Jason’s Tips

Automate Your Way To Success

Automate Your Way To Success!

I’m sure that many of you are familiar with the term ‘automation’ especially if you are an entrepreneur or online marketer.

Marketing automation is the process of using technology to streamline marketing efforts and make them more effective.

Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns — not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers and this makes good business sense.

But automation isn’t just for business. You can use the principles of automation in your daily life too.

Think about it. The smart home is now a reality and the technology is getting smarter and cheaper. More people are working from home, either as an employee or entrepreneur and they need to use tools that can keep help them be more productive, and the line between home and marketing automation will start to blur.

In this post we’re going to look at ways to automate both your life and business so you can make the most of the tools available to you at present. Things will develop and only get better as technology improves but even now, there is a lot that you can do to automate your life, so let’s get started.

5 Ways To Automate Your Life

Wouldn’t it be great if, like your oven, you had a self-cleaning home? Or taxes that just magically did themselves every year? Or how about bills that pay themselves on time every month?

While we can’t automate everything, there definitely are a lot of things we can automate in our lives to save us time and energy so that we have more time to do those things we enjoy or those that will make us money!

Automatic Bill Payment – This is one of those “why have I never done this before” type things. Once you’ve set this up in your bank account (if a physical check needs to be sent) or with the business receiving the payment (most have online automatic payment options), your regular monthly bills will magically get paid every month.

They’ll get paid on time and you won’t even need to think about it, except for the initial setup, and making sure you have money in the account to pay with when the payment is scheduled to go out.

Computer Health and Security – Invest in good system scan and maintenance software (Iolo System Mechanic is highly recommended) and create a schedule of periodic system scans and clean-up.

In the same vein, an automatic backup system is also a necessity, if you want to protect everything that lives on your hard drive, like irreplaceable pictures.

What You Eat – It’s an onerous task, but the only way you can truly get a firm hold on your diet is to do meal planning and prep once a week and stick to the plan.

There are so many benefits to this – not only do you save money by not eating out, but you save all those empty calories consumed, and you can be sure your body is getting what it needs.

You can take this one step further and either order from a service like Plated.com, where you’ll receive recipes as well as all the ingredients you need or hire someone to do the meal planning and prep for you, so all you must do is open the fridge or freezer, heat, and eat.

Papers and Things – First, go paperless whenever you can. Most bills that you pay online have a paperless option, so use that. For everything else that you feel you need to keep, utilize a scanner so that you can keep everything on your computer instead of in physical filing cabinets or all over your desk surface.

Then, do a bit of research online to find a folders/files system that will work well for you and that you feel you can stick with, and then go organize everything. Luckily, this will only need to be done once if you stick with it.

Shopping and Coupons – Whether it’s groceries, sundries, or extraneous goods…everything can be found online and delivered to your door. Amazon.com even has an option where you subscribe to things you need to purchase repeatedly (paper towels, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, etc.) and they’ll be automatically delivered on a schedule of your own choosing.

And, you’ll get discounts, too! When you do shopping like this online, you’ll often get coupons to use that give you an even deeper discount. And think of the time you’ll save not having to traipse through the supermarket!

5 More Ways To Automate Your Life

Automation is the future, and that future is now. It’s no longer science fiction to think about automating your interior lights or furnace or to have coffee already made for you the minute you get out of bed in the morning.

These things and much more have been utilized for years now by people who realize that doing less is how to get more (important stuff) done.

Here are five additional ways to automate your life!

Automate Your Car – Automatic (automatic.com) is a service whereby you’re able to monitor gas mileage, service records and maintenance, trips, vehicle tracking, immediate accident reporting, and more all by plugging in a dongle to your car’s computer that then communicates with your smartphone via Bluetooth or 3G.

There is a Lite version and Pro version, so if you don’t want to think about things like maintenance schedules, Automatic is for you.

Make Your Smartphone Smarter – You can tell your Android smartphone to do certain things at certain times by using the Tasker App. Everything from dimming your screen to turning off notifications, to customizing your battery-saving settings, Tasker can do it.

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ll need to jailbreak your phone first, and then search out individual apps to accomplish the tasks you’d like to automate.

Integrate All The Things – If integration is your thing, Zapier.com is probably already on your radar, but if not, it’s worth the time to check it out. Want to create Google Calendar events from your Evernote reminders?

How about adding your ‘liked’ Instagram posts to Google Drive? Or maybe you’d like to save your new Freshbooks clients to a Active Campaign Client List? Zapier can get it done. And it is amazing!

