Tag: Motivation

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Common Business Problems that Building a Community Can Solve

If you are struggling to build your business and looking for ways to improve, building an online or brand community may be the best solution. In fact, it is likely the tool you’ve needed all along.

 

The following are five common business problems building a community can solve:

 

Poor Return on Investment

 

While email lists, advertisements, and your blog are all fabulous ways to generate interest in your offers, there is nothing more effective than truly getting to know your customers more intimately. If your ROI is not what you want it to be, but your customers are otherwise satisfied, a brand community can help you fix that problem.

 

You can create the community free or for a fee. It’s up to you. It really does depend on your niche and your business model, but you can test out various ways to run your community. Once you have a captive audience that you can communicate with regularly, they will start buying more, and your ROI will improve.

 

Poor Cashflow and Intermittent Revenue

 

Whether you provide services or products, or you’re an affiliate with no products of your own, if you work within a particular niche, your income is likely not consistent if you have not built a community of avid and hungry buyers. Having a membership-based community, whether paid or free, can stabilize your cash flow like nothing else.

 

In your communities, you can offer them the first peek at new products and services, get more feedback, receive more customer reviews, and even get your members to become brand advocates and recommend you to others much easier than you can without having a community.

 

Poor Credibility, Trust, and Awareness

 

Communities humanize businesses, and once that happens, your audience will start trusting you more. The credibility that you end up with after creating more awareness through community building will jumpstart your creative juices and end up helping you become even better in the eyes of your customer base due to all the inside knowledge you’ll gain by being part of your community.

 

Poor Business Growth and Stagnation

 

If you have grown as far as you can with what you are doing, consider building a community. An active and engaged community can really boost your growth and end the stagnation you’re experiencing. Even if you haven’t sold a solitary product yet, building an active community will generate new revenue.

 

Finally, you can vastly improve your customer service by setting up an active and involved community. Not only will your members offer each other community peer-to-peer support, but you’ll also be much more in tune with what is going right and wrong and learn better ways to help your members in the way they desire.

 

 

Four Ways Community Building Improves Customer Service

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Eight Facebook Story Ideas for Increased Engagement

Creating Facebook stories is a fun and creative way to engage and interact with your target audience. However, suppose you want to stay ahead of your competition and get the most out of what Facebook can bring to your business. In that case, you need to take the time to craft compelling, interactive, and highly valuable stories.

 

Here are eight Facebook story ideas to try to increase your audience engagement and business success on this platform:

 

  • Ask a Thought-Provoking Question – One way to really boost engagement and action from your audience is to make them think. So ask a question without giving your answer, giving them time to respond. Then you can give them your solution that feels more conversational while also learning more about your audience gleaning information that can be used in the future for more content.

 

  • Share Something Behind-The-Scenes – Your true fans love finding out more about you. They like feeling like they’re VIPs getting a stage pass by getting a sneak peek into the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Show them how you set up for a shoot, or how you make your product, or whatever you want that you think they want to know. If you aren’t sure, ask them.

 

  • Use A Trendy Topic for Inspiration – While you do need to keep going with a thought-out content plan that is based on the future offerings, you also want to pay close attention to trending topics that you can create off the cuff by sharing your thoughts or otherwise engaging with your audience around that trend.

 

  • Share a Meme or Infographic – If you have no other ideas about what to share, look at your current offerings and grab a meme or develop an infographic from them to showcase parts of your message.

 

  • Tell a Real Story – Do you have a story to share relevant to your audience that they can learn from or even be entertained by engaging with it? Tell a real story about yourself or your business, or even a customer.

 

  • Showcase Popular Products – If you sell products, showcase them on your stories as if you’re doing a review for them. You can also do reviews for others if you’re an affiliate right on your stories.

 

  • Highlight Your Email Newsletter or Opt-In – Create a story all about your email newsletter or opt-in that you’ve created.

 

  • Have Fun with Staff or Influencer Takeovers – A really fun thing to do is let someone else take over your page, or you take over someone else’s page who markets to your audience a complementary product or service.

