We’ve all heard the quotes when it comes to procrastination. ‘Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today’ or ‘Action today can prevent a crisis tomorrow’… and so on.
Yet, millions of people procrastinate daily. So why do we not do what we know we need to do?
The answer is simple. When you view a task as unpleasant and tiring, your mind immediately starts cooking up excuses to prevent you from being in discomfort. This is your self-preservation instinct at its finest.
Your mind is trying to protect you. While this is good when it comes to dangerous situations, for the most part it’s unnecessary and actually holding you back.
Knowing how to act is crucial to avoid procrastination. If you keep procrastinating, your work will pile up and your schedule will become a mess.
You won’t reach your goals or meet your deadlines. It’s impossible to have work-life balance when you’re always playing catch-up. So, here’s what you need to do to stop procrastinating…
Make a list of ALL the things you need to get done. List them in 3 categories:
Get the urgent matters out of the way ASAP, then focus on the important tasks and finally clear the other tasks as and when you can.
Many times, you may feel like you’re not in the mood for an activity. This could be exercise or writing or cleaning your house, etc. Whatever the activity is, your mind is already making excuses for you to avoid doing it.
You’re thinking of skipping the workout. Or maybe you’d rather organize the folders in your laptop than write that blog post you need to.
Clean the house? Pfft! You can always do that next month.
So how do you beat this problem?
Simple. Just give yourself 2 minutes to do the task. Tell yourself that you’ll just exercise for 2 minutes or clean the room for 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter what the task is. Just aim for 2 minutes.
You’ll often find that once you get started, you’ll usually go on for 30 minutes to an hour or longer.
It’s always the initial step of getting started that’s the most difficult. 2 minutes tricks your mental resistance because writing or exercising for 2 minutes is not as intimidating as doing it for 30 minutes or an hour.
Employ this technique whenever you catch yourself about to procrastinate.
Parkinson’s law states that, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
What that means is that if you give yourself 3 days to complete a job, you’ll take 3 days. However, if you gave yourself 8 hours to do it, you’ll rush and get the job done.
So, giving yourself shorter deadlines will help to motivate you by lighting a fire under your butt to get you moving. You can’t procrastinate when you have a deadline that’s approaching really fast. You’ll get the job done quicker than you thought possible.
One of the cruel twists of life is that very often, you get motivation only after you’ve completed the work. If you wait to be motivated to do a task, you’ll be waiting a long time.
However, if you just go ahead and do it, you’ll gain some self-satisfaction and feel productive. Now you’ll have the motivation to quickly complete the next task and so on.
Start doing first, and the motivation will come later – and you’ll not even think of procrastinating once you’re on a roll.
Avoid procrastination at all costs and know that it doesn’t change anything other than cause your responsibilities to pile up. Life begins outside the discomfort zone. Challenge yourself to get started today and right now.
And now you have mastered procrastination, let’s look at how you can use automation to make even more use of the time you have.
One of the best ways to increase your productivity and free up more time for leisure will be to automate your recurring tasks or outsource them. This could be done in a variety of ways.
One fantastic strategy to stop wasting time at the bank will be to have your bill deductions automated. You could plan things out in such a way that money from your account is automatically deducted towards your outstanding bills.
Online banking is all the rage these days and yet thousands of people queue up at the tellers just because they’re not ‘tech savvy’ and don’t wish to learn something new.
If you’re working from home or you’re a busy entrepreneur, it’s these automated tasks that will save you precious hours and also prevent any hassles in your workday.
Instead of washing dishes by hand, you could use a dishwasher. Instead of drying the laundry on a line, you could use a dryer. There are many machines that will help to simplify your chores.
You could also create a roster for your kids where each one gets a specific chore to complete daily. It could be doing the dishes or vacuuming the house or one of the many daily chores that threaten to suck up your time.
They’ll do it in a fraction of the time for a small fee. The amount you pay for the service will be worth every cent because your time is worth much more.