Home Automation – Home automation isn’t just for burglar alarms anymore. No, you can automate lighting, heating and air conditioning, sprinkler systems, outdoor grilling, vacuuming, mopping, even mowing the lawn!

As technology reduces the gap between where we are now and fully automated living, we’re sure to see many interesting inventions pop up in the near future, and beyond.

Mundane Daily Chores – Remember the broom in Fantasia? Don’t you wish we all had one of those? While this isn’t a “true” automation, creating a schedule that utilizes time in your day in which to get those mundane tasks done will have you doing them without even realizing it.

For instance, while your coffee is brewing in the morning, wipe down the kitchen counters and stovetop. Wipe down the bathroom sink while you’re waiting for the shower to get hot. Utilizing these minutes to accomplish necessary tasks will help you avoid having to do a “big” once-a-week housecleaning that will take hours out of your weekend.

4 Areas To Automate In Your Business

Automation can seem overwhelming at first – where do you even start? You know that automation is, in some capacity, necessary to your business success.

You also know that you can’t do everything yourself manually, nor do you desire to. Automation gives you the ability to work on your business without working so much in your business. It allows you to have necessary steps that happen automatically without you getting involved.

In this section we’ll explore four common areas for business automation.

Social Media Automation

There are many marketing automation platforms and tools such as ContentStudio make automating your social media posts easy as pie. You simply queue up as many posts as you want, with or without images or video, and schedule them to publish, and you’re done!

You can spend an hour or two once a week and schedule up your posts to several different social media platforms at the same time.

After that, all you need to do is follow up and respond to comments on those posts, and you’re good to go!

Web Hosting And Management

Your website is the cornerstone of your online business, and your web hosting is the building that houses it, so it pays to have a web host that will do the maintenance you need so that you don’t have to worry about it.

This will keep your site(s) up and running, and as secure as they can be.

Try to find a web host with stellar support so that if something should go wrong, they’ll be immediately available to get your site back up again.

Website Analytics

You’ve got to know your numbers. But this can be fiddly and overwhelming because you’re not just dealing with website traffic anymore.

Your best bet for automating this task is to find an all-in-one dashboard (such as Cyfe.com) that can analyze and give you data on your website traffic, as well as your social media engagement, Facebook or Adwords ads performance, keyword ranking information…and with just one place to log in to get this information, it’s a true gem!

Yes, you can use Google Analytics or AWStats, but the point here is to automate and free you up!

This is not an extensive list of marketing automation by any means. I haven’t even covered email marketing automation platforms, such as Active Campaign or Aweber.

Help Desk Support

If you’re still answering support emails one by one, you need to get out of the dark ages and begin automating this task immediately!

There are so many excellent solutions for help desk automation – Freshdesk.com and Zendesk.com are just two of hundreds of providers who will allow you to utilize automatic responses, FAQ sections, and will save you hours of answering individual emails.

Having a centralised support portal is best for both your customers and you so look into implementing this change now.

So far, we have looked at some useful ways to automate many things in your life and business by mainly using technology.

But you can also delegate tasks to others so let’s look at that now.

3 Key Steps To Delegation

If you’re going to be a success in the business world, you need to learn to delegate those tasks you either don’t like doing or aren’t good at.

Delegation is a hard thing for some to do – those who like to be in control of anything find it difficult to give up that control to someone else.

On the other hand, since you’re an automation expert now, this quite possibly won’t be an issue for you.

The key is really in the balance – the balance between your ability to trust that others will complete the tasks given properly and on time, and making sure that those you delegate to have what they need from you to get the job done right.

Here are three steps that you can take to ensure that all the tasks you decide to delegate to others get done when you want, how you want.

Set out very clear instructions for the tasks to be completed. This is the most important step and the one that you’ll have to put the most work of your own into. But doing so will ensure that you get the results you want.

First, outline what is to be done. Use visuals if necessary. If you were going to get a brand-new haircut, you would bring in several pictures to be sure that your vision was the same as the hairstylists, right? So set this up clearly, leaving nothing to guess at.

Also, spell out how the tasks are to be completed because you simply want them done correctly the first time. So, don’t leave this to chance.

Be available to your team when they need you. Make certain that they have your contact information and clear instructions that if there is anything they don’t understand that they should contact you instead of making their own judgment call.

To facilitate this, you will need to be available to them when they need you. Never simply assume that your tasks are getting completed. Check on them, but not obsessively. This is supposed to make your life easier, remember?

