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A Proven Way To Boost Creativity And Focus

You might be a creative who wants to find more ways to up your productivity and your focus. But if you’re like most creatives, focus might not be your strength. You’re not alone in thinking that way.

Most creatives don’t think in concrete, specific terms when it comes to business things. That’s because the business side feels removed from the creative side. So what you need to do is tap into the creative side to boost the business side.

There is a proven way that you can boost your creativity to get more accomplished and be able to reach your goals. You have to get specific with your thoughts. Sort of having an idea of what you want, or need isn’t going to work.

It’s only when something is specific that you can identify it and work on accomplishing it.

Once you’ve narrowed down what it is you’re after, add a time constraint. For example, if money is what you need, you wouldn’t spend time saying, “Think about where or how I can get more money.”

Instead, you’d say, “What are 5 business models I can put into effect within 10 minutes?” This helps you to develop concrete ways to help take your creativity to the next level.

By having a specific goal with your thoughts, you’ll come up with ideas to improve whatever it is that you need.

This step of coming up with ideas within a certain time limit keeps you from wasting time, but it also works for creatives because they don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking of the business side, which can drain creativity.

The ideas that you come up with by adding time constraints can also be put into play faster than if you were vague and spent hours or days trying to come up with a solution.

With your business, you’ll need to learn the best way to market it.

You might have gone back and forth trying to come up with ways that you could do this, but you weren’t able to pin anything down.

Rather than spending a lot of effort thinking about this step, you could say that you were going to make a list of the pros and cons of a certain kind of advertising within 15 minutes.

By giving yourself that time limit, you turn it into a game and this can produce quicker results and give you ideas for solutions.

Plus, when you’re specific about what you want and you introduce that time limit, it boosts your creativity because your focus is intentional rather than running in different directions. It does this because it’s easier for the mind to focus for shorter periods of time versus thinking that you have several hours or days to come up with something.

OK so you can see how specificity can help you to become laser focused and thus boost your creativity.

So, let’s flip it and look at the reverse and take a look at something that can be detrimental to your creativity and focus and it seems so simple and innocuous that you may feel that it won’t make a difference.

However, just bear with me and give it a go and see what difference it makes for you.

The simple idea to try is to only use your workspace for work and nothing else. Make sense? Well, let’s dive a little deeper…

Don’t Use Your Work Space For Other Things

There’s a reason that the IRS says if you have a home office it should be used solely for that purpose and nothing else. It’s because using a home office for multiple purposes can lead to a crossover between professional and personal use.

If you have a workspace, you should be working. Mixing up the space can happen anywhere that you’ve set aside to work. It happens when you let boundaries slide.

But it really is best just to use it for the intended purpose and not for any other reason that people commonly choose to do.

For example, some people choose to eat at their desk or whatever their workspace is. This is a bad idea – not just for health reasons, but it’s also bad for productive purposes. You get less done physically and mentally.

When you mix work with eating or any other habit, it blurs the lines between what’s work and what isn’t. You can easily make the mistake of setting yourself up to think that it’s okay to work and it’s okay to not work when you’re in your space.

At your desk, your purpose should be to focus and to be productive to work on whatever task or project is before you. But when you choose to eat or to do something else instead, it steals that focus and productivity.

This happens because the brain is straddling two functions when you do that. You need to have boundaries between personal tasks and professional ones. Otherwise, your brain remains in the work mode and doesn’t relax and get a break from the work.

This can lead to overwhelm, which in turn can lead to brain fog. On the other hand, if you’re constantly using the space for other things in addition to work, the brain won’t want to get into work mode.

It’s important to establish what your workspace is for and what it’s not for. Your space isn’t supposed to be a spot to hang out and watch TV. It’s not meant to be the area where you play with your pets or your kids.

It’s not supposed to be the place where you play games or wonder what you’re going to have to eat for dinner. When you treat your workspace like any other space, you lose the benefit of conditioning the mind to fall into the habit of work recognition.

You can establish the work habit to create a routine in the mind. As soon as you sit down in your chair, your brain automatically kicks into thinking, “It’s time to work now,” but if you use the space for other purposes, it won’t do that for you. Save the relaxing activities and tasks not related to work for other spaces. You’ll get more done.

Having a strong mindset is critical to any attempt to nurturing creativity and staying focused, so click on the featured resource below to get a free report on how to develop a strong mindset. Download, it read and take action 🙂

7 Ways To Write Great Email Copy

Email marketing has overcome dozens of challenges and competition over the years and still remains one of the most effective solutions for businesses when there’s need to reach the customers directly.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, being able to reach your customers through email makes it easier to create interest and generate more leads, not to mention revenue.