If you’re an online entrepreneur, there are tons of email management software and other tools that simplify your job. You can queue emails for an entire week that are set to be sent at a specific time and day.
The same applies to other activities such as scheduled blog posts, social media posts, etc. Automation is a time saver that you absolutely must use if you wish to be effective.
Which brings us to the next point…
Batching your tasks is without a doubt one of the best productivity hacks ever. So what is batching?
For example, if you’re planning to write 10 articles, batching will mean doing the research for all 10 articles at once. Then you’ll outline them all.
This principle applies across the board. Write all your emails at once. Schedule them at one go and so on.
Instead of doing each task from beginning to end and then repeating the process over and over, batching will save you countless hours in the long run.
Use the methods above to manage your time effectively. Time management is life management. The better you are at it, the more time you’ll have for yourself and the activities you really want to do.
And remember, one way to beat procrastination is to stay focused and many people struggle with this. If you want to learn more about staying focused, check out the featured resource below for a free detailed report; download, read it and take action 😊
Affiliate marketing as an online business opportunity is very attractive as it is low cost and low risk, but as an affiliate you’re always going to have a lot of competition.
Not only are you competing with others who are selling similar products, but there may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of serious affiliates who are selling the EXACT same product as you are.
How do you beat your competition?
You’re probably wondering what the simplest and most effective way of creating a bonus for your offer or service that you are promoting.
It can be overwhelming and quite frustrating as you want to give your audience and potential buyers a valid incentive to purchase from you or through your affiliate links.
Here are a couple of simple ideas for adding value to any affiliate offer.
If you are not sure where to start then the most effective and simplest way would be to create a free report or detailed guide.
You can make it as simple or as detailed as you like but it must provide value. Another point to take into consideration is that the guide must have a unique flow that coincides and complements the original training or tutorials.
In other words, it must be structured in a way that acts as a reference that works in tandem alongside the original content as a supplementary alternative.
You can add images and additional text to help further expand on the training while providing more insights to allow users to better understand the topic and complete tasks etc.
To give an example of this, if you are a personal trainer and your clients need help with losing weight and correcting their dietary habits, you will create a detailed guide and structure it in a way that follows a simple step-by-step process.
To elaborate on this example to keep it as simple as possible you will focus the guide on 3 key areas which your clients must follow to help them get the required results.
You will start off with an estimated time period in which they must adhere to all the rules and complete the tasks as required for them to start seeing progress.
The next step will be to create a detailed day to day meal plan that covers the types of food they should eat at each meal. Making sure to provide information based on the number of calories, protein, and macronutrients they need to consume or restrict to allow them to work within any boundaries or limitations they may have.
The final step will be to incorporate a structured exercise plan that will provide information on the best warm-up routines and exercises to implement to increase stamina, build muscle or lose weight.
You can cater the information based on the client’s proprietary needs so they can follow the plan in a simplified manner.
One of the most important aspects of providing a free report or guide to your followers is to not call it an eBook or pdf.
For example:
You don’t want to use this phrase – You can download a free pdf or eBook using the link below.
So, in your audience’s eyes, it is seen as less valuable, and they may be less likely to use it.
Instead, what you should do is give the eBook a different name such as:
This small change will greatly help enhance the perceived value of your bonus.
It’s a great way to get people interested in your brand, and an even better way to introduce yourself as an expert.
It will also give you an extended reach as an authority figure on the subject or topic.
You’ll not only get instant credibility for yourself and your brand but also have a chance to reveal how the training is helping others deal with their specific problems or challenges.
Now that you have those small changes in place, you can now provide a simple CTA or Call to Action to encourage your followers to provide their email address in exchange for the free report.
OK, here’s another way to add value to your affiliate offers.
Sharing a detailed checklist is another great way to add value to an offer, service, or promotion.
People love incentives and checklists are a great way to increase a viewer’s interest in a product.
It can help users to follow along with the content of the training etc in a step-by-step order as it also helps to keep them accountable as they progress.
