Tag: schedule

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What You Need to Know to Start a Podcasting Business

The podcasting industry is growing fast, with a growth rate of just over ten percent in 2021. What’s more, nearly sixty percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four in America listen to podcasts monthly. Moreover, audio is highly digestible, convenient, and shareable by many people around the world.

 

Many folks love to listen to podcasts while commuting to work or while doing other important tasks. The podcast is an easy reach for busy consumers. Just like any content on the Internet, you can turn it into a highly profitable business with the right resources, information, and strategies.

 

To start and run a profitable podcasting business, you’ll need to:

 

Invest in Proper Equipment

Unfortunately, you will not be able to get started without proper equipment, including a desktop or laptop computer and a professional microphone. While you can create a podcast on your cell phone, it won’t have the quality many listeners are looking for. Therefore, by far the most important equipment to invest in is a microphone. You want to offer your listeners the best possible sound; otherwise, they will turn away.

 

Know Your Niche and Target Audience

Finding your niche or topic within the podcast industry is crucial if you want to market your business effectively. Those who offer a broad range of topics have difficulty growing their audience as they reach many people. Narrowing down on a niche allows you to grow a community more effectively.

 

Pick a Consistent and Convenient Schedule

To further grow your community, you need to find a schedule that you can be consistent with, and that is convenient to your target audience. For example, if you know your listeners are likely to tune in around five in the afternoon on the weekdays, it is more convenient for you to start your podcast show at these exact hours. Trying to go against your target audience’s schedule obviously won’t grab their attention as you need it.

 

Don’t Skip the Website or Email List

Successful podcasts have effective and highly managed websites and email lists. These two tools are vital to growing and finding your audience. These sources serve as a resource for your audience when you are not live-streaming a podcast. The more places you are online, even when not live, the easier it is to grow an audience.

 

Create Engaging and Valuable Content

Finally, the most important piece to a successful podcast includes content. Be sure it is relevant to your target audience and provides value in some way. Do the research you need to learn about what your audience struggles with the most and then provide tips on how to solve it. The more problems you can solve and the value you can provide to your audience, the more successful you will be.

 

Overall, podcasting is a viable business model as long as you have the proper equipment, consistent and convenient schedule, and valuable content to share. Engaging and growing your audience is key if you want to run a profitable podcasting business.

 

 

 

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Four Top Benefits to Using YouTube and YouTube Stories

Getting noticed against the massive online competition can make any small business feel overwhelmed and inadequate. However, a tool can make it easier to get noticed and be seen as an authority within your niche or industry. This can be done by creating and starting a well-run and quality YouTube channel. Eventually, once you gain ten thousand subscribers, you can unlock the story feature to better market to your target audience and reach even more followers or subscribers.

 

Here are more benefits to using YouTube and their stories feature for business:

 

To Get a Chance to Market to Nearly One Billion Monthly Users

 

Using YouTube gives you a low-cost and sometimes free way to reach a global audience depending on the tools or resources you need to create a high-quality and valuable video.

 

To Rank Higher on Googles Search Engine Results Page

 

The main power of YouTube relies on the fact that it is a search engine. The second-largest just behind Google. Even better is that Google owns YouTube, meaning your long-form content video will rank well when people search from Google. It is essentially the same engine. Did you know nearly ninety percent of clicks made after a Google search are from the first ten organic results? So reaching the first page and near the top is an important goal when creating your videos.

 

To Grow Your List and Traffic to Your Website

 

Stories are essential to YouTube as they help you further engage your audience and hopefully convert them to loyal and paying customers. To accomplish this, use the feature for advertising and growing your email list. In turn, this will also increase your website traffic and potentially increase your revenue.

 

To Increase Engagement and Make a More Obvious Impact

 

Furthermore, once you reach ten thousand subscribers, you will want to use the stories feature to enhance further your engagement and exposure against your current audience and subscribers. Just because they subscribed or followed your link to sign up for your newsletter or email campaign does not mean you should rely on it to keep their attention. Stories appear on YouTube’s platform, giving you another way to keep their attention and further away from your competition. The more valuable and useful you make the story, the more likely they are to share it to grow your subscribers list too.

 

Sixty-two percent of businesses took advantage of these benefits in 2019. The fact is, the more your YouTube channel grows, the more successful your business becomes. Add to the growth and success of your business by adding a YouTube channel to your business marketing plan today. The more value you show your target audience, the more chance you have at success.