Improvise, adapt, and improve. To create as close to a hands-off experience as you can, after one project is done, get together with your team to decide what went well, what went wrong, and how to better facilitate success on the next project.

This level of intimacy is necessary for getting your hands-on time whittled down to next to nothing, thereby allowing you more laziness.

OK, so you are now an automation and delegation expert. But what about goal setting? Is it something you should always be focused on, especially if you are trying to slacken off and reduce your efforts?

Well, let’s see if setting goals is all it’s cracked up to be.

Give Your Goals The Boot

We’re told to make goals and stick with them. Make big goals! Make little goals! Make interim goals! Tell everyone your goals! Don’t tell anyone your goals! And in reality, your goals could very well be hurting you, instead of pushing you forward into success.

In the laid back success lifestyle, which you’re trying to achieve, you need less to do, not more, and goals are one thing that should go to the chopping block.

Here are five clues that goal setting may not be the right thing for you to focus on.

You love to set goals, but you don’t accomplish them. Really, what’s the point in that, aside from subjecting yourself to the guilt of an unfinished task? If you’re a starter, but not a finisher, find someone to partner with who will finish the projects you start, and then you can both benefit.
Are your actually taking action? Setting goals allow you to feel as if you’ve achieved something, but it’s just a mental game you play. It’s the action that follows the goal-setting that makes a difference, not the goal setting itself. Don’t mistake one for the other, and feel that just because you’ve set a goal, you’ve done something significant.
Are your goals working for you? You feel that setting goals set you up for future success. Again, the success comes from doing – are you doing what you need to do to achieve that goal? You can’t secure a great future by setting goals and then letting them sit.
You set goals because you’re supposed to. Everyone does it, so it must be a good thing to do, right? Not even close. Stop following the masses and begin making your own choices based on what you value, and what you want out of life. And then act on those things…goal or no goal.
You feel you’re a nobody if you don’t accomplish your goals. Listen, the worth that you have in this world doesn’t have to do with what you do or don’t do. Your worth is infinite and it’s inside you – so why pressure yourself into doing stuff you don’t want to do?

By removing goals from your life, you may just feel a huge weight off your shoulders Especially if you’re just following everyone else who is setting goals, but don’t really feel it in your heart. Let go of that sense of guilt, let go of the goal setting, and just focus on the action!

Using automation, delegation etc. to get what you want in life all comes from having the correct mindset and this is why many entrepreneurs and business owners work on their thinking to achieve at the highest levels.

If you want to develop a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊

4 Traffic Generation Tips For Affiliate Marketers

So you are interested in affiliate marketing. That’s great because it is a relatively quick, virtually risk-free way to start making money online.

Let’s quickly explain affiliate marketing for beginners in case you are unsure of how it works.

Basically, affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else’s products and when someone buys through your affiliate links, you get paid an affiliate commission.

As an affiliate marketer, you’re acting like a salesperson for the company. You sign up for their affiliate program, help to make a sale, and then the company rewards you.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it is incredibly scalable. A typical salesperson will only sell products from one company, or their own products and services. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different sources and earn commissions from all of them.

Many people try to start with Amazon affiliate marketing because Amazon is such a large, household name. The problem is that their affiliate commissions are tiny compared to other affiliate programs. Don’t rule Amazon out but you need to have realistic expectations when using it.

How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer? Well, the possibilities are endless, and the top performers are easily making 6-7 figure incomes online, and best of all, they don’t have to create or support their own products.

There are many affiliate platforms and programs that you can apply to join depending on your niche.

But if a product or service looks like a good fit for you and they don’t offer an official affiliate program, you can reach out to them and see if they would be willing for you to promote it to your audience in return for a commission. Many companies will agree because it is a win-win for them, After all, you are sending traffic to their offers so it’s not costing them any time or effort unless they make a sale.

And on the topic of traffic…

As an affiliate marketer, it’s crucial that you know how to drive traffic to your offers. This is a skill that will make or break you. So, you’ll to need to devote a huge chunk of your time in the beginning to learning how to drive traffic. While simple in concept, it’s not entirely easy and will require effort on your part.

Unlike product creators who can rely on affiliates to drive traffic, as an affiliate, you can only count on yourself. The traffic you generate can either be from free methods or paid traffic.

If you have the budget for it, you can use paid traffic. It’s faster and you get feedback much quicker. You have complete control of targeting so you will know who sees your ads and if you get your targeting right, you should be able to break even on your ad spend on your front end offers.