It also helps to solidify more trust in your product so they can get more value.
They can just check off the tasks they have completed along the way allowing them to move on and focus on the next stage of whatever process they are involved in.
This can be useful not only for solo content creators but also for groups and teams that need to work closely together on specific tasks to complete projects etc.
For a lot of teams, sharing and checking off checklists helps everyone stay on track with projects. For instance, maybe you have a big project to take on, but you don’t know who is responsible for what steps in the process.
You can create a detailed checklist of events that can be designated to each team member so that everyone involved knows exactly where to focus their time and energy on.
This will help to avoid confusion while allowing the entire process to have a better flow and be more streamlined.
There are plenty of ways you can create a detailed checklist!
You can use various design programs to build the files and convert them to pdf or different reading formats that can be made viewable online or made printable so that you can access a physical copy if needed.
Everything involved with these interactive checklists is hosted online so you can view them through your internet browser window, but they can also be made printable if required.
There are so many benefits to creating detailed checklists as you can cater them to whatever area, interest, or niche where you have an established audience of loyal followers or as an incentive to entice new followers to join your group, offer or service.
You can create anything from holiday travel and packing checklists to remind people of all the specifics they need to take with them and be aware of when travelling abroad.
Even step-by-step health guides, cooking and diet plans to exercise plans etc, even how to set up an online business where they can check off each section to let them know which stage they are currently on their journey.
Checklists are a great way to summarize the content in a training course or program into individual tasks while also helping to increase engagement with the user.
You can sell checklists as an additional way to earn an extra income source, or you can give them away for free as an added bonus for an offer or product you plan to promote, you have the freedom to use or implement them how you wish.
If you like the 2 simple ways to add value to your affiliate offers in this article, you will surely like an extended and detailed report containing another 8 ways to boost your affiliate earnings.
So, check out the featured resource below for the free Simple Affiliate Strategies detailed report; download, read it and take action 😊
Saying that times are challenging these days would be a gross understatement.
With the Covid pandemic, political polarization, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, people losing their jobs daily and untruthful media juggernauts dividing the people over issues – let’s just say, times are stressful.
The good news is that you can remedy this problem and maintain your sanity in a world that seems to be growing increasingly insane by the day.
Here’s how you do it…
The first step to healing yourself will be to find out what’s getting you down.
Are you unhappy at work? Is it the news? Or is it the constant vitriolic debates on social media that’s aggravating you?
What’s important is to know what’s eating you.
Even overthinking can be a problem – and the first step is knowing what’s causing you distress.
As simple as this sounds, people are not rational and fail to do it. Millions get stressed out watching the news which is always polarizing and stirring up fear. It would only make sense to stop watching this drivel.
But people don’t.
Like a deer caught in the headlights, they keep consuming the news content put out by the networks who have hidden agendas of their own. As a result, they get more stressed out. It’s a vicious cycle that never ends.
Eliminate ALL triggers that are causing you mental and emotional anguish.
A 3-to-5-day digital detox will do wonders for your mind and soul. When you don’t watch TV or use your phone, you’ll immediately be reducing the amount of stimuli your brain receives and processes. As a result, you’ll calm down.
Recently, Facebook (Instagram and WhatsApp too) was down for a day. Millions of people reported feeling better for that day when they couldn’t access their social media.
They got a brief respite from all the stimuli. Instead of understanding how beneficial this was to their mind and soul, the masses mindlessly got back on social media the very next day when the platforms resumed operations and started discussing why the ‘blackout’ happened.
Like Max Lucado said, “A man who wants to lead an orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.”
Turn your back on the social media crowd and your life will become a symphony. Or at the very least, it won’t become a stressful cacophony of social media talking points.
While your morning coffee is fine, you’ll want to avoid energy drinks and other stimulants to keep you going through the day. Caffeine dependency is a very real problem.
