Category: Personal Development

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Be Aware of and Follow FTC Guidelines

If you don’t know yet, you have to follow certain guidelines before working with and sharing influencer marketing posts or anything to do with internet marketing.

FTC what they do

The Federal Trade Commission Act is used to protect both the consumer and the business owners. Its main purpose is to protect the credibility of information being shared on the internet while maintaining transparency.

 

You can expect the following consequences for not following the FTC rules:

 

  • Cease and Desist Orders
  • Fines Up to $43,792 per violation
  • Injections by federal district courts
  • Refunds to consumers
  • Costs associated with damages

 

Here are a few main points to be aware of and practice to avoid any legal fees and responsibilities:

 

  • Don’t Share Deceptive or Fake Information – If you do not know for sure that the information you are sharing or promoting is 100 percent legitimate and true and not fake, do not share it. If you do it, it will make you look untrustworthy, cause many controversies, and maybe even cost you money.

 

  • Always Display a Disclaimer – Disclaimers are not meant to allow you to mislead or lie, but they can help protect you from problems. For example, if your product is a special neck pillow, you may want to add a disclaimer that this neck pillow, while it helps you personally with your neck pain, is not a medical device, and you’re not giving medical advice. But, again, talk to a lawyer to help you with your disclaimers.

 

  • Don’t Fake a Product Demonstration – If you’re going to demonstrate anything, never do it in a fake way. If the product doesn’t work as you state it works, then the buyer will find out. Just be real and ask that the influencers you work with are too.

 

Be sure to visit the Federal Trade Commission website to fully understand the guidelines as much as possible before you get started. Knowing and following the law is your civil duty, and you can’t use a lack of knowledge and understanding to protect yourself.

 

 

 

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Start with the Right Influencer and Target Audience

For influencer marketing to work in your favor, your target audience and the influencer’s audience must match. Before you reach out to the influencer or even understand which type of influencer to work with, you need to identify your target audience, one of the first steps required to running any business and creating products and services that make a real difference within your industry. It’s simple, if you share products, services, or ideas to the wrong audience, you won’t see any conversions.

 

Your target audience consists of a specific group of people with particular characteristics found within your target market. Therefore, your market is a lot broader and not as narrowed down. For example, a target market would be women ages 18 to 26, while your target audience would narrow this down to women 18 to 26 who enjoy travel and fitness.

 

To find the right target audience, you must:

 

Outline the Demographics:

 

To start, you want to outline their demographics which includes:

 

  • Their age and gender
  • Place of work and yearly income
  • Relationship status
  • Ethnic background
  • Level of education
  • Where they live and visit

 

Pretty much any information you can think of to better narrow down your audience. While it can sound a little invasive, it is crucial to ensure you get the information out correctly.

 

For example, if you know most of your audience is located in California, you will have a better time launching your content with their pacific daylight time zone. Furthermore, it helps determine how or what content to create and where to put it. Finally, 18 to 26 are more likely on Instagram than Facebook to give you another example.

 

10 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience Better

 

Highlight their Psychographics and Pain Points

 

This section focuses on why they buy and can better help you communicate your message.

 

Questions that determine this include:

 

  • What common problems do they have?
  • How do they live? What is their lifestyle like?
  • What are their interests and hobbies?
  • What are their buying patterns and habits like?
  • How do they behave in your industry?
  • Do they like brands, and if so, which ones?

 

Compare Your Content and Services

 

Once you have your demographics and psychographics outlined, you can better understand what to create and who to put on your team. Next, you want to compare your products or services to the information you determined above to select your campaign and influencer type better. The most important is that they share your target audience. How big their following is does not matter if their engagement rate is low and their audience doesn’t have any interest in starting.

 

Anything in business, including influencer marketing, starts with your audience. If you can’t determine the right target audience, anything you do next will only lead to poor or inconsistent results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Why You Need To Mail Your List Regularly

I have a question for you. How often are you mailing your list? Do you sit down once a month to create a newsletter for your existing subscribers? Or are you waiting to reach a certain number of subscribers before you even start to mail? If so, I think you’re making a big mistake.

 

Mailing lists only work when you use them to get in touch with your subscribers regularly. If you wait too long, they’ll forget about you. When you’re no longer relevant or important to them, they’ll unsubscribe, or worse, mark your emails as spam. Yes, even if it is something they opted in to receive. People forget. It’s your job to stay on top of mind. And you do that by emailing them regularly.