 

 

 

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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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Schedule Your Daily Activities Based on Your Goals

Developing daily habits that drive success sounds complicated, but the truth is, when you break down your actions based on what you want to achieve and then distribute that action realistically into your daily to-do list, success will start to feel almost automatic.

 

Turn Daily Planning into a Habit

 

Every morning first thing, it’s important to take a look at the to-do list that has been created based on the goals you’ve set at other times. Putting the actions, you need to do in order of importance and based on today’s reality is important to help avoid any roadblocks to achieving the goals you’ve set.

 

This type of planning should only take about five minutes and consist of simply opening your scheduling method, whether it’s paper or digital, and double-checking the schedule for any bottlenecks or issues. You can then rearrange things on the fly to ensure ease of success.

 

All To-Do Lists Need to Be Goal-Based

 

If something made it to your to-do list, it needs to be based on the goals you’ve set for yourself. For instance, if you have the goal of losing 50 pounds by a certain date today in your calendar, you might include your daily calorie limit, your daily moving goals, and your hydration goals.

 

If it’s related to a deliverable for work such as getting 10,000 edited words to your book editor by a certain date, then you know simply by looking at the schedule because you’ve set aside the time to devote to the future goal. It’s all on the to-do list.

 

Break It All Down into Small Micro Tasks

 

When you have the deliverable or result that you want described in great detail as part of your SMART goal-setting process, and it is easier to break down each goal into smaller micro-tasks resulting in your to-do list for today.

 

Consider Your Week, Months, and Years as a Whole

 

When you do your daily planning, you’ll also want to schedule weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning to help you get a big picture look at all the balls you have in the air. These longer times for planning should be scheduled to ensure that you don’t have bottlenecks and are taking control of the things you have control over.

 

Schedule Everything

 

Remember, you want to automatically schedule the work and actions you need to develop your goals and objectives. But don’t just focus on one aspect of your life.

 

Instead, you want to schedule everything in regarding everything to do with your life, whether it’s time with friends, which will be part of your long-term goals of building strong relationships, or 45 minutes of fast walking because that’s part of your long-term goal to stay healthy – taking the time to schedule every action you will take will assist in building daily habits that lead to success.

 

Have No More Than 3 Daily Priorities

 

While you will schedule everything, even if it’s a nap break, you want to only put up to three things as your daily priority. Setting daily priorities should only happen the week that you’re looking at the schedule and perfecting it. The main reason is you cannot know what a priority will be for next Monday if you don’t know that your spouse will be sick.

 

Try Different Productivity Methods

Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

Part of creating a schedule and making it work is learning how to be more productive and get things done. Everyone has a sworn-by method. The best thing is to experiment with other methods. Try a new one each 30 days until something sticks with you.

 

Some methods to try include the Pomodoro Technique, Block Scheduling, and the Eisenhower Matrix.

 

Use The Right Planning Tools

 

It doesn’t matter if your chosen planning tools are paper or digital as long as you use the tool and work for you. Try different tools. Some people swear by Google Calendar, and others hate it.

 

Finally, eliminate distractions so that you stick to the schedule you have ended up with each day. Technically if your daily activities are organized first based on your long-term and short-term goals, then each day, the actions you take will be impactful, trackable, and 100 percent within your own control to do or not do.

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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.

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Treat Yourself and Take A Day Off

Skipping breaks and other self-care needs neglects your business just as much as it, does you. As a business owner, it’s important to pay attention to your health, physically and mentally, before it negatively impacts your success.

 

The following are crucial reasons why you should never skip breaks or feel guilty about self-care:

 

  • To De-stress And Optimize Health – To promote mental clarity and happiness to make the right choices and decisions for your business. Poor self-care leads to depression, cardiovascular disease, and many other health problems that can ultimately change the trajectory of your life you don’t want to go down.
  • For Gratitude and Generosity – Mental clarity provides you a moment to be thankful for the things around you that inspires happiness.
  • To Inspire Creativity and Innovation – Studies show a link between alone time and increased creativity.
  • To Maintain Energy and Focus – Ultimately improving your performance, communication, and engagement.
  • You Deserve It – Lastly, and probably one of the most important reasons to take a day off and treat yourself is because you deserve and are worth it.

 

Here are a few tips to help you more easily take breaks and treat yourself even with a busy schedule:

 

Schedule Them in And Be Strict

Add short breaks, vacation, and essential appointments for self-care to your schedule and clear a spot for them first. Then don’t permit yourself to skip them.

 

Just as they say that you should always pay yourself first, including adding in time off and other vital needs right away before you allow yourself to schedule over it, remember, your health should be a top priority; otherwise, your business won’t be one either.