A well-written plain email can yield better results than a complex, highly decorated email with dozens of bells and whistles.

When managing email marketing, keep in mind that creating fancy emails won’t get you leads: if the emails are devoid of well-written content, subscribers will lose interest and unsubscribe from your list.

So how exactly do you write engaging and compelling marketing email? It’s actually not that complicated: you only need to observe a few copywriting practices and use them when drafting the email.

Next time you sit down to draft a message, consider these 7 tips and ask yourself whether your email meets these requirements.

Write Short, Clear And Compelling Subject Lines

Half the job of drafting good email copy is nailing the subject line.

This is important because the subject line is the first thing your subscribers see before they open the email and they wouldn’t bother reading the email if the subject line doesn’t pique their interest.

Keep the following in mind when crafting subject lines:

Actionable language generates the desired effect. Actionable language doesn’t necessarily describe verbs -though they help. Actionable words tell the recipient what they can do with the information provided. For instance a subject line that reads “Take Mom To Brunch” is bound to pique interest.
Personalize if possible. Highly segmented emails always have better open rates. This would explain why the best email copy is the one you write to ONE person. Find a way to personalize the subject line and then work on providing relevant content to the recipient.
The subject line needs to be clear first, then you can worry about making it catchy. If after drafting the subject line, you find that you can make it funny, cute, catchy, whimsical or whatever, then by all means, go for it. But never sacrifice clarity in order to add some entertainment value.

Ask Questions And Try To Convey A Sense Of Urgency

When you ask questions in the subject line you effectively pique your subscribers’ interest and get them to read the email.

One way to do this is to include time-sensitive promotions or some deadline they could miss.

Even when working with a limited number of words you can still convey urgency by making it sound as is everyone is attending the event so the readers feel as if they’ll get left out.

Appeal to The Subscribers’ Self Interest

At the end of the day, the customers only care about services and products in the context of their specific needs. As a way to address this, your copy should go beyond explaining the features of what you’re selling, and explicitly describe all the benefits of the product or service.

Remember features tell, but benefits sell.

Imagine you’re selling an onion on your sales copy, and so you start out describing what an onion is, its special features and so on.

This information will have answered the “what”, instead of “how” and “why” the subscriber should purchase the onion. If however you explained the benefits thereof, such as how the onion could spice up a recipe, or how it lowers calorie content, the reader will be interested.

Use Design Effectively

Most sales emails contain some form of design and that can enhance the message but try to support the message in the email- not detract from it.

Effective design makes it easy and fun for readers to engage with the content. It may contain neat and visible social media icons and use clear prompts and simple buttons to guide the reader through the text.

Use design sparingly if you don’t have enough experience with it.

Several elements can make the purpose of design backfire on you: for instance, all capitalized or bolded text, white typing done over a over light background- which makes it difficult to read text, or a tiny call to action.

Support your message with a captivating photo, good color contrast and clear call to action.

Deliver What Your Subject Line promises

It is absolutely crucial for your email message to deliver what the subject line promises.

If your readers don’t get what they’re promised, click-through rates will tumble and over time you won’t have any open rates to speak of.

Make sure the message body doesn’t disappoint and you should have significantly high open and click-through rates.

Draft A Compelling Message

So now that you have that catchy subject line and you’ve grabbed the reader’s attention, how do craft copy that will keep them engaged, informed and ready to click?

Several issues have to be considered here:

Establish relevancy. It takes more than a catchy name tag for your email to yield results: you have to start by establishing relevancy, so they have a reason to read the material.
Write in the second person. This ensures you orient the copy towards the recipient, as opposed to yourself. A typical sales copy contains numerous instances where the words “you” and “yours’” are used.
Be brief. In cases where you know plenty about the topic, you might be tempted to shove in an entire life story into the copy, but don’t. Few people read marketing emails word for word; so find a way to summarize whatever information you have to offer and allow the reader to quickly scan the document and still get the most important information.

Pump Up Your CTA With Actionable Language

Yes even emails have calls-to-action! Or at least the good ones do; and its up to you to make sure to include a button-effective call to action.

This means using language that is clear and succinct, and that is action-oriented. Keep in mind though, not all email clients will render you fancy HTML copy, and not all recipients will choose to display them.

You may rely on plain text with a clear, perhaps hyper-linked call to action so your readers do something about the information offered.