This effectively means you are building a buyers list for free and this is a crucial part of any online business as these buyers can be put in front of more offers.

However, if you’re a beginner and short on funds, there are many free methods of traffic generation that are effective too. The term ‘free’ is deceptive because you’ll be paying for it in time and effort, and you must be patient before you see any noticeable results; this may be frustrating, but you need to understand this from the beginning!

Nevertheless, you can drive free traffic and still make sales if you know what to do. Below you’ll find a few tips that you should always bear in mind when driving traffic.

Know Where Your Audience Hangs Out

You must know where your niche audience hangs out. If it’s a bodybuilding crowd you’re targeting, they’ll probably be on bodybuilding forums, fan pages for bodybuilders, YouTube channels featuring fitness experts and so on. So, you can go into these places and start siphoning traffic from there to your sites.

It is important to know who your target market is and what they are looking for. This is so often overlooked by marketers of all persuasions because it isn’t the most interesting thing to do, but it is one of the most important!

Create an ideal customer avatar and refer to it whenever you are writing sales copy, blog posts or creating videos to promote your affiliate offers.

If you know who they are, what they want and their specific pain points, you will be much more successful in gaining the sale.

Start With One Method

The reason so many marketers never do well with traffic is because they never focus their efforts on one method. If you’re going with video marketing, create a good channel and keep making videos till you have a following. Learn how to optimize your channel and videos so that you rank.

If you’re using Facebook groups, learn how to get more members in your group and post stuff that they like, and which can be linked to your web properties.

If you are blogging, learn to write interesting and engaging posts that are crammed with helpful information that your readers will enjoy and appreciate. Be consistent and write often. Don’t write short posts but instead go for longer posts that can go into more detail (a 1000 word minimum is a good benchmark to aim for). Learn about SEO so you can get your blog posts ranked in the search engines.

Pick one traffic method and strive to master it until you have an avalanche of traffic coming to your sites, etc. Once that’s successful, you can move on to the next traffic method while maintaining the current one.

Repeated And Relentless Effort

Driving traffic is a continuous process. Keep repeating your efforts and never give up. Even if your first few videos have only 10 or 20 views, keep going. Over time you will get more views and a bigger audience.

It takes time for things to snowball. remember what I said earlier; patience is key with free traffic methods.

The same applies to most traffic methods. The more videos you have, the more traffic you’ll get. The more people in your Facebook group, the more comments and engagement you’ll get. The more blog posts you write, the more visitors will come to your website. The more paid ads you create, the higher your chances of finding winning campaigns. It’s all a matter of time and repeated effort.

Engagement

This is another important factor. Engage with your traffic. Reply to comments on your videos. Like and respond to comments in your Facebook groups and ads. If you have commenting enabled on your blog and someone takes the time to comment, reply to them and thank them for taking the time to comment.

The more you engage, the better your relationship with your audience will be. They’ll grow to like you, trust you and will eventually buy through you.

Remember these pointers when driving traffic. It’s not as difficult as most marketers make it out to be. Once you understand how it works and you’re consistent, you will see results. The key to traffic generation is consistency. That’s where most marketers fail.

Get this right and you’ll have all the traffic you want.

Once you have started to make progress you can rinse and repeat with another traffic method.

If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊

How To Overcome Self Doubt

Self doubt can be a troubling and persuasive voice that holds you back in a number of ways. It can hold you back from seizing opportunities that come your way and also makes getting started or finishing things harder than they need to be.

Doubting yourself can sometimes be useful as it helps you to soberly see your current limitations or simply recognize a half-baked or bad idea. But for the most part it is holding you back from the life you really want.

So what can you do about it? How can you overcome those times of self-doubt so that you can move forward once again?

Can you reach a state where you never doubt yourself? That is probably unlikely as even the most confident people will suffer from this during their lives but overcoming self doubt can be incredibly liberating and allow you to unlock your full potential, so it is definitely a skill worth mastering!

7 Tips To Overcome Self Doubt

Here are 7 ways to help you to stop doubting yourself. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, as there are many ways to tackle this issue, but at least these will point you in the right direction.

The key is to be persistent with these tips. Suffering from self doubt is a habit that you learned and mastered throughout your life and it is going to take time to undo it.

Many ‘gurus’ will say “Do not doubt yourself, you can achieve anything you want” but that isn’t really practical advice is it? It’s just motivational speak.