 

Commit to It and Take A Day Off

Practice self-discipline and do absolutely no work during your day off to reap the fullest benefits. Don’t use this time for chores or planning your next business moves. Rest and commit to activities make you happy.

 

Release Guilt and Be More Selfish

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being more selfish in life when protecting your mental and physical health. Stop feeling guilty for your purchases or days where you do absolutely nothing and recognize their benefits.

 

Establish Proper Time Management Habits

Simply put, the more time you have, the easier it is to take a day off. Find the right habits that allow you to get ahead or maximize your productivity in the shortest amount of time possible. A 90-day action plan and working in block schedules are great ideas and areas to start.

Stop neglecting your health and using the excuse that “I just don’t have time.” The only thing that statement is saying is that you don’t value yourself or your business enough to make time.

5 Rituals to Boost Your Energy and Productivity

 

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How to Find Your Most Productive Hours

The news is out. The standard 9 to 5 is dwindling, and many studies show that it’s bad for business. Even worse, you only have about two to three actual productive hours. To get the most done, you should take advantage of them and figure out what time and day you perform the best.

 

Experiment with Your Sleep Schedule

Figure out what your body likes the best. Are you a “night owl” or a “morning lark?” Even if you think you might know, give each type of schedule a try. Don’t just stick to the traditional 9 to 5 unless you have to. Research shows these are not the most productive hours. They were only designed to help offset manufacturing workload requirements and prevent child labor.

 

Keep Track with A Journal

Keep track of the information above in your journal. Take notes of both periods of inactivity and activity. Write down the times, the project you worked on, your mood, and other important details like obstacles that happened that normally don’t or if you got something done even faster than usual.

 

Also, keep in mind the environment you are working in, how much sleep you got the night before, or other stress factors – the more information you can provide, the better. After a week of building and experimenting with this data, you will determine your best hours to work.

 

Use Applications or Technology

If keeping track of this information on your own seems tiresome, then take advantage of technology or applications instead. RescueTime is an automated time tracker that pools all this data to track where you spend your time the most. They also generate reports and provide other tools that allow you to block distractions and improve your productivity.

 

Peak, Trough, Recovery

These are the stages you go through as you work. When you first get going, this is the peak where you have most of your energy and motivation. Then as your energy starts to go down, you are in your trough period.

Never Quit: Go After Your Breakthrough

Recovery is at the end of your shift, and best left for mindless or easy tasks. This means that when you get to work, no matter the time of day, always do the most important or most challenging work first. You will have the best energy and mental focus to get through it faster and more efficiently.

 

Overall, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to work a total of eight hours to be productive. You need to find the time that is best for you.

 

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How to Be Realistic About Time

You know it, and practically the whole world knows it: time is money. It can instantly steal your success if you aren’t being realistic or use it right.

 

The following are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you are realistic about your time:

 

Time Yourself

Make sure you understand how long each essential task takes. How long is the average for you or the person you are working with? Don’t try to rush it or see how fast you can do it.

 

You want the actual time it takes to accomplish each task plus a few minutes to account for variables and unpredictable events. Write these times down in your schedule so you can be sure you schedule enough time out of your day to get finished without interruption or being late for other things.

 

Could You Be Automating That?

Investing in technology or outsourcing your work are great solutions that allow you to add more time to your day essentially. While you may only have 24 hours each day, that doesn’t mean you can’t make it by paying for other peoples’ time.

 

Outsource your blog post content, repeatable social media and email marketing tasks, accounting, and more. Anything these days can be automated as long as you have the income to do it.

 

Stay Focused and Keep Moving

In other words, don’t let yourself get off-plan or run off schedule. Planning, creating goals, and scheduling tasks only work if you do it and stick to it. In fact, the less you stick to your plan, the more work you create. Staying on track prevents burnout, stress and keeps you motivated as you continue to see progression each day.

 

Schedule Appropriately and Don’t Over-Book

No matter how lucrative, fast, or talented you may think you are, overbooking is terrible for business. That is the best way to lead you straight to burnout and dread coming back to work. You don’t need to rush the process to be successful. Remember, slow and steady wins the race.

 

It’s Not Just You

As easy as this may sound, it’s easy to get into tunnel vision and only think about what you need to get it done. When in reality, no matter what you do, more than likely other people will be involved too. Never expect the same type of work ethic you display, and always be sure to over-communicate when scheduling meetings or delegating tasks.