Ultimately you want the reader to click on your call to action so it might not matter how many images or bolded words you have, if they don’t lead to clicks, they’re not being used properly.

If you want to know more about nurturing your list, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊

5 Ways To Make New Habits Stick

Wouldn’t it be great if everything in your life was completely automated? You would no longer have to remember to get up and go to work or do your daily chores. You would exercise regularly and eat the healthiest things.

But unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way and you have to be involved in the process.

There is something that you can do to make your life a lot easier and a lot more rewarding though. That is to form some good habits so that you tend to do the most important things in your life automatically.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Yes it does but forming new good habits requires a lot of time, effort and patience.

If you don’t go about it the right way then your new habits will not stick. In this article we will show you ways that you can make your new habits stick.

Start In A Simple Way

A lot of people fall into the trap of trying to totally change their lives in a single day.

It doesn’t work like that. When you are committed to forming new good habits in your life you will be very motivated at first but it is easy to lose your motivation if you are trying to make too many changes.

Start off with small changes and then build from these.

Make A 90 Day Commitment

You will need to run a routine for at least 21 days to become comfortable with the change.

To turn this into an automatic habit will require an average of 66 days.

So ,we recommend that you make a 90 day commitment to your new habit. 90 days is not a long time in the scheme of things and it will pass quickly.

The Importance Of Daily Routines

The best way to make a new habit stick is to be consistent with it. You want to create a new daily routine which includes your new habit.

So, if the new habit you want to form is regular exercise then participate in some form of exercise every day.

Don’t go crazy here. You do not want to join a gym and commit to completing a full workout each day.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. Find a form of exercise that is beneficial that you can easily do at home. Gradually migrate to going to the gym a few times a week.

Create A Reminder System

It is important that you never lose sight of why you are forming a new habit.

The stronger your reason for creating the new habit in your life the better.

So, create a reminder system that will always remind you of why you are putting in this additional effort and making sacrifices.

Write down your reason for making the change and make this strong for example.

Remove Things That Will Tempt You Back Into Bad Ways

Forming a new habit is a tough thing to do and you will help yourself enormously if you remove temptations that could push you back into your bad habits.

If you are changing your diet to a healthy eating plan then get rid of all those forbidden foods from your kitchen for example.

Making your new habits stick is not easy so give yourself all of the help that you need by following these tips.

These are not difficult things to implement in your life and they will make the difference between success and failure.

Of course, when we create new habits, we want them to ones that are positive and empower us.

But sometimes we acquire bad habits and need to break free of them but how do you do that?

The Best 5 Ways To Break Bad Habits

Most people have attempted to break bad habits in their life before but found the process so difficult that they gave up and resigned themselves to accepting the bad habit. This is not a place that you want to be in.

You need to break bad habits using the best techniques. It doesn’t matter if you eat too much junk food, spend too much money on things that are not important or procrastinate too much; you can break these bad habits when you know how to do it properly.

So, let’s look at 5 of the best ways to break your bad habits.

Breaking a bad habit is one of the most liberating things that you can do in your life. So please read on and then start putting what you learn into practice.

Make Indulging In Your Bad Habit Painful!

People will usually do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. So, with this in mind it is a good idea to create a pain situation related to your bad habits.

If you eat too much junk food, then fine yourself each time you visit the hamburger joint. Make this significant such as $20 that you give to your spouse or children when you do this.

Another thing that you can do is to engage in a wager with someone over your bad habit. Make it a large enough wager so that it will be really painful for you if you have to pay it out.

You do not have to use money for this pain. Giving up something that you love can be just as painful if not more. The wager could be over your new video game console for example.

What Triggers Your Bad Habit?

You need to understand what kicks off your bad habit in order to break it. This is called a trigger and it can be one thing or several different things.

Most of us indulge in our bad habits without even thinking about it. We then tend to believe that we can never break the habit because it is automatic.

It is not automatic it just happens very quickly so you think that it is. So, when you next crave your bad habit identify what caused this craving.

The more that you know about your bad habits the more likely you are to break them.

Remind Yourself

You may have the very best intentions to break a bad habit but if you experience a sudden drop in your willpower then you can find yourself easily indulging again.

In order to avoid this, we recommend that you place reminders around you that you are on a mission to break a bad habit.

This will help you to refocus and continue with your good work.

Change Your Environment

As we have seen above, a lot of bad habits are triggered from being in a certain place or seeing the same things over and over.

To avoid these triggers, you can make some small changes to your environment. They don’t need to be massive to make a difference

If the route you take to work stresses you about because of the traffic and makes you want a cigarette then try different routes.

