Tag: positive attitudes

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How to Track Your Influencer Marketing ROI

When you engage an influencer to help you market your product and services, you must track the metrics just like anything else you do in your business. The only way you can be sure that action A causes result C is that you tracked and measured it.

 

Determine Your Campaign Goals

 

Before setting a realistic budget, you need to understand your goals for each campaign clearly. You will have different requirements for every goal, which means the costs associated and return on investment for each product will vary. Working with a micro-influencer will fees significantly less than working with a macro influencer, for example.

 

For example, you may have the goal of getting more subscribers to your e-mail list. If so, what exactly will that require? It’ll require giving the audience a reason to click through and sign up, for one thing. What else? Make sure you know and match all goals with the requirements.

 

Identify Key Performance Metrics

6 WAYS YOU CAN TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

Your goal needs to be clear and direct for each campaign to determine what key performance metrics to keep track of. This way, you have a more accurate representation of your return on investment. Tracking the wrong indicators like sales volumes when your main goal is brand exposure will provide inconsistent results.

 

While exposure can translate into more sales, it is better to keep track of your audience growth, engagement rate, or new versus return visitors before, during, and after the campaign. The point is to make sure you are watching the specific metrics that reflect your goal. For sales, keep tracking affiliate links, promotion codes.

 

Highlight Individual Campaign Expenses

 

What supporting details or materials do you need to run the campaign? Product costs, travel costs, influencer fees, agency fees, and more. You must first determine the influencer strategy or content you want to create to know what you need to budget for the campaign.

 

Track, Compare and Evaluate

 

You should keep track of all data before any campaign starts. If you don’t pull key performance metrics first, you won’t know if the results are really translating into a positive return. The only way to be certain of effectiveness is to check the metrics before, during, and after.

 

Your return on investment will be as good as your due diligence. Do your research and find the right influencers who offer the best services for the budget you have. The more you work with others in this regard, the more effective you’ll become over time. You’ll be able to use the numbers to figure out what is working and do more of that.

 

 

 

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Six Tips to Communicating and Collaborating with Influencers

Nearly 63% of top brand marketers have reported working with ten or more influencers at one time. Further making proper communication and collaboration paramount to your success. Every business should already understand the value of appropriate communication and take steps to learn how to do so for each goal and department of their organization, especially when it comes to marketing and communicating to your target audience.

 

Here are six tips to establishing proper communication with any influencer:

 

Keep Communication Type Consistent

 

If your influencer works mostly through e-mail, keep all the conversations there. However, if you work with several influencers, try to find one platform to keep everything organized. For example, you don’t want to talk to one influencer through Instagram directly while talking to another on Facebook directly.

 

Eventually, it will get too unorganized as you continue to add influencers to your team. Imagine if you had ten influencers on your team, each using a different channel or software to communicate. Over time this can get confusing and disorganized, easily providing an opportunity for missed information. Not a sustainable relationship for anyone.

 

Provide a Clear Plan or Roadmap

 

Tell the influencer exactly what you need and how their content can benefit your company. Highlight your goals and the metrics you are hoping to gain from the partnership. Be as clear as possible, ask questions and always follow up to ensure they know what the plan is or provide the influencer an opportunity to ask questions or offer suggestions.

 

Keep Communication Open

 

Allow space for your influencer to provide their opinion and be open to new ideas. The one thing that makes influencer marketing so great is its unique content. They also understand their audience and how they will react to certain information better than you would. They want to see success just as much as you. If they don’t produce the results needed, they will be without a contract or revenue.

 

Form an Authentic Relationship

 

Just because it is business does not mean you can’t form genuine and strong relationships with influencers—the more authentic the connection, the better the content. If you truly care about each other, you won’t have any problems working together and getting the results you both need. So start engaging with their content and following all their social media pages. Like and comment on their posts and treat them just like any other friend or customer. Not only will the influencer appreciate it, but their audience will too.

 

Schedule Content Creation Time Together

Important Questions to Ask Before You Work with An Influencer

Brainstorm new ideas or content to use for the campaign together. Be open to creativity and innovation. The influencer is here to create content, so be sure they are involved during this process.