 

Mailing once a week is a good start for most people. If you’re not crafting email messages for your readers regularly right now, start there. Send out a message and let your readers know what to expect. Good mailing lists are all about setting and meeting expectations. Tell them that you’re excited to kick things off and that you’ll have something fun and valuable stuff to share with them each week. If possible, set a date and time and tell them to keep an eye out for your emails. This will do wonders for your open rates. For example, you could tell them to look for a new message from you every Wednesday morning. Then deliver on that promise.

 

Meeting expectations builds trust. Not only are your subscribers more likely to stick around, open, and read your emails, they’ll also trust you when you make an offer or a recommendation. That means you’ll start to see more clicks and sales on your affiliate links, and of course higher conversions on your own product offers. Build that relationship with your target audience and move people from prospect to customer, and eventually to a raving fan by staying in touch regularly via email.

 

And here’s a little bonus tip. Ask your readers to share you with others. Every so often invite them to share your opt-in page or even ask them to forward one of your emails to people they know who may be interested in the topic. Keep it light and casual and don’t overdo it. You’ll be surprised how quickly your subscriber list will grow when you enlist the help of current readers.

 

To get started, commit to an email schedule. Start weekly and stick to it for a couple of months. Use the email schedule features of your autoresponder service to make sure it happens even if life gets crazy. Don’t miss an issue and work on building that reputation of being reliable and consistent and see what happens. I think you’ll be hooked.

How to Optimize Your Email Subject Lines

 

 

 

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How Does Consistency Affect Your Bottom Line

You want to be more productive, right? Get more stuff done. Make a lot of progress.

Start to move the bottom line to make your business more profitable. It’s the goal in some way, shape, or form for all of us. And most of us think we have to make some big leaps to get there.

But here’s the big secret. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you focus on consistency and do something to make progress every single day, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success.

Think back on the parable of the turtle and the hare. There’s a lot of truth in that old story and it applies to all areas of your life, including your business.

Yes, you can go all out and get a lot of work done all at once. There’s a time and place for that. For example, you may put long and hard hours in for a week or two to prepare for a new product launch, or when you’re first setting up your website. It shouldn’t be your default strategy. Why? Because you’ll burn out.

Burnout is a serious problem. Most entrepreneurs and small business owners have experienced it and it can take a long time to get over it.

A much better strategy – aside from those brief periods of hustle – is consistency. If you make an effort to get something done every single day, you’ll make a lot of progress in the long run.

Over the course of a year, you will go further and your business will grow more than if you overdo it and then go into a slump because you have no energy for anything else.

Remember, slow and steady wins the race. It’s much easier to motivate yourself to get something done that takes fifteen minutes and to do it every day, than something that takes you hours. It’s much easier to justify not doing something that’s hard or takes a long time.

Instead, keep it easy, make it fun, and get into the habit of doing it each and every day. In the long run, you’ll get a lot more done if you put in half an hour per day, six days a week, than working for two hours once or twice a week.

Habit is one way how consistency can help you grow your business.

But there’s something else that will work in your favor when you start to put in a small bit of effort every day.

You will start to build momentum that will carry you much further than you would have gotten otherwise. More on that in a future blog post.

I encourage you to shift your mindset towards a focus on consistency that will allow you to continue growing, expanding, and most importantly moving the needle in the right direction when it comes to your bottom line.

Do This to Be More Consistent in Life and Business

 

 

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Invest a Percentage of Your Income for Your Future

As you work on your daily habits that help safeguard your future, one of the daily habits that will pay off the most is learning to save and invest a percentage of your income for your future by habit. It’s hard to save money for the future if you’re not able to really think about the future much, but there is no willpower needed if you just think about what you’re doing today, and keep doing it as a matter of course, you’ll end up benefiting exponentially.

 

  • Determine Your Priorities – When you know what your priorities are today and into the future, through your life, it’s going to be much easier seeing your daily spending and savings goals.

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

  • Automate Investing and Saving – Once you have set up your goals, you can automate most of the process by having a percentage of your paycheck go directly to savings and investment accounts. If it’s never there to spend, you will be more likely to save it.

 

  • Avoid Consumer Debt – When you are setting up your daily habits, you know that avoiding consumer debt is an imperative for anyone who really wants to have a safe and stable future. Therefore, you don’t buy things without a daily plan for saving and spending.