 

Test these Facebook story ideas to see what personal benefits they can provide to your business. Each idea may suit certain business goals or niches better, so it is important to get to know your target audience and take risks to understand them better. Just because one post doesn’t deliver the results you want or need doesn’t mean the next idea won’t, nor does it mean you have failed. A proper social media content plan includes being aware of where you need to improve and doing the work to get there.

 

How to Easily Crank out Content Daily

 

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Five Tips for Working with Micro-Influencers

When you start seriously thinking about working with influencers, your thoughts probably go to a huge influencer that you really love. You may imagine them using your product, and the experience goes viral, and you make a million bucks. This can happen but not without a good plan and a lot of money.

 

Top reasons to work with micro or nano influencers:

 

  • They are more affordable
  • They have a higher return on investment
  • Their audience is more loyal and targeted
  • They are more genuine and authentic

 

The following are five tips for working with micro-influencers to gain a higher return on investment:

 

Be Niche Specific

 

Because nano and micro-influencers have a specific target audience, you want to be sure their niche matches yours. In other words, their target audience must match yours for it to be successful.  

 

Always Allow Creative Freedom

 

Be sure to avoid micromanaging. Just because they are a smaller influencer does not mean they are not professional. Guide them with the proper product and business information and expectations, but always allow for creative freedom. They have the targeted audience and loyal following for a reason, their content. If you take over, it will quickly come off as ingenuine to their audience.

 

Research and Watch Their Engagement

 

Micro-influencers have more time to engage with their audience by responding to comments and offering a closer friendship-like experience for their audience and followers. Due to this feeling that the audience is close to the influencer, they are often more likely to take the influencer’s recommendations on what to buy.

 

Consider More Than One

 

When working with small influencers, one way to compensate for the smaller audience numbers is to work with more than one at a time for a rolling campaign. For example, choose five influencers with small audiences of 10 to 50 K each and have each influencer start their campaign on a slightly different date to get the ball rolling.

 

Compensate Fairly

 

Just because they have a smaller following, subscriber base, or audience does not mean they deserve to be well compensated. Avoid product-only compensation models if you can. Giving them more for sales and just for trying can really help encourage them to do more.

 

Working with micro-influencers may actually be more beneficial for you if you have a smaller budget. Plus, studies show that micro-influencers have more responsive audiences than huge influencers anyway.

The Do’s and Don’ts to Influencer Marketing

 

 

 

 

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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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Developing The Habit of Doing

Whenever you set up your schedule, there may be things you put on your schedule that you don’t want to do, or try to avoid doing, which can lead to procrastination and other problems. If you want to stop allowing this to happen, there are some strategies you can put in place that help you develop the habit of doing.

 

Schedule Everything

 

How you arrange your calendar makes all the difference. Most people only put work and appointments in their calendars. Put everything you want to do in your calendar, from lunch with your spouse to ladies’ night out with friends to a picnic with your daughter. If you’re going to get it done, it has to be in the schedule, or it won’t happen.

 

Schedule Properly

 

When you do create your schedule, it’s not going to help to list the things you want to do without knowing how long you’ll take, where you’ll do it, how you’ll do it, and more. This requires research. Scheduling properly includes considering the real amount of time you will take and where and how you’ll do it.

 

Understand That Perfection Does Not Exist

 

Sometimes putting something off is done to save face. You think that you’re not good at doing it, so you put it off. The thing is, no one is perfect. As long as you do things according to directions, the best you can do is better than not done but done never means perfect.

 

Results Matter More Than Intention

 

You mean to do the thing. Truly really mean to. Then fail anyway. But if you didn’t do it when you said you would, whether you told yourself or someone else, you’re going to feel guilty. Why put yourself in a position of guilt to start with? If something is that bad, and you can do it, outsource it. Until then, just do it.