 

While you need certain information to be shared with their audience, this doesn’t mean it has to be a sales pitch or read from a script. The influencer knows how their audience digests information so let them do the bulk of the content creation. Just be sure to provide them any supporting materials and information they need. You need to guide them and educate them on your products and services, not micromanage them.

 

Create Personalized Incentives or Gifts

 

Send products or create unique promotion codes personalized to each influencer. The more you treat your influencer as an individual with their own feelings and thought processes, the better the relationship altogether. Don’t treat them like a corporation and dehumanize them.

 

Overall, taking the necessary steps to communicate with your influencer properly is vital to your campaign and collaboration success. Use these important tips the next time you reach out to an influencer.

 

 

 

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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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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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Cultivate The Daily Habit of Asking for Help

Emulating what rich folks do isn’t always best for people who want to live a principled and moral life. However, you can learn how to give yourself an advantage by studying what rich people do differently from what poor people do. When morality and reality collide, it’s a sign that the habit is one that you need to incorporate into your daily life.

 

One super clear thing is that rich people are not afraid to ask for help. Of course, many rich people do not even realize how much support they get, but let’s think about this and then let’s find ways to cultivate the habit of asking for help in your life that is both moral and enriching.

 

Do Not Trade Hours for Dollars

 

While most people you hire will often provide an hourly rate, when you get paid for something, don’t charge by the hour. Instead, figure out what the value of the service is to the recipient and charge what the market will allow. A lot goes into being able to offer the service such as education, experience, connections, and so forth that differentiates you from the next person.

 

Perception, time, education, experience (and so forth) is the reason someone like Bill Gates can command a year’s average salary for a short speech, or a surgeon can charge six figures for an 8-hour procedure – it’s not just about the time. Never has been, but it’s something often taught to the average person to justify low wages.

 

Delegate To Willing Family Members

 

I don’t mean to be stereotypical so if I’m wrong, let me know in the comments, but this advice will probably resonate most with the women. Men are really good at delegating tasks to family members despite their net worth. Women are not as good at doing that, although the habit, according to research, is more prevalent in higher-income earners.

 

We can argue about it, but the best course of action is to think about and narrow it down to only considering what you can control and what you cannot control. You can only control your actions and reactions to things. You can’t control someone else at all. So, if you are feeling resentful in any way against your family because you feel like you are taking on too much work at home, speak up and start delegating just like other confident people do.

 

Outsource To Experts

 

When money is not a concern, the things you spend your money on are different than when you are struggling. Those who are struggling tend to spend more on housing, healthcare, and food, while those in higher tax brackets spend more on experiences and downtime than the necessities of life. However, even so, they are more productive, and this is because they aren’t afraid to outsource to experts to let them do what they do, giving them more free time to have amazing mind-opening experiences. Of course, having time to experience more fun and joy increases their perception of happiness. Set income benchmarks that signal time to outsource all the things you don’t need to be doing to meet those goals and beyond.

 

If you don’t like doing something, stop doing it. Don’t be ashamed of not wanting to clean your own toilet. There is someone out there who values their toilet cleaning skill and who wants nothing more than to be paid good money to clean your bathroom. The same can be said about literally anything in life. If you like doing it, keep doing it. If you don’t like doing it, stop doing it and find someone willing to trade something with you to do it, either money or something else of value.

 

How to Outsource to Save You More Time

 

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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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Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

When you start making the good things you do into habits, suddenly everything you want to change seems easy. Want to lose weight? Just eat 100 fewer calories a day, move an hour a day, and while the change won’t be noticeable or hard to stick to, the results over a long time, such as a year, will be dramatic.

 

  • Start Your Day with Uplifting Music – Even if you think you like listening to negative music to get your anger out, the truth is that it does affect your mind and inform your thoughts. There is a time and place for everything, so first thing in the morning, feed your mind with positive music. It can help to pick one pick me up song that works no matter what to listen to.