 

  • Borrow Money Like Rich People Do – When and if you borrow money, only borrow it when you really don’t need it, and the interest rate is super low. If the rate is lower than what you can earn on your money, borrowing is smart. For example, if you qualify for a zero-interest car loan, why wouldn’t you?

 

  • Plan For Big Expenses – When you habituate your spending and saving, you will always plan for big expenses (and really all expenses) so that you’re never caught off guard. You will know that at this particular time in the future, you’re going to buy a thing, and you know how much you need to be saving daily to ensure it happens.

 

  • Plan for Emergencies – Even though it seems impossible, you can plan for potential emergencies, making them less tragic. In everyone’s life, they have things happen. People get sick. People get hurt. People lose their jobs. People even die. Plan for at least one emergency by saving six to eight months of living expenses in a liquid account.

 

  • Save All Windfalls – During a lifetime, you’re going to get monetary windfalls once in a blue moon for birthdays, inheritances, or bonuses and raises at work arrange for every single one to be saved or invested without even giving it a thought.

 

  • Take a Cooking Class – Most people waste money by eating out at restaurants and not even good ones. Decide to learn how to cook so that you can make good quality food at home.

 

  • Buy Experiences Not Stuff – When you do plan expenses, consider having more experiences and less stuff. When you spend money on an adventure, you always learn something that gives you value far beyond what you buy.

 

  • Track Your Efforts – Whatever you track and pay attention to is what will grow. Track your savings efforts by checking up on your accounts at least quarterly. This is important when you’re doing automatic deposits just to make sure it’s all working as planned.

 

When you start thinking of the daily habits you have as good things that automatically take care of your future, each day becomes a no-brainer. You just save money just because that’s what you do and not something difficult to do.

 

It’s part of your priorities and a driving force for your lifestyle, and that’s what you set up to be important. Do you see a method to the madness now? Set your goals, schedule the actions you need to take to reach your goals, and then simply live your life doing a little bit each day, and one day you’ll arrive in the future automatically, and all will be well.

 

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Learn to Laugh More Often

Sometimes you can make yourself feel happier and more successful by simply seeking out more laughter. A daily habit that will pay off big time is simply not taking life or yourself too seriously while finding ways to laugh about funny things even if they’re hard.

 

Developing the habit of laughter simply requires that you give yourself permission to laugh and let go and seek out more humor. Let’s look at several ways you can bring more laughter into your life.

 

  • Spend Time with Funny People – When you really want to feel light, there are likely people in your life that you can make sure you spend time with. When you hang out with funny people, it will rub off on you.

 

  • Try New Experiences Often – One way to bring laughter back into your life is to keep trying new things. When you open your life and mind to new experiences, you also open yourself up to funny things happening to you that are out of the norm of what might happen if you just do the same thing day in and day out.

Tips to Help You Practice Positive Thinking

  • Watch Your Favorite Funny Go to Sitcom or Movie – Sometimes, you have to pull out the big guns and watch a rerun of something that made you laugh when times were good. Bringing laughter back into your life in any way you can is a healthy habit that pays off for years to come.

 

  • See The Situation from a New Perspective – Everyone sees things from their own perspective and information bubble when you realize that you can become more like a child or a baby or a first-time parent by opening up your world to new ideas and perspectives.

 

  • Go to a Comedy Club Show – Choose the type of humor you like but burst through your comfort zone and go to a comedy show near you. You may not even realize that people still do comedy shows at clubs, and you don’t even have to put up with smoking nowadays if you don’t want to.

 

  • Understand Human Nature – When you know how humans really behave, on average, it’s a lot easier to see what is happening to you through the eyes of experience. When you understand that this is just how things are, it is way funnier than when you think it’s only happening to you.

 

The great thing about bringing more laughter into your life is that it pays off in numerous ways. It will lower the stress you’re experiencing, which will lessen your chances of experiencing stress-related diseases like obesity that lead to serious cardiovascular disease. Not only that, but it’s like you’re also doing a ton of sit-ups to your stomach muscles. It’s a way to get in shape that doesn’t feel like work at all.

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Eat One Meal a Week with Your Extended Family or Close Friends

One thing that is very important for your long-term happiness, even if you’re the biggest introvert alive, is the strength of your relationships within your family and your connection to the world at large. Study after study shows that maintaining a connection to others regularly is essential for health and happiness and is directly correlated with longevity.