Hopefully these 7 tips will give you practical guidance to eliminate self doubt from your life.

Stop comparing yourself to others! This is a big no-no! If you start comparing yourself to the accomplishments of your colleagues or peers, you can quickly start to feel inadequate. The thing to remember is that everyone is on their own journey through life so comparing is a waste of energy. Plus, you never know, they may be doing exactly the same thing with you!
Forget about what others may think of you! This is a bit of an internal self defence mechanism to try to shield you from judgement or criticism but doesn’t really work and can increase anxiety and thus self doubt. Worrying about how others perceive you can really hold you back from achieving your true potential so stop doing it.
Gain clarity! Take the time to write things down. This can really help you to alleviate any fears and doubts you have. Look at what is causing you to feel these feelings objectively and look at the pros and cons of the situation. Doing this can give you focus and can help you to find a way forward.
Be optimised! Spend some time listening to music, audiobooks or podcasts from people who inspire you and make you feel positive and motivated. I’m not just talking about fluff, but people who can give you a real boost to turn your self doubts into optimism and can help you to think constructively about the challenge ahead.
Be decisive! Stop procrastinating and getting caught up in making a decision as this is a quick road to self doubt. Just make a decision and stick to it. This can be very liberating, and you will actually get stuff done. If the decision is ‘wrong’ you can course correct as you go, but at least you are moving forward!
Use a journal! Take some time at the end of the day to write down what you have achieved that day. This is much better than wallowing in self-pity, yes? This will help you to feel grateful and releases endorphins and put you in appositive frame of mind just before you go to sleep. If you are a spiritual person, you can pray a prayer of thanksgiving too.
Remember that setbacks are temporary! Don’t spend too much timing beating yourself up if something doesn’t go according to plan. Nothing goes smoothly in life, so don’t think that everything you do is doomed to failure because that isn’t true. Treat failure as an opportunity to learn and grow so you can increase your skillset and avoid these things in the future.

Self Doubt Is Understandable, But Crippling

Even the most confident person you can think of has an occasional bout of self doubt. The trick is to recognize it for what it is and then get on with the business of being successful.

That’s how successful entrepreneurs beat the self doubt plague. Consistent self doubt is as crippling as clinical depression and you may soon find yourself in a rut that’s difficult to extract yourself from.

As a fledgling – or seasoned entrepreneur, you have a lot riding on your ability to stay focused. Your ultimate level of success and satisfaction with your chosen career depends on it.

It’s imperative that you develop the resilience to overcome self doubt you’re sure to experience and replace that negativity with other thoughts designed to build your confidence rather than bringing it down.

Self doubt can cause indecision and procrastination – both lethal detriments to your ultimate success. Yet, every challenge you face in your quest as an online entrepreneur brings with it old hauntings from your mind that may prevent you from overcoming the challenges and achieving your goals unless you can get a grip on them and see them for what they are – lies.

The higher you climb on the ladder of success, the more self doubt you’re likely to have. What can you do to alleviate some of these obstacles and direct your energy in a more productive manner?

It begins in your mind and progresses to taking action as you learn you really are capable of facing and overcoming any challenges that come your way. First, you should know and be comforted that you’re not the only person (successful or not) who has suffered from self-doubt along the way.

Acknowledging that others have felt as you do and became successful in spite of self doubt can alleviate your worries and help you get past the feelings more quickly. If you haven’t already set some personal and business goals for yourself, do it immediately.

It’s part of the plan that you’ll use as the map to the magic kingdom of success. It’s perfectly okay to set lofty, long-term goals. Just make sure you set attainable, short-term goals, too – so you can experience success in small increments along the way.

Short term goals are important because they provide continuous realization that you are moving along quite nicely and are well on your way to meeting those long-term goals. It lets you bask in the sunshine of the smaller wins, while waiting for the big payoff at the end.

Some things will happen along the road to success which is beyond your control. It’s important that you recognize this and keep from blaming yourself. In all lives, a little rain must fall. Be prepared in every way you can and press onward to your goals.

I hope the 7 practical tips in this article help you to manage the feelings of self doubt in your life and remove their crippling effect on you so you can start to achieve at the level you want.

Overcoming self doubt and achieving what you want in life all comes from having the correct mindset and this is why many entrepreneurs and business owners work on their thinking to achieve at the highest levels.

If you want to develop a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊

Make Money Blogging As A Career

Blogging has been a widely known concept for quite some time now. While they may not know the technical ins and outs of how it works, many men and women have heard about blogging in pop culture.