It causes anxiety and when you’re not loaded up with caffeine, you feel lost. Over and above that, any alertness you get from caffeine is temporary… but it generally leaves you feeling worse after the effects wear off.
Since the half-life of caffeine is about 5 hours, many people still have caffeine in their system when its bedtime. As a result, they can’t sleep well and wake up groggy and stressed out. Avoid caffeine after 1 PM.
We all know what we need to do here. Eat clean and in moderation – and exercise 4 to 5 times a week. It’s so simple in concept but so difficult in practice.
A good diet and regular physical activity are 2 of the best forms of self-care any individual can undertake.
Want to feel better mentally and emotionally?
Then look after your body well.
However bad things may be, fear helps no one. Like author, Robin Sharma says, “Being scared is part of being alive. Accept it. Walk through it.”
Don’t let fear control your life. Tell yourself that you’re resilient and will get through anything. You’ve come this far, haven’t you?
Well, you have what it takes to go all the way. Focus on your goals and where you want to go – not fear.
Massages, yoga, aromatherapy, walks in the park, watching a comedy, going to the zoo or an amusement park, etc. are all forms of stress relief.
What matters here is that you do what works for you. Break the monotony in your life. Do something fun. Very often, people get trapped in a mundane cycle of work and mind-numbing entertainment such as reality TV.
What you really need is a change in your daily life. Something that takes you out of your normal routine and helps you break through the grey fog of inertia and unhappiness.
Doing something that’s fun and not what you normally do will be akin to letting rays of sunlight break through the dark clouds in your life. You’ll get a ‘breather’ and be able to shift your mental state. This is priceless.
The author, Robert Ingersoll, once wrote, “We rise by lifting others.”
An excellent quote with an eternal truth – when you help someone else, you will feel better.
You’ll feel like you’re making a difference in the world, and your actions just might make someone else believe in the goodness of people. This belief is in short supply these days.
Buying a homeless person a meal will not only help them but will make you feel much better than donating your money to a faceless organization.
Sometimes, you’ll even find good conversation among people who have fallen through the cracks of the system. That said, you’ll want to be cautious in your approach too.
Your mental health and emotional health are intertwined. How you process information is just as important as how you emotionally react to it. It’s imperative that you be aware of this.
Feed your mind positive information. Where your attention goes, your energy goes.
If your attention goes on social media and reading hateful comments, you’ll be stressed out and become spiteful too. Your mind and thoughts be clogged up with drama, debate, and disinformation.
If you spend your time reading good books and helping yourself to progress in life, you’ll feel a sense of achievement because your life feels more purposeful. That’s how you look after your mental and emotional wellbeing.
“You can’t have a positive life and a negative mind.” – Joyce Meyer
Whatever you want in life will require discipline to achieve and maintaining a healthy mental and emotional balance is a small part of that. And if you want to know more about harnessing the power of self-discipline, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
Starting a blog can be a very interesting and financially rewarding endeavor, but only if you do it right. Unlike other online business models such as ecommerce, Kindle publishing or product creation, blogging has very few ‘moving parts’ to it and is simpler.
Once you install WordPress, a cool theme and some useful plugins, you’re almost set. Now all you need to do is create content.
As simple and straightforward as this sounds, there are still a few pitfalls that must be avoided.
Below you’ll find a list of 7 common mistakes that bloggers make… and what you need to do to steer clear of them. Take note of these pointers and remember them.
You can’t be everything to everybody. It’s important to pick one niche, find a sub-niche within it and target a specific audience in that niche.
For example, fitness for men above 40. Or potty training for dogs. Or self-care for first-time moms.
It can sound counterintuitive because you want a large audience, but a highly targeted audience is much more likely to get you and but from you once they see you as an authority.
Initially, you’ll be excited when you set up your blog. You’ll probably create content regularly and be checking your stats to see if you’re getting traffic.
However, as time goes by, you’ll discover that content creation can be a grind. Writing is hard work. Constantly coming up with topics to write about can be a chore too.