Take Small Steps

You need patience and persistence to break bad habits. Trying to make massive changes in your life all at once is going to be really challenging for you.

It is better to take smaller steps and introduce smaller changes over time that lead to the eventual big change.

You really need to work on building good habits and to do that you will need to develop a strong success mindset and that is easier than you think; you may just need a few pointers to help you out along the way.

To that end, please check out the featured resource below as it features a free report that will help you to develop a strong mindset that can help propel you into the success you deserve. Download, read it and take action 😊

Is Your Sales Funnel Bleeding Money?

If you know anything about sales and marketing, you know the power of the sales funnel.

This Is nothing new; sales funnels have been around in some shape or form forever. Online marketing makes them quick and simple to implement with the correct tools, such as Convertri or ClickFunnels and they can make a real difference to your profits, but can you be doing more, and is your sales funnel bleeding money and not working as well as you would like?

Let’s be honest. Does this sound a bit like you and your business?

You work hard to build your sales funnel. You’re buying traffic, but your funnel isn’t converting well enough to fully pay for that traffic.

Which means, you’re in the red. Yes, you are building your list, and yes, over time you will recoup your money from your list by promoting other products.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could get your funnel in the black NOW, so that you can buy all the traffic you want and build your list as fast as you want?

Having a self-liquidating offer, or an offer that breaks even on the front end can make a huge impact on your business because this means that you can afford to pay more for traffic, which means more eyes on your offer and more profit, but only if your offer converts well.

Anther way to boost your funnel is to take in a “lodger” of some kind. Not sure what I mean? Look at it this way…

Think of a big house – one that you love, but it costs too much on your income. What do you do? You take in a renter or two. They are paying you to stay in your house, and you now have no trouble making the mortgage payment each month.

Surprisingly, you can do the same thing with your sales funnel.

Take a good look at your funnel for places where you can accommodate “renters.” For example, if your backend offer isn’t converting as well as it should, how about renting out that back end offer to another marketer?

If that marketer has an offer that converts really well, and it’s a good match for your funnel, then this makes total sense for the both of you.

Now here’s a little trick: Let’s say you run your traffic through three different offers after they sign up to your list. All of these offers are on a related topic, in line with the subject of the lead magnet that got them into the funnel in the first place.

But if they turn down all three offers, then renting the exit splash page to another marketer with a product that is DIFFERENT for your offers could work really well.

Obviously, this offer would still be marketing-related, but it could be ANYTHING else that is marketing related. Of course, you’ll have to test this out. Do a one-week trial run with your “renter” and see if it’s a good fit. If not, find someone else.

You can rent out any space you like, whether it’s the first upsell, the exit page, a link on your download page and so forth.

How much should you charge? Enough to put your funnel into profit, or a little bit better. If your renter makes a killing, that’s fine. The point is to get you into profit. Then you can buy all the traffic you like and build that list quickly.

Your real profit comes from the list, not the funnel. Always think about the backend and your email marketing because this is where a really profitable business is built.

Selling this offer to established marketers isn’t difficult, either. Simply send them an email letting them know what you have. It’s an offer they don’t see every day – at least not yet – and it will spark immediate interest with some marketers.

Like anything else, it is a numbers game. Plan on approaching or emailing about 5-7 marketers to get 2 who are really interested, typically one of which will say yes.

I know of one fellow who’s been doing this for a couple of years now. He built a funnel in a new niche; one he was dying to enter. But for whatever reason, he had a devil of a time getting the funnel to pay for itself.

Finally, in frustration, he sent out a blanket email to 14 marketers that he personally knew. Granted, he already had the contacts, so this part was easy for him.

10 of those marketers expressed interest, and he wound up building a second, similar funnel to accommodate the demand.

He has two upsells after his squeeze page. The first is for one of his own products, and the second is rented out to another marketer. Then on the download page he rents out three different spaces to three different marketers.

Finally, he sends a ONE TIME ONLY offer to his new subscribers via email. He makes it VERY clear that this is the only time he will ever send such an offer on behalf of another marketer, but this offer is so good, he just had to let his new readers know about it. (You know the lingo to use.)

Because he makes it clear that this is a one-time only thing and he won’t be spamming his list, no one gets upset.

And between his own upsell, the upsell he rents out, the three ads on the download page and the ‘solo ad,’ he makes a good chunk of money.

He’s now able to buy more expensive traffic and still be in the black at all times. And this better traffic is more targeted and results in more sales from his list.