Julie and Julia is a good example of this. It’s a movie that originated from a true-life tale of Julie Powell, who set out to blog about her experiences cooking each of Julia Child’s 524 recipes from her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days.

Her blog became so popular that she was offered a book and movie deal for her efforts, and she also published her second book. Her success isn’t common, but not everyone needs a book and movie deal to make a substantial profit from their blog!

The benefits of blogging are huge; it is free or cheap to start so the risk-reward benefits are huge. Starting a blog is simple; you can start with a WordPress blog for free if you want to, but I would suggest paying a few bucks for a domain name and hosting if you want to take the whole thing seriously and really want to make money blogging.

How Blogging Works And Where Most People Go Wrong

Looking for “blog jobs” online is something many people do these days. They know they love to post on Facebook, and they hate their current 9-5 job, so they think they’d love to get hired as an official blogger for a company.

It’s true that more and more companies are coming onboard as blog entities – because they understand the value of having a social media presence online, part of which is their blog audience (in addition to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, for example).

But you have to understand that when a company sets out to attract a blogger to represent their business online, they don’t want an amateur blogger. They want someone who knows how blogging works and understands the business side of blogging – because when you’re a blogger, you’re building a brand (or destroying it, in some unfortunate cases).

When you start looking at professional blogger-for-hire jobs, you’ll see that they want you to understand online marketing fully, they want you to deliver a certain number of blog posts per week (usually five), and sometimes want you to go out and find guest blogging opportunities where you can blog elsewhere and link back to their main blog.

It’s not a good career for someone who is new to blogging and thinks it “might be fun.” This is for seasoned professionals – and sometimes the company will even want to investigate to see what kind of current reach you have with your own content in the social media world.

If you’re already at a company that doesn’t have an online presence, then maybe you can make a suggestion that they allow you to head up that operation. This would give you a little experience so that you could then go out and brag about launching and generating a good buzz for your current company.

Blogging To Make Money

The do-it-yourself blogging to make money route is far more rewarding. It’s something you can do anytime – in the morning before work, on your lunch hour, after work and on the weekends.

Then when it becomes profitable, you can use it to replace your current income and begin blogging fulltime. When you choose this path, you have much more personal satisfaction in your blogging career.

If you want to learn more about monetizing your blog, check out this post here.

Blogging is a real business when you start pursuing it for financial reasons. Yes, it gives you much in terms of happiness – but when you’re making money doing something you love, it’s very rewarding.

You have to treat this like a business from the very start. If you start blogging haphazardly, then your readers will recognize that it’s an amateur site. Yes, some will become fans anyway – but others want to know they’re following a leader in whatever niche you choose to blog about.

By the way, if you are serious and want to take your blogging to the next level, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint. This is a premium level training that takes you through each and every step of setting up your own highly profitable blog and profiting from it. You can check it out here.

How do you pick a niche for your blog? Some blogs have a multitude of topics – from entertainment to fashion to business to health. You can do that, but unless you have a team of contributors, it’s hard to maintain the momentum needed for a broad blog like this.

A better option might be to narrow down your focus into something that you really love. It can still be broad – like a women’s health blog for example. But it’s not as narrow as “everything” or “health in general” (including both genders).

You can even drill down more and go with one form of women’s health, like menopause or pregnancy. You don’t even need to be an expert in it – it’s all about sharing information and as you learn, you can share!

One thing that’s important is that you make sure that you love whatever topic you’re blogging about. You should want to wake up every day, eager to get to your computer.

If you dread it because it bores you or it’s depressing, then you won’t help your readers and the blog won’t become profitable for you.

Aside from the overall slant, you get to choose what each individual entry on your blog is all about. If you were blogging for another company, they might tell you what to blog about each day – even if you found it mundane.

You can set an entire editorial calendar for your blog where you choose which topics are presented to your readers. You also get to pick the tone for the blog pieces.

For example, let’s take the diet niche. You could be a fad and trend diet blogger who emphasizes fast weight loss – or someone who harps on the fact that weight loss should just be the adoption of better nutrition and exercise and the pounds should come off slowly.

Benefits Of Blogging: Developing A Relationship With Your Readers

Having a relationship with your readers means they value your blog, and they share the link to it with other people. You want that type of connection because as a professional, the traffic and branding that you gain will be priceless.

When blogs have a loyal readership, they enjoy a fantastic word of mouth traffic flow. While many bloggers are out there buying links back to their site and paying people to help them get traffic, you can do it all for free.