 Scheduling to Avoid Burnout: Learn to Take More Breaks

 

eliminate, delegate, automate

In the end, to create a realistic and successful schedule, you need to take time to evaluate every aspect of your life and others. Be aware of your expectations, other people’s expectations, and never underestimate what it takes to get there.

 

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How to Create an Effective To-Do List

To-do lists are the most popular and widely used time management strategy and essential productivity technique adopted by many successful entrepreneurs and business owners.

Lists

It is even a great way to achieve your own personal goals. However, not just any to-do list will do. Each to-do list you make must be designed appropriately and strategically to be successful.

 

Here are six tips and tricks to implement when developing an effective to-do list:

 

Tip #1: Choose the Right Medium

Choose the proper medium you enjoy, such as paper, a phone application, or simply a word document. What you pick doesn’t matter as long as you understand it and enjoy the process to inspire your creativity and get you working. The medium you choose only frustrates you or has a high learning curve. It won’t be helpful.

 

Tip #2: Use Your Schedule to Guide Your Day

Before you make a list, look at your schedule. Do you have any important meetings or assignments that must get done first? For your to-do list to be effective, use these times or important objectives to guide you. Therefore, don’t make a to-do list for a goal that requires more of your time if you know you will be interrupted.

 

Tip #3: Make It Clear and Precise

Don’t use too many words or go overboard with the tasks. While breaking it down is necessary to highlight the actions required, you can go overboard and overwhelm yourself. Be a realist and make it scannable.

 

Tip #4: Make Deadline or Time Limits

For each task on your to-do list, make time requirements or schedule deadlines and add it to your calendar. This way, it becomes a commitment, and you won’t forget about it either.

 

Tip #5: Limit Your Daily Tasks

Remember being busy doesn’t mean you are productive. In other words, you don’t want to break it down so much that each and every little task is highlighted. This can overwhelm you and require too much time to set up in the first place. Highlight the most important information such as times and what exactly needs to be done. You don’t need to include every time you might go to the bathroom, for example.

 

Tip #6: Add Ways to Keep Track of Your Progress

Seeing the work that you finished is a great way to motivate yourself to get even more done. This way, you can get yourself back on track if you notice you are not getting the work done.

 

As long as you make your list clear, direct, time-driven, and aligned with your goals, you’ll improve your productivity exponentially.

 

Hope you are having a very productive Day!

Here is a Great Speech from Art Williams. Very inspirational.

You must be Tough and Never Quit!

Just Do It Speech….

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The Secrets to Time Management and Why You Need It

The most successful entrepreneurs have this key skill down to a science: time management.

It’s time to get the cold, hard and ugly truth out of the way. If you have not realized your goals and dreams yet, it’s likely your time management skills, or lack thereof, are to blame. As with any skill, there are things you can do and implement to improve it.

 

The following are the secrets to time management and why it’s a must-have skill to run a successful online business: 

 

Proper Time Management Is A Choice and A Skill You Can Practice

You can make a choice and commit to get things done on time and not procrastinate. Poor time management always stems from something, and as a responsible and successful adult, you must make the conscious choice to understand why and develop strategies to overcome it.

Scheduling to Avoid Burnout: Learn to Take More Breaks

Increases Creativity and Makes Innovation Easier

Proper time management means you have the right amount of time for the tasks and areas that matter the most. It means you are no longer wasting too much time on mundane and tedious things that don’t get you to where you need to be—freeing your time and allowing you to be more creative and innovative in your industry.

 

Take Full Responsibility and Understand Your Value

You know why you didn’t get something done on time or what is causing you to procrastinate more times than not. Please take responsibility for your actions and realize the value you bring to yourself, your business, and the world to overcome it.  

 

Schedule and Implement in Order of Importance and Urgency

This way, you can be sure to give yourself enough time for each task required. If you plan a task that needs your total concentration, knowing you will be interrupted quite a few times or need to leave soon, you simply won’t finish it. Don’t ignore reality, or you’ll set yourself up to fail before you even get started.

 

Be Aware of Your Main Objective

Always keep your main objective for the day at the top of your mind. Unfortunately, you won’t always be able to plan for everything. There will be distractions in work and life, but if you train yourself to keep your main objective on your mind at all times, you will know when and how to snap back easier.

 

Be Comfortable with Abnormality

In other words, in order to establish proper time management, you will probably have to go against what your peers or co-workers are currently doing. You have to say no to longer lunch breaks or any other activities you know will only further distract you.

 

Overall proper time management starts with taking responsibility, creating a daily to-do list, sticking to your schedule, and remove unnecessary distractions to ensure you always stay on track.