If you don’t post for a month or two, they’ll get tired of checking your blog and won’t show up anymore.
You’ll lose your audience, and your blog will appear stale. So, aim to post at least twice per week. This will ensure that you’ve fresh content in your blog regularly.
If you dislike writing or you’re busy, you can always hire writers from Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork or TextBroker to write articles for you.
You’ll definitely want to build a list from your blog so that you can stay in touch with your readers. Install the Thrive Leads plugin on your site and you’ll be able to create pop ups, scroll mats and even embed sign up forms in your blog posts.
Make sure you use a good autoresponder service, such as Active Campaign or Aweber.
It goes without saying that your content needs to read well and not be full of grammar and/or spelling errors.
Besides the obvious errors, your content needs to be informative and entertaining at the same time. If your readers are bored, they’ll close your page and move on.
Make sure the content is user-focused and it’s best to write like you talk. Conversational content will always win online. Leave the formal writing to stuffy college professors and dusty books at the library.
Your blog needs to provide information that’s relevant, useful and entertaining. It’s a tough juggling act, but that’s what separates the popular blogs from the thousands of blogs that no one bothers visiting.
This is a common mistake made by many beginners to marketing. They either display too many ads on their blogs or their content is too salesy.
People can see through the bloggers’ veiled attempts at providing skimpy information with an ulterior motive to sell.
Let them click on these links on their own… and they’ll be much more likely to buy what you’re promoting. People love buying stuff, but they hate being sold to.
So, don’t overtly sell all the time. Keep most of your posts content-driven but have affiliate links scattered here and there so that you get sales.
The Gutenberg block editor can seem clunky in the beginning but once you’re adept at using it, your blog posts can be made to look great.
You may choose to have a sidebar or not. Not having a sidebar does give a page a cleaner look, but this is a personal choice. What matters is that your content is easy to consume. The user experience is very important.
If you’re blogging for fun, then it doesn’t really matter what you post or when you post. But if you’re blogging for profit, then you must have an end goal in mind for EVERY post you make.
Is it to educate? Or will you be selling products through it? Or is it for traffic generation and list building?
So, decide what the goal is first – then write your blog post. If you want to know more about writing a great blog post, check out this post here.
These 7 tips when applied consistently will help you create a blog that’s engaging, popular and profitable.
Over time, you’ll have an income-generating asset that makes passive income round the clock… or you can flip it for 3 to 6 times (or more) what it’s currently earning and walk away with a sizeable chunk of profit. It doesn’t get better than that!
If you really want to know more about the power of blogging, you can take a look at the Rapid Blogging Blueprint training course or if you just want a few pointers for now you can grab the featured resource below for a free blogging report; download, read it and take action 🙂
If you’re creatively inclined, then you probably enjoy most of your time coming up with ideas, but you’re likely less intrigued by the serious business side that requires a lot of focus and monotonous work.
Any creative projects require these aspects to become full-fledged products or ideas, as annoying as it may seem. Don’t panic when it comes time to set aside your creativity, because you will get back to it.
Instead, just focus on your intentions with the creative idea and work to bring it to reality. While ideas certainly have merit, they’re not particularly useful if they’re never put into action.
Often times, putting them into action can be a tedious process, but it becomes worth it to see your creative endeavor brought to life, able to accomplish the goals that you had in mind when you thought of it in the first place.
For example, if you came up with a great infographic to inform people about a topic that you’re passionate about, it wouldn’t get very far as a simple idea or rough draft. A completed product that was shared and spread online would be able to actually inform others and spread your knowledge, but it’s going to take work.
You’re going to have to do research and cite sources, make it look nice, and go through the work of getting it to be spread and shared around. These are tedious things, but since your intent was to spread knowledge to begin with, it makes it worth your effort.
You might also want to create something with the intent of generating some income for yourself. It might be something like designing logos for up and coming companies or making physical products that people can buy on websites like Etsy.