First, pick topics they want to know about. Part of your job in relationship building is to listen to your audience and meet their needs. There are many ways you can do this.

Do some preliminary keyword research to find out what people want to know in your niche. Using the menopause example, you could go to UberSuggest.org and type in what are menopause.

This is known as a sentence starter – and it gives you some insight into what type of blog post you might want to do, such as:

What are menopause hot flashes like?
What are menopause symptoms caused by?
What are the best menopause vitamins?

A good keyword tool gives you help on what to blog about. But there’s more that you can do to find topics. You can look in forum threads and see what people are asking.

You can also simply invite your readers to submit questions to you. You can do this on your email autoresponder opt in form, or have a special contact form on your blog where people can engage with you that way.

Whenever someone emails you with a question, you can assume there are more people out there who are wondering the same thing. Use those questions as fodder for your blog topics.

When you start blogging about all of these things, it makes the audience feel like you’ve really got your finger on the pulse of the marketplace – like you have great instincts.

Next, write in a highly conversational style and end each blog with an invitation to connect. People need to feel like you’re speaking just to them – even if you’re not.

If you write, make sure it’s conversational and not stuffy like you’d write for a professional publication. If you make a video blog, look right in the camera and be casual and relaxed, not stuff and nervous.

When you end a blog post, you can ask a question or invite people to share their own $0.02 about the topic in the comments. Make sure that whatever comment system you’re using, it’s easy to find – because some are almost hidden.

Participate in the conversation that goes on in your blog comments. If people are kind enough to take you up on your invitation, then make an effort to have a dialogue with them.

Thank them for their comment, call them by name, and open up a discussion about what they had to say. You can use a plugin to help the comments become “threaded,” which helps all of your readers see who was responding to who.

Supporting Yourself Financially And Make Money Blogging

When you start blogging for profit, you should be consistent with your efforts. You should blog regularly – daily if possible, but at least several times a week. There are a few ways you can make money as a blogger.

Build a list from your blog so that whenever you have a new blog post, you can notify people about it. Also have an RSS system set up for people who use RSS feed readers to get notified of your new content.

Whenever you have a list, it gives you a certain amount of power – the power to instantly communicate with your target audience when you are selling or promoting products.

Because of this, you have to make sure that you don’t abuse that power by spamming their email with useless or irrelevant offers. If you do this, you build a reputation as a spammer.

Sell ad space for a certain amount of profits. You can arrange a specific area of your blog for ad space that people rent on a monthly basis, paying the ad revenue to you directly.

If you go this route, make sure you have specifics in place to control what kinds of ads can get placed on your blog – all the way down to the colors and animation of it if you want.

Sign up for AdSense, too. This can help you get clicks and revenue. You can put different sized ad banners on your blog, from buttons to skyscraper ads. You can include images or go with just text.

One thing you have to remember whenever you place any ads on your blog is that yes, it gives you some money when people leave your site for somewhere else – but in leaving, it also means someone else is capturing their name and email address and selling something to them, not you.

Promote tangible products as an affiliate. You can sign up as an Amazon Associate and promote anything they sell there that they offer a commission on. Using our menopause example, if you promoted a chilled pillow, you could earn a percentage of each sale from your blog post.

Promote digital products as an affiliate. Digital products can be found at sites like ClickBank.com. You can sign up for free and get a hoplink (affiliate link) where you earn around 50% for each sale.

Create your own products and sell them from your blog. You don’t have to promote other people’s stuff. Why not create an info product (eBook, video or audio course) and teach something you blog about in more depth – or in a more comprehensive manner?

Offer services from your blog. Freelancing like writing, graphics, or other services can be offered right from your blog. Coaching is something you can offer. Many people pay top dollar for one-on-one coaching sessions via Skype or even email!

Blogging can be a very fun and very profitable venture if you approach it correctly. Don’t make the mistake of flying by the seat of your pants. If you do this, your blog will be scattered with topics, have no set monetization plan, and you’ll end up unhappy with the effort you’ve put in.

With proper planning and enthusiasm, you’ll never need to look for “blogging jobs” again – in fact, you might be the one putting out feelers for a professional blogger to come onboard and help you with your content needs! Being in a position of power makes a world of difference.

And remember, if you want a premium training on blogging the right way, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint which includes over the shoulder training on blogging the right way.

