ranks poorly for used boat for sale on search engines, write an article about the environmental benefits of buying used boats and make sure to use that phrase a few times in your blog post.
• Social media promotion: Promoting articles on social media can jump start traffic to your blog. Not only can social media cause your blog post to go viral, but search engine rankings are also, in part, dependent on shares and views. As a result, virality feeds virality.
• Email promotion: Create an email newsletter using your company’s email list. Existing customers are the most likely to be interested in your content since they have previously purchased your products or signed up for your email promotions.

Writing a blog that highlights your company’s commitment to the environment will draw readers to your site. Environmentalism, conservationism, and sustainability are topics of great interest among all consumers, but particularly among younger consumers. However, you must be careful to provide concrete tips and tricks that are based in fact, rather than urban legends. Moreover, your blog post should show your creativity and provide the reader with something free. Finally, make sure you promote your blog posts. This improves your blog’s visibility and ensures that readers can easily find your content.