 

Do It for Two Minutes

 

Sometimes all you really need is to get started. If you’ve done a good job with your schedule, it’s not going to be that hard for you to use rote memorization to get going and get started. You don’t even need to assign a feeling to it. Just start doing it for two minutes, and if you still don’t want to do it after that, you can stop.

 

Plan For Breaks

Scheduling to Avoid Burnout: Learn to Take More Breaks

When you are doing anything that you dislike doing, don’t torture yourself. Yes, get it done as soon as possible according to your needs but don’t make yourself do the thing you hate for 8 hours when it’s not necessary. Plan for breaks and try to give yourself incentives along the way.

 

The fact is, whenever you need to get something done, simply doing it will take less time and cause less stress than all the gymnastics most people do when they try to avoid something. If you just get it done, you’ll be able to move on. Make this a habit by creating better schedules and then just getting it done. After all, if it’s running through your mind, it’s taking up space that can be used in a much more creative way if you just finish it.

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Daily Organizational Habit: Make Your Bed Each Morning

Developing daily habits that take care of your environment keeping it uncluttered is useful for multiple reasons. One, because your home and office will generally be cleaner if you’re committed to daily organization, but secondly because the action creates a transition for your day that can trigger more good behavior all day long, thus increasing your happiness and satisfaction level.

 

  • The Action Creates Transition in Your Mind – When you take the time to clean your room in the morning and make your bed, the action will serve to give you a little more of a wake-up than just leaving the bed messy.

 

  • You’ll Feel Accomplished – The ten minutes it takes to make your bed well will also make you feel more accomplished, and when you start your day feeling like you’re succeeding, it sets you up for even more success.

 

  • Productivity Will Increase for The Day – When you do something productive right away, the feel-good hormones will take over a bit, thus helping motivate you to do even more useful stuff the rest of the day.

 

  • Less Clutter and Mess Means Less Stress – Science has already proven that no one thrives in a cluttered environment. While we can debate what constitutes clutter and disorganization, if it feels organized to you and less messy, it’ll serve the same effect of making you feel less stressed.

 

  • Everything Will Become Cleaner – When you start cleaning things for five or ten minutes at a time, like with bed making, it’s just natural that you’re going to clean other things around the bed. You’re going to put your night clothing away, put anything dirty in the hamper, and probably even notice the dust building on your headboard sooner than if you did not make your bed daily.

 

  • Bedmaking Gives a Reason to Perform Useful Body Movements – Many people are worried about exercising, but some of your workouts can be completed by doing housework. It’s good for your body to stretch to make your bed and bend and pull to get the sheets on. It’s a great two-minute morning workout to wake you up and get the blood pumping that serves dual purposes.

 

  • The Habit Starts a Pattern of More Good Habits – Human nature is such that when you make good choices, more good choices seem to come easy, but when you make one choice, your brain deems ‘bad’ it’s harder to get back on the horse. Start your day positively, and you set yourself up for more positivity.

 

  • Your Home Should Be Your Retreat – So often, especially if you have to work a full-time job under someone else’s hours and rules, we forget that our home is supposed to be our safe place to fall and let it get disorganized and even dirty. But if you want to feel better about yourself and your life, no matter what type of home you live in now, organize it and keep it clean, and you’re going to feel better about everything.

 

To make it more fun to make your bed each morning, make your bedroom a retreat from the world. Invest in the best bedding and mattress you can afford to buy and make it beautiful and comfortable according to your desires and needs. You shouldn’t need to go to a hotel to have an amazing sleeping experience, and making your bed is just part of that effort that will improve your life in amazing ways.

Organization Is A Daily Requirement

 

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How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

Setting up the right workflows and process are essential to proper time management and the success of your business. When you create repeatable workflows, you can better improve the quality of your work and stay consistent, saving you more time and energy in the long run. They establish proper communication habits and increase your confidence as you more easily glide through your day and accomplish more goals.

 

Establishing proper workflows allows you to more easily highlight the areas that need to be improved or eliminated—in return, saving you time to be more creative and innovative within your industry and business. In other words, repeatable workflows allow you to optimize the way you conduct business so you can more smoothly accomplish your goals without delay or frustration.