Talk about a win-win-win situation. He took something bad – a funnel that frustratingly was not paying for itself – and turned it into a way to build his lists even faster and with better prospects, while still making a small profit on his funnels.

If you want to know more about increasing conversions in your business, check out the featured resource below to grab a free report which will teach you how to boost your conversion rate. Download, read it, and take action 🙂

Nurturing Creativity Takes Time

When you are trying to be creative, don’t be tempted to force it because this can be detrimental and have the complete opposite effect and cause your creativity to dry up.

This will only cause frustration and can become an unending cycle of frustration and lack of creativity and focus,

Being creative takes time for most people so you need to be patient. Also, many of us lead incredibly busy lives and it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and try to get the creative juices flowing.

But if you want to unleash your creativity, it is important to try to make time in your daily schedule.

Be Okay With A Split Work Schedule

Sometimes you can get burnt out on your work pretty quickly during the day. If you’re working for 8 straight hours, then by about hour 5 or 6, you’re going to be feeling pretty worn down and ready to recharge.

Many people seem to stress getting all of your work done for the day in one block, but you really don’t have to do that. In fact, it can be quite helpful for your focus and creativity to split up your work schedule as you’d like it.

Let’s say you’re working for 8 hours each day. During that time, you likely want to get as much done as possible, so you want to be working efficiently and competently. It’s most definitely not impossible for you to work 8 hours straight.

Many people do that. However, not many people come out of 8 hours of straight work feeling happy or energetic – nor do they give it their all during the last couple of hours. What you should do is split that 8 hours of work into two halves, each only lasting 4 hours long.

By the end of each 4-hour shift, you might be a little bit tired, but definitely not as bad. You can take some time in between to nap, relax, and do whatever you want to do – such as tapping into the creative side of your brain before you get back to work.

At the end of the day, you’ll have more energy, but you will have worked the same amount total. You just gave yourself some time to rest in between, but overall, it’s the same exact amount of work.

In fact, you might actually become more accomplished because you’ll be reinvigorated in the second half of work after some time spent recharging. You can even split it into smaller chunks if you’d like.

You can do 4 sessions of two hours each, which isn’t much at all. If you’re taking good sized breaks in between, you’re going to have a much-needed rest at the start of each session and be able to work as efficiently as possible during the time that you do work.

Some people might scoff at splitting up your work schedule, because it’s not the traditional way of working. Keep those thoughts out of your mind because it doesn’t matter if the work is done all at once or not, as long as it all gets done throughout the day.

Just try it for yourself and see how it works out for you. What have you got to lose?

So, you now have put time aside to nurture your creativity. But how do you go about doing that during those sessions?

Do your sessions have to be strict and regimented or more fluid and forgiving?

This may well depend on the type of person you are, but it can be a good idea to not put too many restraints on yourself during these sessions and to get things out of your mind and tidy them up later.

Be Okay With ‘Messy’ Creativity You Can Sort Out Later

You may have encountered situations where you’re being creative and coming up with new ideas, but you spend a lot of time trying to make them more focused than they are. You might think that creativity and focus have to happen at the same time, but that’s just not true.

In fact, not only can you reign in your ideas later, but it might be beneficial to you to only be creative and not place so much emphasis on cleaning them up right away. When you’re brainstorming new ideas, they’re bound to come out a bit messy.

That’s not a negative at that time – it’s just natural. Creativity isn’t meant to be focused and structured at first, but rather raw thoughts that need to be refined later. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, you might stifle your own creativity by not allowing it to breathe, constricting it with too many boundaries.

To get the most out of your creativity, you should just let it all flow out no matter how nonsensical it might seem at the time. Whatever comes to mind, just put it all out on paper so that later on you can sort through it and find what will work best and what maybe needs to be restructured.

Your brain will often either be in a creative state, or a focused state. Each one of these has their own benefits but trying to do both at the same time can end up hurting both. Your focus won’t allow your creativity to have enough wiggle room, while your creativity will cloud your focus.

Have dedicated time for each to fully develop your ideas. Let’s say you’re brainstorming ideas for a slogan for your company. The first thing you should do is let your creativity flow and come up with whatever you can think of and write it all out.

This lets you cover as many possible ideas as you can, so that you don’t leave a potentially good slogan out. Later, you can then look back through all of the slogans you thought of, and sort through them.

You might see some that are good, but need to be changed a bit, some that are good as they are, and some that might just need to be ditched. There’s no shame in tossing an idea out later, but you want to make sure you put it out there in case it seems like a good idea when the time comes to focus.