 

  • Reframe Roadblocks as Challenges – How you think of things and word things makes a difference in how you react. If you can use positive language to reframe the things that get in your way or threaten to get in your way, you’ll naturally teach yourself how to overcome them.

 

  • Use Positive Words to Frame Your Life – When you are talking about your life, even if something is less than perfect, use positive language to talk about it or think about it. When you do that, it will make you feel more satisfied and happier with your life.

 

  • Ignore Other People’s Drama – Whether it’s work-related, HOA-related, or family-related if the drama isn’t something you have any control over, you want to ignore it. You only have control over one person, yourself, not anyone else. The more you realize and accept that, the less bothered you’ll be about the drama going on in the world.

 

  • Fill Your Mind with Hopeful Thoughts – It’s natural to sometimes go toward the negative, but you can change that by purposefully filling your mind with hopeful thoughts about the world and your own personal life.

 

  • Keep a Gratitude Journal – Each evening, write down three things you are grateful for that happened today. This is going to help you focus on the positive even as you sleep tonight.

Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

  • Tell One Person or Organization Thank You Each Day – It’s one thing to write about your thankfulness in your private journal, but how about letting someone in your life know that they are important to you. People like getting told that they did something good. They’ll remember you.

 

  • Surround Yourself with Other Positive People – While shunning others doesn’t come off as all that positive, the more you surround yourself with those who are also positive, the more you’ll feel positive. It’s really just another version of the whole “birds of a feather” idea, and while it’s a stereotype, it’s mostly true.

 

  • Focus On Mindfulness – One thing that breeds discontent more than almost anything is expectations and living in another time, whether the past or the future. The more you can focus on what you are experiencing right now, the more satisfaction in life you’re going to feel.

 

Nothing here takes more than a few moments of your time each day, but if you tie the behavior to something you do each day, you can turn positive thinking into a habit grounded in reality and fuel your life in a positive direction.

 

 

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Daily Habits to Get Smarter: Read Daily For At Least 15 Minutes

One stat about reading you should know is that people who read at least 15 minutes a day are happier, more successful, and of course, they know more. Finding an hour to read might be hard for busy folks, but everyone can find 15 minutes to read. In order to build this habit of reading each day, simply follow these tips.

Invest in More Training and Education

  • Choose Long and Challenging Books – When you incorporate this reading practice, you don’t want to use your 15 minutes of reading articles on the internet. Instead, choose challenging and interesting books for this particular challenge, such as the philosophy greats or something college level you want to learn.

 

  • Make a List of Books to Read – After you’ve set the criteria for the books you want to read, make a list of them. Put them in order of your interest. It can help to figure out what’s coming up in your life so that you can read things that help you with your current reality, but you don’t have to.

 

  • Schedule The Reading Time – You’ve read at least once about the importance of scheduling in everything you want to do each day, and reading for 15 minutes is no different. If you schedule a time and make it into a ritual, it’ll become a habit faster than if you just go by the seat of your pants.

 

  • Create a Comfortable Reading Space – You’ll need a good place to sit so that you can comfortably read the book using good posture. You’ll also need good lighting so you can see the words on the page or tablet. A table to put a drink, a place to put up your feet, good lighting, and temperature-controlled will ensure that you don’t feel tortured while reading.

 

  • Keep Dictionaries Nearby – You don’t want to interrupt your reading to find the dictionary or other manuscripts that can help you understand, so keep these in your reading area.

 

  • Keep a Reading Log or Journal – After you’ve finished your 15 minutes of reading, it can also help you log what you read and your thoughts about it. You can just log the time, or you can log your thoughts too. It’s up to you.

 

  • Get In Extra – Keep a book in your purse or car that you can pull out and read whenever you want to. It doesn’t need to be the same book you’re reading during your 15 minutes of daily reading, but a book you want to read that is easy to leave for a time and come back to, using wait time in a good way.

 

Choose a list of books to read during your daily 15 minutes that are long, well written, books that are philosophical like The Bible, The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner, or Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche. It’s up to you but make them challenging books that need more study beyond the main text for understanding. Not only will you experience more success in life, but you’ll feel happier about it too.