 

The following are five tips to creating repeatable workflows that improve your productivity:

 

Understand Your Full Needs and Requirements

When it comes to creating a successful workflow, you can’t miss any details. Block out time to really focus on this and list your full needs and requirements for the objectives you want to accomplish. Start with the most important areas of your business first, then work your way down not to overwhelm yourself.

 

Keep It Simple and Standardize

One of the many faults of any workflow is that it is too bulky and tries to be innovative in places it’s not needed. Trim down any unnecessary fat that causes delays and confusion and find better ways to streamline the process. Start with the tried-and-true methods first, then adapt later when you have made a consistent effort first.

 

Physically Map It Out with A Flowchart

Write down one major task required for your business in the center of a document or physical piece of paper, then draw a circle around it. For example, new customer set up or product purchase.

 

Then draw arrows out that direct you to each required step of the process, including the resources needed and who will complete the project, just like a mind map for brainstorming but with a specific direction and set of instructions. The idea is to create a visual and scannable chart so you can more easily see where you need to adjust, streamline, or add more information.

 

Document and Analyze

Add controls and benchmarks so you can measure and analyze the success of your workflow. Something certain in life is change. Businesses need to adjust at a moment’s notice to stay successful. The state of constant change highlights the importance of blocking out time to evaluate your processes, business plan, and long-term goals.

Project Management Tools to Try

The path to success requires consistent and continued action, and repeatable workflows allow you the freedom and ability to do just that.

 

 

 

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If You Don’t Set Hard Deadlines, Plan to Fail

If you feel like you can never get anything done and constantly run against the clock, you are likely skipping one of the most essential details of any to-do list or 90-day action plan. If you don’t set hard deadlines, then you are setting yourself up to fail from the start.

 

Deadlines are crucial to a successful plan because they:

 

  • Ensure you complete the right work to accomplish your goals.
  • Establish consistency, organization, and a smooth workflow.
  • Clarify your expectations and responsibilities.
  • Maximizes success and productivity.

 

In other words, when you set clear deadlines and stick to them, you can better use your time to focus on your goals and achieve more in life. When you are not constantly running to beat the clock, you maintain your energy and improve productivity.

 

Here are a few ways to create deadlines you will always stick to, to achieve maximum productivity: 

 

Gain and Understand the Right Resources First

Understand all the expectations required of you, what extra materials you may need, and any other obstacles that may get in your way before you establish a deadline.

 

Make Them Urgent but Realistic

Once you fully understand the expectations set a deadline that pushes you to act without feeling overwhelmed and is realistic to the task you are doing. While also accounting for the unexpected. This step will require your full attention, honesty, and accountability.

 

If you can’t be honest with your actions and abilities, you won’t estimate the correct times to accomplish your takes. For example, if you know you usually take about two hours to do a specific task, don’t expect you to get it done in an hour, even if you think you can do it or be better overnight. If you do happen to get things done faster, take note of it, find a new task to work on instead or take a much-deserved break.

 

Make Them Personal and Meaningful

Instead of telling yourself, you need to meet the deadline simply to be on time for the project, highlight a better and more meaningful reason to complete it on time. To harness even more power, make it as personal as possible.

 

For example, “if I don’t complete this assignment on the date I established, I will miss free time with my friends and family.” Even though this isn’t about your business directly, it is precisely the motivation you will need to stay on track. If you are more likely to suffer consequences, you are less likely to fall off track.

Be More Accountable and Consistent, Share Your Goals

As you can see, the correct deadlines are there to motivate you and give you the discipline you need to get work done in a timely and orderly fashion as long as you stick to them.

 

 

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The Impact of Music on Productivity

Research shows that music can provide many benefits to your brain and overall cardiovascular health. It can increase your blood flow, making it easier to concentrate and relax. Increased blood flow protects your brain from memory loss, allows you to de-stress, and reduces inflammation that can damage your body’s healthy cells over time.