Or, if you just want some more basics to see whether blogging is right for you, check out the featured resource below for a free Blogging Fundamentals report; download, read it and take action 😊

Why Habits Are Important

Have you ever asked yourself these types of questions: “Can habits change your life?” or “What are the benefits of good habits?”

If you are like most success hungry entrepreneurs, then I guess the answer is a resounding “Yes!” We all want to be more successful and developing positive habits can help us to achieve that success.

So, why are habits important to your success in life?

If you look at the most successful people in their fields, they will all have something in common. They have a success mindset, are willing to take calculated risks and have certain habits or routines that help them to overachieve.

If these highflyers are using the power of habits, don’t you think you should do too?

Of course you should! Habits give you structure and can help you to keep going when things get tough. They can become so ingrained that nothing will stop you from completing certain habits.

That being said, it is pretty obvious that you need to create simple, daily habits that will impact you positively. And if you have any negative habits, you need to recognise them and eliminate them from your life.

But what exactly is a habit? Well, a habit is something you do daily without thinking much about it. You probably have a habit of waking at a certain time, brushing your teeth a certain way, and perhaps calling your parents once a week on a Thursday evening.

Habits become such a part of your routine that they become who you are. Want to be a different person? Just start a new habit!

And the good news is that you can change your habits or create new ones. It must be said that it can be very difficult to break old habits, especially if you have been doing them for years, but if they aren’t doing you any good, it is time to ditch them!

Good habits will help you to achieve more in life and to reach your goals, so let’s look at building and stacking a daily routine that will fire you up and help you to achieve more in your life!

How To Build A Daily Routine With Habit Stacking

There are morning routines and evening routines that perhaps are habit-based already for you. You may get up, eat breakfast, shower, brush your teeth, and depending on how early you get up; exercise may be in the morning routine as well.

Habit stacking works by looking at what you do automatically and then add/stack a micro habit to it. Author Steve Scott wrote a book called “Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes Or Less.” The key is right there in the title…five minutes or less. That is tiny habits at its best.

In creating daily routines, you identify what you already do that is good and then attach a tiny habit to it. For example, if you do a few minutes of yoga in the morning, you can stay on the mat and do five minutes of meditation. After that is complete, you can do four minutes of visualization, and to finish it up, do three minutes of deep breathing.

This is very similar to Tony Robbins’ 4-part morning routine, which is four tiny habits, one right after the other.

To create a habit-stacking routine, Steve Scott advises that you look at your day and come up with times and locations as your prompts. It would like this:

– Once I wake up, I will…

– Once I start work, I will…

– Once I have a break or lunch, I will…

– Once my work is complete, I will…

– Once I finish dinner, I will…

– Once I hit the gym, I will…

– If I travel, I will…

These are examples and adjustable as not everyone goes to the gym or travels for work or vacation.

Make sure to have a good reason why you want to stack the habits you have picked out. A big why is essential for any habit or goal, or you will not put in the necessary time to do it.

Steve Scott believes that you should only work on one routine because of the willpower required to do it. It is easy to get distracted, and working on two or three routines at once, would require more focus and willpower than the average person can truly say they have.

Once you have a routine filled out, spend one month installing these new tiny habits stacked upon each other. Repetition is key; you will need to do the same actions repeatedly for 21 to 30 days to make the new habit stick.

As mentioned, Steve Scott came up with 97 tiny habits you can stack into different areas. He broke down the areas of your life to focus on like this:

– Leisure (Your days off and your vacation time)

– Organization (Keeping the house clean, organized, and decluttered, along with your workspace)

– Finances (Making and saving money. Reducing debt)

– Productivity (Finding your best working hours and getting tasks done on time)

– Spirituality (Connecting with the earth and your Creator)

– Health and Fitness (Your mental and physical well-being, including what you eat and how you exercise)

– Relationships (Developing loving relationships with family and friends. Getting along with co-workers)

Let’s look at a daily routine for relationships using habits stacking.

We will use the dinner hour as our example.

– When we prepare dinner, I will ask about their day.

– When we sit down to eat, I will say how grateful I am for not only the food but having them in my life

– During the dinner, I will put away my cell phone and focus on what they say

During clean-up, I will touch my partners’ lower back to make a physical and emotional connection.

– After dinner, I will take their hand, and we will walk around the block while I express my love

Just like goals, being accountable will help you to succeed. Tell people what your stacked habits are, and if they see you miss a step, they can remind you what you need to do.

Creating habits requires self-discipline and many people do lack in this area. If you want to gain more self-discipline, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about the Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊

Jason’s Tips