Positive Attitude

A favored way to stay connected to someone is through sharing a meal. Everyone has to eat, and eating is an emotional experience for human beings. When you share an emotional experience with other humans, it connects you. This is probably why we’ve invented so many food-related holidays and even associate funerals with food.

 

Along with other positive ways to connect like phone calls, emails, and text messages – enjoying a regular meal with those who are important in your life, or those you desire to be important in your life, will make a huge difference in how connected you feel to them and how connected they feel to you.

 

If one of your long-term life goals is to have strong, loving, and powerful relationships, you know that focusing on the long term is the most effective way to impact this part of your life as it’s what you do over time that impacts today, and what you do today that impacts tomorrow. How your relationships feel about you will be about combining the last memorable connections weighted toward the last time you were together.

 

Since you understand this and want to start now forming daily habits that change your life and set you up for success, start setting aside one day a week, at a minimum, for enjoying a meal with someone in your extended family or to share a meal with someone outside of your family.

 

One week it might be that you enjoy lunch with Aunt Alice, and the next week it might be drinks and wings with a business connection – it’s okay to mix it up as long as you make it a habit to clear your schedule to enjoy a meal with someone outside your immediate family on a weekly basis.

 

This one addition to your calendar and act will keep you connected to the world at large and expose you to new ideas and thoughts, as well as solidify a deeper connection to those you choose to meet again and again. Plus, it may even push you out of your comfort zone and allow you space to discover new things and interests.

Write Down 3 Things You’re Grateful for Each Day

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Daily Mindset Habit: Own Your Own Happiness

Growing up watching stories about heroes saving others, or people finding their “other half,” or worse, watching your own family member waste away after the love of their life dies as if the life they have of their own is without value.

 

The truth is, love is great, and you should experience all the love you want to, in all its forms, but how other people feel about you should not define your happiness. You define your happiness, and it’s what you do or don’t do and ultimately how you feel about yourself that makes you happy or not happy.

 

Once you start practicing the daily mindset of owning your own happiness, the world will open up to you in ways that you may not have considered. To accomplish owning your own happiness, practice each of these attitudes each day.

 

Accept Yourself

 

Getting to know you also means that at some point, you have to accept who you are, flaws and all. That doesn’t mean you use the flaws as an excuse. No – instead, you discover ways to overcome the flaws. If you’re short, you get a stair step to help, and you don’t give up.

 

No one is suggesting that you accept anything that is changeable about yourself. Whether through exercise or surgery, if you can change something and determine it’s important to change it, do so. Do it because you think it’s important. Otherwise, accept who you are as you are now.

 

Fix Yourself

 

As mentioned above, while you are self-accepting about things that you can’t change, after all, you’re born who you are born to be, and you cannot change much, but what you can change and do have control over is very powerful. When you identify things you don’t like that you can fix, decide right away to start fixing it by adding daily habits that help into your schedule.

 

For example, if you’re self-aware enough to realize that you tend to pack on extra weight around the middle, which is a health issue, and your long-term plans include living until you’re 90 despite your genetic predisposition to heart issues adding in daily heart-healthy activities, and eating a low-fat vegan diet will pay off big time over the years even though it feels like a very small change today.

 

Express Yourself

 

One thing that shows that a person has manifested into a complete adult human being is expressing who you are without shame and concern about other people’s feelings. This does not mean you lack empathy either, and it simply means that you don’t ask permission to be who you are, and you’re not afraid to set boundaries surrounding how people behave around you.

 

The way this may look in your schedule today is a 30-minute anti-anxiety meditation session an hour before you meet up with your mother-in-law. You want a good relationship with her. You know it’s contentious, so you do all you can to calm yourself before the meeting, and then you’re in the best possible position to have a good day.

 

Finally, the more you value yourself, the happier you’re going to allow yourself to become. People who value their time and themselves aren’t afraid to say no to what they have no joy in doing. They are not people-pleasers, they’re self-pleasers, but they have a high level of morality too in that they’re empathetic to others, but they’re not going to be used or walked on.

 

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Daily Mindset Habit: Value Your Time Over Everything Else

If you’ve ever been told that you have the same 24 hours as the next person, pay close attention to this post and take this daily mindset habit idea to heart. A mindset of the rich that differs from their non-rich counterparts is that the rich tend to place a high value on their time.