How to Find Your Most Productive Hours

Music even works the other way around for high blood pressure due to illness or stress. The key to music and productivity is that it makes you happier. It is creating a positive spiraling effect throughout your day.

 

Music impacts your productivity in many different ways, including: 

 

  • Boosts your performance and accuracy.
  • Improves your focus, motivation, and inspiration.
  • It releases dopamine improving your mood.
  • It stimulates your brain and improves your energy levels.

 

Music can be incredibly beneficial, however, too much of it, or wrong implementation, just like anything, can have detrimental effects.

 

Tips to keep in mind when playing music:

 

Choose the Right Song

Find the tune that is right for you and the work you are doing. If the tempo is wrong for your needs, you can accidentally make a mistake. If the song is too slow, you will soon see yourself at the same pace or fall asleep; too fast, and you may start dancing instead of working. You must pay attention to your feelings and the thoughts that are going on for the music to work on your side.

 

Be Mindful of Your Tasks

In other words, some tasks require your complete and undivided attention to do safely and correctly. Be mindful of which tasks you are doing and carefully evaluate them to ensure your music doesn’t prevent you from doing your best.

 

Take Notice When It’s Not Working

Music only works if the person who is listening to it likes it. Keep this in mind. If you slow down because the tempo is slow, or it irritates you, or even because you like it too much, immediately change the music or request to turn it off, just like with anything, especially technology – it only works if the user knows how to use it and pays attention to their actions while being mindful.

 

Make Sure It Promotes Happiness

While it may not feel like it, the music is actually what’s making you productive. It’s the fact that the music is making you feel and be happier. This is why it’s so important to pick the right song and keep it personal. If it doesn’t make you happy, you likely will slow down and produce the opposite results.

 

As you can see, as long as you pick the right music, it can lead to happier and more productive days. Next time you get to work, put on a good steady beat and see just how much faster you get things done.

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Deprioritize Non-Essential Tasks: Know What’s Important

Proper time management skills, high productivity, and achieving your goals all require knowing when and how to deprioritize. Just because you do everything or are extremely busy every day does not mean you are being most productive or will be successful one day.

 

Efficiency and high productivity stem from understanding that the effort you put in should equal the same or more output. Every time you work, if your actions don’t chip away at your tasks helping you reach your goals, you are not the most productive – you’re just busy.

 

The following tips will help you learn to deprioritize the right tasks so you can run a more successful business:

 

Goals First Tasks Later

In other words, when you create your daily to-do list, you should keep in mind your goals first. For example, don’t organize your day to leave easy tasks last unless it makes sense for your business and overall plan for that day. Think about your most important goal, then organize your actions or tasks around it.

 

Understand the Value of Your Time

Twenty-four hours a day may seem like a lot when you look at it numerically, but it goes by quite fast in realistic terms. For eight hours, you need to sleep, and then you only get sixteen hours left to share between work, friends, family, fun experience, and your life.

 

You can’t be bogged down constantly by things that don’t matter when you don’t have that much time to spare between everything and everyone. Highlight the essential tasks that get you closer to your dreams. Learn when to say no. Remember, you are missing opportunities when you spend all your time on one thing.

 

Start with The Most Obvious

What brings you pain, discomfort, and anxiety? Are there people in your life that only bring you stress and frustration?

 

Be sure the answers to these questions are not the first thing you are trying to do each day. For example, if a friend only keeps you distracted from your goals, stop going to breakfast with them every morning or being around them in general.

 

They are not worth your time and value. If you know checking emails, first thing in the morning will throw off your whole day, leave them for last or outsource it. Just because you put something at the bottom of your list doesn’t mean you can’t get back to it eventually or let someone else handle it.

The Secrets to Time Management and Why You Need It

In the end, if you want to have more time to focus on the things that truly matter to you, then take a moment to evaluate each area of your life and make sure your focus is on the right priorities. Start with your calendar right now. Are they a good use of your time?