The thought process is fun when you get to utilize your creativity, but then comes the actual process of bringing it to reality. Gathering materials, stocking your inventory, shipping purchases – all of these things can be a hassle.
Regardless of whether or not it’s a pain for you to do, your intention was to make money. The only way for you to do that is to give them an actual product. Very seldom will people pay good money for the concept of something that they’ll have to actually create themselves.
Instead, they’re more interested in purchasing a completed product, something that they don’t have to put any more work into. That’s where your effort to backburner your creativity comes in handy.
While technology and all of the gadgets we have today are certainly useful and can help you work more efficiently, they may also be dragging down your creativity and focus.
Whether it be a ton of distractions on all your devices or the fact that you might be using them as a crutch, they can sometimes do more harm than good for your creative flow and ability to focus.
In these situations, it’s best to put all of the tech down and just focus with the bare essentials. It’s almost like a palate cleanser. While you spend hours and hours writing on Word documents or drawing pictures in Photoshop, you can just as well get it done with a good old fashioned pen and paper.
It might not be as efficient, but it helps in ways that you might not anticipate. The best thing to do when attempting this is to separate yourself from as much technology as possible.
Otherwise, you shouldn’t be listening to music or watching anything, and preferably it’s somewhere outside where you can really absorb the sights and sounds of nature. When you don’t have the distractions of technology, from constant alerts to easily accessible entertainment, you might find that you’re able to be much more focused.
You’re there with only your own work to do, and otherwise you have nothing to really focus on. If you’re having trouble focusing, this might be a great way to get you back on track.
In terms of creativity, technology is very helpful, but it can start to become more of a crutch than a tool. If you know that you can always reference random guides online and draw inspiration from all kinds of other designs, then you may start to lose your creative edge.
By isolating yourself from all of that, you’ll be able to use your own pure creativity to create something entirely unique, without the reliance on all kinds of other sources. You should always look at technology as a tool – a means to an end.
It’s an amazing tool that you can and should take advantage of, but sooner or later, you’re going to reach a point where you’re becoming overly dependent on it, at which point you need to take a break and reassess.
Productivity is often stressed above all else in businesses today. It’s the best way to put out product after product, which typically results in the highest profit yield. However, productivity isn’t everything.
You need to be able to put out something that you’re proud of, something original and creative, and too much focus on productivity may stifle that, leading to some rather negative consequences.
There are many companies that would rather put out as many products as possible instead of making high quality products a priority. There’s a balance to be found between the two.
You obviously can’t release just one small product every year, but you also can’t be rushing so quickly that you’re not putting enough effort into things. Once you start to rush through your projects without care, you’ll start to slip.
If they’re used to receiving quality products from you, ones that are made with much love and care, they’ll be pretty sour once they start receiving a ton of mediocre work.
At that point, word may start to spread, and you can actually end up losing business. Creativity takes time. That is a fundamental part of business – it doesn’t just come out of thin air.
It takes time and care for you to develop an idea fully and to polish it to near perfection. You can’t take all the time in the world to get it done, since you naturally have certain deadlines to meet, but you can put a bit of extra time and effort into it to get it just as you’d like, to make something you’re proud of.
Extended periods of time spent pumping out as much as you can without any true creative input can actually hurt you in the long run as well. It might get you some short term sales, but it’ll start to fall off.
Creativity is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised frequently in order to grow and develop as well as stay healthy. If you’re not spending some time honing your creativity over a certain amount of time, it will start to degrade.
Eventually, you’ll be left without the same degree of creativity that you had before, and it can be difficult to get back into your flow when you need it. Instead of focusing on pure quantity, make sure you’re actually putting some heart and effort into the things you produce.
Well, as I’m sure you can appreciate, there is a lot more to be learnt about increasing focus and productivity; far more than can be covered in this short post, but if you’d like to know more about this, then click on the featured resource below where you can pick up a free report, Stay Focused For Success, that covers this topic in more detail. Download, read it and take action 😊