 

Time Not Money is Finite

 

We love acting like money, and certain natural resources are so limited, but the truth is, it’s time and not money that is finite. And due to money, you can actually buy other people’s time, thus placing a higher value on your time than theirs.

 

For example, if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour because that’s how much your boss pays you or how much you bill your clients, why would you wait in a 30-minute line to return a $10 item? Likewise, why would you spend an hour grocery shopping when you can pay someone enabling you to earn more money?

 

Calculate The Worth of Your Time

 

Part of the problem is that most people have never calculated the worth of their time. They know how much their boss pays them, or they know how much they want to bill their clients, but often these numbers are completely arbitrary and are simply the “going rate” that is not based on reality either. In fact, if more people established the worth of their time based on reality, they’d demand a lot more money from their employers.

 

Most HR departments use the number of 2080 yearly hours to designate full-time work. So even if you’re on a salary, they’re going to say that you earn your paycheck by working full time, which is equal to 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, for a total of 2080 hours.

 

This HR department magic number ends up on the companies compensation records as part of the benefits of the job and health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and other compensation. This is a great place for you to start figuring how much your time is worth but doesn’t consider the entire picture. After all, if you’re on salary, you don’t work only 40 hours a week.

 

So, to calculate your hourly worth, let’s focus on what you would like your life to be like, not what it currently is. If you want a specific lifestyle, go ahead, and add up what that would really cost. Then add in how much you want to work, not how much you do work, and that is your hourly worth even if you’re not there yet.

 

For example, if you want to earn 120K a year before taxes by working 20 hours a week, that equates to only 1040 hours of work a year, making your hourly worth over $115 an hour. Knowing this, since you don’t love mowing your lawn, you should jump at the chance of paying Billy down the street $50 bucks a week to keep your lawn nice because it’s worth it to you based on how much your time is really worth according to your life design.

 

Some Things Are Priceless

 

One thing the rich have figured out that hasn’t been passed down to the masses is that some things are priceless. Your child’s birth, their first birthday, kindergarten graduation, and anything that takes you away from those types of things – the things that will never happen again – should come at a much higher price and even be considered priceless. When you start to think of your own time as priceless and irreplaceable, productivity becomes almost automatic because you know there is no time to waste.

 

When you truly understand not only the value of your time, but the probability of the length of your life, and how you cannot go back in time, or forward, and that you only have right now – when you really get that – it becomes so much easier to habitually value your time above all else – because your time is the most precious thing you have. You cannot get it back once squandered.

 

How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

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Learn The SMART Goal Making Process

Proper goal setting is one of the most important skills you can learn in terms of how much goodness it’ll add to your life. By learning this goal-setting system, you’ll gain a sense of direction so that you can organize your resources in a way that helps you reach your goals.

 

When you craft a SMART goal, the way you phrase the goal helps you focus on what’s important so that you can make decisions about the actions you’re taking in a way that impacts your goal. Not only that, but the goal also provides the motivation you need to take the small daily actions toward success.

 

Example of a SMART Goal: “By Sunday night, I’m going to increase my total weekly word count from 7000 words to 10,000 words a week by adding 427 words a day to my normal daily 1000-word goal.”

 

  • Specific – The goal you set has to be very precise in order to help the person reading the goal understand and become certain about the expected impact or deliverables. Ask yourself questions to get this right, such as: What am I doing, why am I doing it, what do I need to do it right?

 

  • Measurable – As you craft the goal, you also need to use numbers that allow you to judge whether or not you’re reaching your objectives. Numbers like time, range, weight, steps, and so forth all make sense.

 

  • Attainable – Don’t bother setting impossible goals. If you have never walked an hour a day in your life, don’t start with that as your goal. Instead, start with five minutes and then craft a plan to add on a minute a day until you reach your goal of walking an hour a day.

 

  • Relevant – Also, each goal that you make has an overarching objective you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if you’re trying to write a novel writing the words is just one aspect of the novel publishing goal, but it is directly related.

 

  • Timely – Never leave a goal timeline open-ended. Even if you have to adjust the timeframe due to reality, the truth is we all fill up the time we give ourselves. If you give yourself three hours to check the mail, you’re going to take three hours. Tighten up your timelines to create a schedule that includes structured action that is easy to habituate – no motivation needed.

 

As you craft your goals, consider who will do the actions that help you reach the goal and think about what you really want to accomplish. When you do that and create a realistic time frame for it all to be done, you’re more likely actually to achieve the results you want and need.

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity