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Driving traffic with hashtags

There are plenty of different ways to drive traffic to your website today, but some are definitely more effective – and attractive – than others.

Social media marketing, more specifically “hashtag marketing”, is definitely one of the hottest drivers of organic traffic today and you have to make sure that you are making the most of the hashtags you create online right now to build your business from the ground up.

Make no mistake about it. We live in the middle of the most competitive business environment that has ever existed in human history.

Even though we have more tools and more technology available to help us grow our businesses than ever before, the competition is fierce, focused, and coming at us from all corners.

If you are going to succeed today, you absolutely MUST capitalize on social media marketing and “hashtag marketing” right now!

And that’s why we have put together this quick list of tips, tricks, strategies and secrets designed to help you really move the needle when it comes to driving targeted social media traffic to your website, your online shop, or your marketing funnel.

Make use of as many of these tips and tricks as possible to really hypercharge your results, and you will be able to hit the ground running with more targeted traffic then you’ll know what to do with!
Let’s get right into it!

Create an account on EVERY social media platform out there While the bulk of the heavy lifting results you’re going to get out of social media are going to come from “mainstream” social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Hashtag Traffic Secrets

That doesn’t mean that you can ignore smaller sized or less frequented social media networks – like Tinder or LinkedIn, for example – if you are going to try and make the most of everything that hashtags have to offer.

You are going to want to review all of the different social media networks out there, large and small, and find out how they fit with the target demographics of your ideal customer.

• If you are selling golf products, you are likely to have a lot of success diving headfirst into the major social media networks and linked in, for example.
• If you are selling outdoor adventure trips, however, you may not have the same kind of success as a social media network designed to cater to business professionals.

It’s all about finding that sweet spot as far as a target audience is concerned and then really trying to make the most of all the leverage that particular platform has to offer.

But you’re going to want to have multiple accounts on multiple networks, if only so that you can publish content across all of those networks with the same hashtags at the same time to really create a “carpet bomb” kind of impact on the market that you reach.

Research popular hashtags for the last six months

There’s definitely something to be said about creating your own hashtags that allow you to kind of control the narrative and own “real estate” in the social media game, but at the same time there is absolutely zero reason whatsoever to ignore leverage already available – especially when it has already proven to be tremendously popular with the people that you are trying to reach.

There are quite a few different tools available (100% free of charge) that really let you research different hashtags on different social media networks and not only find out which ones are incredibly popular right now (usually

Hashtag Traffic Secrets

differentiated by the “Trending” tag) but also which ones are getting the most engagement with that particular social media network.

Engagement is such a truly difficult thing to try and generate right out of thin air when you are building up your social media profile from nothing, but it is a core tenet of hashtag traffic generation.

You need to create hashtags that are…

• Immediately interesting
• Relevant
• Easy to share

These are core tenants of viral content and viral marketing on all of social media today.

It’s not just enough to plug your content into these hashtag traffic streams without any real context, either.

You have to be sure that your content is relevant to the hashtags that you are using, not only because using the wrong hashtags could cause you to miss out on a lot of traffic, but it could actually actively push people away at the same time.

That would be a major mistake, especially if you are a brand-new or relatively new social media account just looking to create traction today.

By looking back six months, reviewing the most popular hashtags over that stretch of time, and then finding ways to either co-opt those tags or to create a new spin that will be interesting and relevant to your content you have a tremendously “unfair” advantage over the rest of your competition.

This kind of research can take a little bit of time to drum up on your own (of course you could always outsource most of it), but the return on investment for doing this digging is definitely worthwhile.

Tie analytics to your hashtags

More than a couple of very valuable tools today can be utilized to track the interaction and engagement of the hashtags that you are using, and you Hashtag Traffic Secrets need to make the most of these analytics tools ASAP if you aren’t already leveraging them right now.

The real core differentiator that has helped to separate online marketing from the rest of the pack is the ease of tracking and testing available.

Yes, it used to be possible to test and track more traditional forms of advertising – usually with coupon codes and mailing lists – but we’ve never had access to this much instant information like we do right now.
It would be a shame to waste any of that data, especially when that data can better inform the hashtag marketing that you decide to move forward with from here on out.

Different tools will allow you to analyze the data in different ways, and some of them will compare engagement from the hashtags you are using to other similar hashtags being used at the same time.

These kinds of tools will really help to sharpen your marketing abilities in your focus, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that!

Generating hashtags that actually work

The most important thing you have to remember when you are creating hashtags designed to help you drive traffic is that you treat them the same way that you would treat headlines on your advertising

• Keep them relatively short
• Keep them incredibly interesting
• Make sure they are relevant
• Use them to do the one thing they are intended to do – drive traffic to your content.

A lot of people make the mistake of trying to get too much out of hashtags or social media marketing in general and then are surprised when they aren’t getting anywhere near the kinds of results they were hoping for.

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Ten Forum Marketing Secrets That Can Take Your Business To The Next Level

If you are looking to promote your online business on the internet, you have your work cut out for you. You really do. The difficulty does not come from finding traffic options. In fact, the difficulty comes from the fact that there are just simply too many options out there. It is too easy to get caught up in all the available traffic generation options, and spend a lot of time, effort and money only to have very little to show for all your marketing efforts.

If you are serious about driving highly targeted traffic to your website, one of the best moves you can ever make is to carry outa forum marketing campaign. It is easy to understand why forum marketing works. Regardless of how obscure your niche is, there are already people congregating online at certain websites who are talking about different aspects of whatever it is you are promoting. They are congregating at online message boards also known as forums.

This is a tremendous marketing opportunity because it is like fishing by shooting fish in a barrel. The fishes are already in the barrel. They have already selected themselves and they are in a tight space. It is almost a sure deal. It is very hard to miss.

However, you have to do this properly; otherwise, your forum marketing efforts will fail. Just as it is very easy tosee the opportunities apparent in forum marketing, it is also very easy to completely blow those opportunities. Here are the 10 secrets to forum marketing that can take your online business to the next level.

Secret #1: Niche targeting is crucial to forum marketing success

If you want to drive high-quality traffic to your website, you have to understand that you cannot just target any and all forums. That is a sure recipe for disaster. Why? You are not targeting these forums based on interest.

Everyforum has a specialization. Every forum is geared towards certain subject matter categories. It is very important to find forums that are specialized in the particular niche of the product or service you are promoting, and stick to those forums.

Do not fall for the common trap of thinking that since there are few forums that deal with your niche directly, you have to pick any and every forum. That is completely wrong. You are only setting yourself up for your failure if you think that way.

Secret #2: All your forum traffic must have an archive-able HOME

It really would be a shame if you put in all this time, effort and energy driving traffic from forums to your target website only to have that traffic evaporate. Unfortunately, that is precisely what you are doing if you are just promoting a link. Many old school marketers used to do this, and it used to work fine.

Unfortunately, as forum visitors have become more sophisticated over the years, the old tricks simply are not going to fly. People expect more. People are not simply going to convert right off a link. I do not care how well written your landing page is. I do not care how well put together your sales page is. People expect more.

Moreover, for you to maximize the traffic benefits of your target website, you need to make sure that it is archivable. It means that the content on your website must be arranged and handled in such a way that search engines can send traffic to different parts of your website. This is why I highly recommendthat you create a blog. Many people think that a blog is a waste of time or it would take too much effort, but the reality is that thanks to outsourcing, it has become very easy to keep a professional blog.

You want that traffic to go to specific pages on your blog, and you want other specific pages on your blog to work to convert whatever traffic you drive to your blog. You have to remember that different people have different interests. They have different reasons for clicking on a link to go to yourblog. Your blog has to present the value proposition you bring to the table in many different ways, so as to maximize the commercial appeal of whatever it is you are promoting.

Secret #3: Forum link dropping campaigns WILL blow up in your face

One of the most commonly used forum marketing methods is to take simple links and just drop them in posts in forums. The problem with this way of marketing is that there is really no added value as far as forum readers are concerned. They do not have a clear idea as to the context of the link and how that link will add value to their lives. All they see are some catchy text encouraging them to click on the link. They do not even know in advance whether the link will be directly relevant to the niche of the content that they are interested in.

Not surprisingly, many marketers that engage in simple link dropping campaigns have very little to show for all their efforts. In fact, most of them have nothing to show for their efforts because these forums end up banning them. That is right. If your account gets banned, all your posts get deleted.

This is a serious problem because many forum marketers market by simply dropping a link in either the body of their post or in their signature line. Regardless of whetheryou are using forum post body text or signature lines to promote your affiliate product or your own website, if you get banned, you will get to no benefits. This is why it is really important to understand that while you are, at the end of the day, promoting a link, you should not just promote the link. You have to promote content. You have to provide some sort of context for your link.

At the very least, this would give people enough information so they can make an informed decision as to whether theylink will add value to their lives. If you are just dropping mysterious links all over the place, you probably will not get too many clicks since people are very scared of landing on Spyware injection or virus propagation sites. At worst, you will get banned. If you keep up this behavior, chances are quite high that your account will completely disappear from the forums that you are marketing at.

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Introduction

There are many ways to generate website traffic off the internet. In fact, your problem asa marketer is not whether you can generate traffic both on a paid or free basis, but whichtype oftraffic you would go withthatis right.

The issue is not whether there is traffic to generate, but the fact that there are just too many ways to do it. There are just too many options on the table. It is very easy to get distracted. It is very easy to get confused among all the different methods of driving traffic. In fact, if you come across a website that allows you to build a linkthat points to yoursite, thatis a potential source of traffic.

In many cases, there are many online platforms that allow you to mention a brand name without even mentioning URLs, and if everything else lines up, those platforms are also viable sources of online traffic. Again, the issue is not a shortage of online traffic sources. There are just too many of them. In fact, I would venture to say that the only real limitis your imagination and creativity.

With that said, some sources of traffic are obviously much better than others. Some sources of traffic take a lot more money and a lot more time to produce results. Others are more targeted, and take less of your time and less of your money to turn into cold hard cash.

One of the most powerful sources of traffic that you should never neglect is forum traffic. This book spells out why you should consider forum marketing and the benefits it brings to the table. It also steps you through the process of using specialized online forums and message boards to get highly targeted and high performing website traffic.

Why Forum Marketing?

The interesting thing about generating online traffic is that it is very easy to conclude that you basically have to create interest in whatever it is you are promoting. It is easy to fallinto the trap of thinking that what you are offering is something so new and so different that you have to go out of your way to create a demand for it. The truth is quite the opposite.

The truth is that regardless of which niche you are promoting, chances are there are already people online who are interested in whatever it is that you are trying to market. In fact, they are not just interested; they are actually expressing their interest about your niche product or service. They are asking questions about it. They are networking about it. They are trying to support each other in their efforts at finding solutions regarding your niche.

In other words, there are specific communities of people that already are interested in what you are promoting. Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t this great news?

Unfortunately, too many marketers think that they have to re-invent the wheel and drum up traffic out of the thin blue air. In reality, people already online are congregating in special areas, asking questions and sharing information regarding your niche. These specialized areas are called online message boards or forums.

Regardless of what niche you are in and regardless of how seemingly obscure your niche is, there is sure to be at least one forum that specializes in that particular subject matter. Even in the rare case that there is no one forum that directly specializes in your niche, you can rest assure that there will be at least one forum that would have a sub-forum where at least several discussion threads are talking about your niche.

Why should you consider forum marketing? Why should you bother to market your niche product or service in these areas online? Here are just some basic benefits that you get. This is just a partial list. In fact, the longer you engage in forum marketing, the more you would be surprised as to how many benefits forum promotions bring to the table.

These are just some of the basic benefits that easily come to mind. You really have to engage in forum marketing for an extended period of time to get a full appreciation of its complete list of benefits. These benefits are the ones that materialized for most people trying their hand at forum marketing.

Niche Specificity

To make money online, you have to really do one thing:You need to get the right message in front of the right eyeballs at the right time. In other words, everything has to line up for you to generate a sale. It all, of course, boils down to trust. You cannot simply market something that people are not interested in because they will not trust you, and they would have no need for whatever it is that you are pushing.
Niche specificity will help you solve a lot of your marketing problems because you can put your offer in front of the right eyeballs. These are people who are actually already talking about the particular niche product or service you are promoting. These are people who already expressed their interest and concern about your niche product or service.

This tight fit between the subject matter of the product or service you are promoting and the interest of the people within a particular community increases the likelihood that people would pay attention, and people would want to know more about your product. Depending on how everything else goes, the more they know, the higher the likelihood that they may build enough trust in the content that you are sharing that they would then take the next step and buy your product or service.

Topic Specificity

If you have been trying to sell stuff online, you probably already know that simple niche specificity is not enough. Simply going to a place where people are interested in your product or service is not in of itself enough to generate sales. You have to do something more.

This is where forum marketing blows away lots of other traffic-generation methods. You can go to a forum that already deals with a specific set of problems and issues your particular product or service addresses and look for even more specific discussions. In other words, you get topic specificity.

Topic specificity is extremely important because as I have mentioned earlier, to sell anything online, you need to get your offer in front of the right eyeballs at the right time. Topic specificity is all about timing. When people post a question regarding a particular issue, people who click on that link are actively interested in that issue.

In other words, they care in the here and now regarding a particular issue that they need a solution for. They are not looking for a solution way into the future.

They are not interested in the issue on a purely theoretical basis. They need an answer now.

This is extremely important because if they know about your solution, then chances are good that they may take you up on your offer. Why? The need already exists in the here and now. It is present. It is not theoretical, it is not something that could happen, but it is actually something that they already have.

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Conversion Explosion

Are you making the kind of money with online marketing that you thought you would be making? Are you putting in time and effort, but nothing seems to work?

Are you following your online marketing success blue-print faithfully; however you're not getting the results you want?

Are you struggling to earn an income online?

Have you tried all sorts of gimmicks and software in the past and you still can't make money online?

If any of the above applies to you, you are hardly alone. Most marketers face these issues at one time or other. The sad reality of online marketing is the vast majority of marketers make very little money. In fact, 20% of marketers make up 80% of the total income of all online marketers. That means if you're in the 80% you have to settle for leftovers and fight for your tiny slice of the online income pie.

The bad news is you can tweak almost all of your operations and still end up broke. This is exactly what many marketers do. They buy all sorts of products and even hire consultants and “coaches”. Some even spend thousands of dollars on gurus (LOL). What do they get for all those hard-earned dollars? Well; most only manage to improve their operations marginally.

The good news is you don't have to resign yourself to barely scraping by. You only need to apply one technique that will take your online business operations and results to a whole new other level. Converting Leads Into Customers

Don't Let Your Mindset Hold You Back From Success

Keep your mind open to the discussion outlined below. If you let your imagination and creativity take over, you can let this technique work wonders for you. However, if you are closed-minded, or you think you already have things figured out; well, nothing is going to work for you. You have to change your mindset. If you think that you have everything figured out, that's going to hold you back. Seriously. Why? Obviously, you don't have it all figured out because if you did, you wouldn't be reading this book and needing help with making more money online. Converting Leads Into Customers

Trafficfor Traffic's Sake is a Waste of Time... and Money!

Another mindset you need to ditch is the 'magic traffic' mindset. Too many marketers suffer from this.

They think they only need to use a tool or use a special traffic generation technique to pump a huge amount of traffic to a landing page or an affiliate link and the job is done.

I'm sorry to break this to you, but if this is how you view online marketing; you are wasting your time. That is nothing but brute force conversion.

The best that brute force techniques will give you is a few cents on the dollar. In fact, you are leaving a lot of money on the table or simply wasting time and money by attacking your conversion problems exclusively through traffic. Converting Leads Into Customers

Traffic is Not the Problem; It is Your Conversion Rate

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't get it to drink. You can dump all the traffic in the world to a landing page or a series of content pages, but if you don't know what you're doing you're not going to convert those people.

Simply attracting traffic is not enough. This is a crucial insight you should wrap your mind around to finally make headway in your conversion goals. Otherwise, you would be put in a ridiculous situation of pumping huge amount of time and money into traffic generation and having very little to show for it.

Conversion is Not a Last Minute Issue

Now that I've opened your mind to the concept of conversion; you have to understand that conversion is not this last minute concept you scramble to adopt after you've put up your website, generated your traffic, and otherwise did everything else.

If you are serious about making money online, conversion should be your top priority. It is not a last minute detail. In fact, you should build your whole online presence around the concept of conversion. This may seem like you're putting the cart before the horse, but if you don't do this, you're not going to make as much money as you deserve to be making.

Conversion is all about turning traffic into: sales, email leads, zip code entries, or software downloads. In short, conversion is all about turning website traffic into activities that put dollars in your pocket. Conversion is not going to happen if you view it as the last stage in your online promotion process. Instead, it should be the guiding force of your online activities.

This is the One Technique you should focus On: Engineering Conversion into Everything You Do Online. Converting Leads Into Customers

Don't Focus on Conversion as the Last Stage of Web Development

If the need for conversion only dawns on you after you have finished your site, you’re headed in the wrong direction. This is precisely how most marketers do it. They pick a niche, create content, drive traffic, and then when they realize they're not making money; they focus on conversion. At that stage, it's too little, too late. You have to focus first on engineering conversion into your content and traffic funnel. Too many marketers simply assume that as long as they get their content right and their traffic flowing properly, conversion will automatically happen. In many cases, they think that conversion will happen at the last minute. Not surprising, most of these marketers end up completely blindsided when they're unable to turn their dreams of financial freedom into a reality. Converting Leads Into Customers

Engineer Conversion intoYour Content andSales Funnel

The first truly fundamental lesson you need to learn as you try to make money online is the importance of conversion. You have to build your online business from the ground up with conversion as your first priority.

The best way to do this is to implement the discussion outlined below. Converting Leads Into Customers

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Introduction

Most mailing lists suck. They really do. They are built using weak content messaging which lead to weak squeeze pages. Weak squeeze pages produce weak lists. If you want to make money onlineyou need to fix this process. At the very least, you need to tighten up the series of messages that lead to your squeeze page. You also need to take full control of the message you're sending out with your squeeze page. Unfortunately, using standard squeeze pages or templates is not just going to cut it.

You have to set a consistent storyline from the beginning. This is crucial in forming the right expectations and getting the right kind of actions from your list members. Otherwise, you are just going tofall into the same trap that most list marketers fall into. They focus too much on numbers and not enough on quality. They feel entitled to success based solely on the fact that they have a “huge list”. Even with very low conversion percentages, they expect their huge numbers to result in a decent income from their list. Not surprisingly, these marketers make little, if any, money off their mailing lists. What gives? You have to focus on the right squeeze page and overall messaging you send out to your prospective list members. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use effective storytelling. Effective story telling involves a complete process: it deals with things you do before people get to your squeeze page, while they are on your squeeze page, and after they have entered their email information into your squeeze page.

Effective storytelling-based list building is the most effective way to succeed with email marketing. While you can still get some results using alternative approaches, you will be settling for cents on the dollar. You probably would have to spend a lot more dollars, to get the same amount of results than if you had taken the time to fully incorporate a storytelling-based strategy into your list marketing activities.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

This booksteps you through the psychological and practical dimensions of building a mailing list around storytelling. By appealing to your marketing materials' readers on a deeply personal level, you make the value proposition you're bringing to the table come to vivid life. Since most other marketers resort to dull, lifeless, or predictably generic marketing strategies in building their lists, your story-driven strategy can give you a powerful competitive advantage. Take the ideas I discuss in this book and let them help you build a powerful, unique, and customized list building strategy that can take your business to the next level.

To Your Success!

Chapter 1

Why Stories? Why Now?

Human beings navigate the world through stories. That is how we make sense of all the information that our bodies pick up. We can look at things, we can smell things, we can touch things, we can hear things -we can detect all sorts of things. However, our mind is quite selective as to which of these things impact how we feel, think, and act. In fact, we are so good at filtering out external stimuli that we are only conscious of a fraction of the things our bodies detect. Interestingly enough, of all the things that we allow ourselves to be conscious of, we choose to remember only a fraction of those. What gives? Very simple -we think in terms of stories.

We have this existing story in our mind of: who we are, our place in the world, and how we choose to look at the world. Stories enable us to have an identity. They enable us to explain ourselves, not just to other people, but to ourselves as well. If you were to just process information on a random and wholesale basis, you would go crazy. You would have to have a system for storing that information and making sense of that information. New information must fit the overriding story we have of ourselves.

Stories act as emotional gateways to new information. This is why they are crucial to online marketing. It doesn't matter whether you are marketing through banner ads, articles or other types of content, a squeeze page or a series of pages that lead to a squeeze page-you have to tell a story.

Keep the following in mind.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

What Does Storytelling Have to Do with Making Money Off a Mailing List?

You have to master the art of story-telling for you to effectively communicate your value proposition. If you want people to join your mailing list, they have to have a clear idea as to what you are offering. They also have to clearly see the need for them to join your mailing list.At the very least, they need to understand these two pieces of information for them to get what you are offering. These involve a lot of data points. These involve a lot of pieces of information. You can just tell people to sign up for your mailing list, but you probably won't go very far. Even if you use fancy fonts or great pictures, chances are your likelihood of success would be pretty mediocre. Why? You might be setting the wrong expectations. You might be sending a confusing message and end up attracting list members who have no intention of buying from you.

If you want to attract highly qualified prospects, you need to use stories. Don't get me wrong, very basic and straightforward squeeze pages can get people to sign up. The problem is, once they have signed up, how do you get them to convert?

Conversion is King

At the end of the day, it is all about conversion. It doesn't really make much sense to get one thousand people to sign up for your mailing list, when only one of them ends up converting.It is much better to get one hundred people to sign up for your mailing list and at the end of the day you have fifty of them convert to your offer. I hope you can see the simple mathematics here. Converting Subscribers Into Customers
Story-telling is a very powerful component of a competent mailing list strategy because it helps you filter your prospects. It helps you attract the right prospects. Most importantly, it helps you set the tone of the relationship.

Good Email Lists are Built on Relationships

Getting people to sign up to your mailing list is the beginning of a relationship. When somebody signs up to your mailing list, they are telling you to keep sending them information. Put simply, they are telling you to keep talking to them. They want to have a relationship with your brand.

Using effective story-telling can ensure that you are getting into the right kind of relationship. If you use the typical squeeze page design, you wouldn't have a problem signing up people, but these may be the wrong people. These might be people who are expecting a different kind of relationship. Regardless of how it plays out, at the end of the day, you probably won't make much money. Weaving in effective story-telling elements increases your likelihood of making money off your list. It is crucial for you to understand how stories work, and incorporate as much of storytelling's power of persuasion into your squeeze page as well as the pages that precede your squeeze page. Stories also help boost the effectiveness of information pages.

Human Beings MakeSense of the World through Stories

I have said this already above, but I cannot emphasize this enough: human beings make sense of the world through stories. You may not be aware of it. You might even think this is some crazy talk, but it is true. You have a story. You look at the world as a story. In fact, it happens automatically that you are not aware of it.Converting Subscribers Into Customers

Think of it this way. To prove my point, try to think in such a way that there is no beginning, middle, or end. Take chronology out of your memory. Give up? Of course you will. If not, you are going crazy.
Time and memory are interlinked. They define each other, and this is really important because it is at the core of stories. Stories help you make sense of the world because it reduces the world into a sequence of relationships. Moreover, just as time is related to memory, time also help us make sense of the relationships between concepts. There are also relationships between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive the world and your place in the world.

Great stories help you connect the dots

A great story resonates with you on a deep personal level. A lot of emotion is involved in this. This is precisely why effective stories drive people to do things. They see themselves in the story. They see their personal narratives at play. They become open and susceptible to being influenced by what would otherwise be a 'foreign' idea. People subconsciously connect the dots between the idea presented to them which trigger emotional hot buttons and their own existing needs and desires.

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Introduction: The Goals That Never Happen

How many incomplete goals do you currently have on your agenda? If you’re anything like the vast majority of us, then chances are that you have hundreds of projects that you started and never completed, countless goals that you told your friends but never saw through and all kinds of dreams that seem to be getting less and less likely to come to fruition.

And it’s for this reason, that you may find people roll their eyes when you tell them your ‘next big project’. When you start a new training program to lose weight and everyone – including you – knows that you’re likely to have lost interest by month two.

Or when you talk about the app you intend to make, the website, or the business project.

Or when you talk about that dream trip to Japan…

This is the way of things for many of us. We work incredibly hard at things we don’t feel passionately about just to put food on the table but when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, we are remarkably ineffective.
It’s time to change all that and to start making those goals happen. But how can you turn it all around?

How We’re Going to Fix Your Goal Setting and Help You to Start Living the Life of Your Dreams

Accomplishing goals is about strategy, it is about making a cognitive shift to change the way you’re thinking and it’s about being smart about how you approach each goal. It’s also about knowing how to choose your goals and even how to phrase them.

This book is going to show you how to make those changes then. You’ll learn how to choose and write goals effectively, how to write effective action plans and how to make sure you stick with your goals and never give up.

But this book is going to be a little different than most goal-setting tomes, too. After we’ve given you the broad tools you need to start setting and accomplishing your goals, we’re then going to take a look at how you can begin to put them into practice.

Because while a goal can be pretty much anything, for many of us they are going to fall into one of a few different categories. Most of us have goals for our relationships, goals for our fitness, goals for our careers and goals for travel. We’re going to provide not only the abstract strategies you need to start making effective goals then, but also the step-to-step processes that will let you apply these strategies in each of these areas. By the end of this book, you’ll be adept at setting and accomplishing any goal. And at the same time, you’ll have powerful strategies for improving your relationships, your fitness, your career and more.

Ready to change your life?

Chapter 1: The Most Powerful Skill You Can Learn: Goal Setting

Learning how toset goals properly is arguably the most powerful skill that you can possibly learn. Why? Because it will allow you to then accomplish a huge range of other goals. When you know how to set goals, it allows you to effectively work toward anything. This is the key to unlocking pretty much everything you could want from life.

So ironically, the first goal you should focus on is the goal of setting goals!

And until now, you’ve probably been doing it all wrong…

The Problem With Your Current Goals

How can a goal be wrong?

Sure, any objective is a worthwhile one, but the way that you phrase your goals and structure them, is going to massively change your likelihood of finding success.

Let’s take weight loss as an example because it’s one of the more straightforward goals that is easiest to implement.

When you set out to lose weight, you should start with a concrete goal. And for most people this will look something like this:

“Lose 2 stone by next year”

This is a terrible goal.

Why? First of all, it is far too vague. How are you losing weight? Weight from where? Why do you want to lose the weight? What do you actually want to look like?

At the same time, it’s out of your control. Even if you are completely committed to your goal, you may find that outside forces prevent you from being successful. Maybe you get ill, maybe you accidentally follow the wrong program, maybe it turns out you have a bad metabolism!

Finally, the goal is too far in the future. If your goal is to lose weight by next year, that then essentially gives you a license to procrastinate. The target is so far away, that you indulge yourself in a little overeating or put off exercise for a while and not worry about it until next month.

6 months pass and you realize you’re actually further from your goal.

And because it’s too late, you’re likely to just give up at this point.

Not a good goal!

What Good Goals Look Like

So, what does a good goal look like? How might you phrase this same objective in a manner that will increase your chances of success?

The first thing to do, is to focus on things that are immediately within your control and that are not influenced by outside factors at all. These goals should be things that you can accomplish in a guaranteed manner and that you will be immediately graded on on a pass-fail basis.

So for instance, instead of aiming to lose 2 stone by next year, you would use this goal:

“I will work out three times a week, every week, for at least 15 minutes”

Now that is a goal that you can aim for. Regardless of your metabolism, or of injury, or of any other outside factor, this is a goal that you can accomplish. It also means you can’t ‘put off’ the goal and it means you’ll never reach that disappointing point where you can no longer stand any chance of completing it. At any point in your life, there is no reason that you can’t set out to accomplish this goal and expect to be successful.

But by focussing on this small short term goal, you will then find that the long-term goal of losing the weight takes care of itself.

How to Formulate Your Goals

But that doesn’t mean that any short-term goal that is binary in nature is going to cut it.

First of all, you need to know what you want and make sure that the goal you are setting for yourself is going to help you get there. You need your goals to be intrinsically motivating and that means that you have to feel truly passionate about them. It’s only be following a goal you really feel excited about, that you will find you have the energy and motivation to keep going.

Working out for 15 minutes a day is an effective goal because it is sure to take you closer to your broader goal of losing weight. By keeping that end goal in mind, you should stand a better chance of staying motivated to work out even when you’re feeling tired, or when you’re feeling low on will-power.

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Introduction

People go through their lives continuously taking on different challenges each day. Whether it is in school, at work, or at home, there are many things that always come up and cause too much stress on a person. He might simply have too much to do and not have an opportunity to get enough rest. There are instances when a person handles a task on a tight schedule, feeling that time is never on his side.

In both situations, it can get scary to think about what can happen, and it can be even harder to think about failure. There is no need to feel this way anymore. Sometimes, things happen, and there is no choice but to wait until the last minute.

Whether this is because an assignment is due in the morning or if there is too much to do in one day, learning how to work faster for your own benefit is the best way to go.

Procrastination is a harsh term that gets thrown around and disrespected. The truth is that everyone does it, and everyone wishes that they could figure out how to complete their work faster while still providing the highest quality. This book will guide you through all the positive and negative results that come from procrastination. It will also show you better ways on how to complete an assignment after postponing it for so long.

Either way, you should be able to find success by reading this book. Read through the chapters and take down some notes. After you read through the final chapter, you will have a full understanding of what procrastination does to a person, why it happens, how it can benefit you in the long run, and how to help yourself to work quickly and efficiently.

Chapter 1: The Science Behind

Procrastination

People will always say how bad procrastination is before ever truly realizing why it happens. It is a natural approach which people rely on at the last minute. It is about how they will continually agree to take on another assignment before finishing the previous one. This is not about responsibility and whether the person can complete tasks or not. It is about wanting to take on a challenge and finish more assignments than the person next to them.

This is a common scenario especially in the workplace where employees will compete to keep their jobs. Sometimes, the only way to do this is to take on more assignments and finish them faster. Whether they were turned in at the last minute or not, they take on more assignments just to impress their managers. People question themselves whenever they push back an assignment another day or even another week. Sometimes, an assignment that is due the next day will continuously be pushed back because people keep switching their focus throughout the day.

The Brain of a Procrastinator

This happens because a battle between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex occurs in the brain. The limbic system controls the amount of pleasure and relaxation that a person will naturally feel. The prefrontal cortex controls the amount of planning that the mind must go through. Simply put, when a person chooses to push back an assignment by either an hour or a day, the limbic system is taking over the prefrontal cortex. This situation often happens as people like going through the constant cycle of waiting until the last minute.

The reason the limbic system continues to be more in control and overpower the prefrontal cortex is because it is one of the older and more dominant parts of the brain. This system automatically runs through the process of strengthening itself more often than any other part of the brain. It is one of the first systems which develop inside the brain, responsible for keeping a person away from carrying out unpleasant actions.

For example, when a child looks at a flame, he might get curious and want to touch it. The limbic system tells his brain not to touch the flame because it will hurt him. This system does not focus on the damage that would be inflicted but the amount of pain that would be felt.

Compared to the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex is developed at a later stage. In science, this system is also known to be one of the weaker parts of the brain. The main feature of this part of the brain is that it runs through stimulus than an automatic process. People think that thoughts develop automatically in the prefrontal cortex, but it is quite the opposite. It sits right behind the forehead and has to be made to function for it to work. The moment a person sits down to work on an assignment and consumes time in continuing it, he is telling his brain to keep working on the task instead of lingering off.

This is a difficult thing to do especially when the limbic system continues to bribe the brain to relax right at that moment. Even though relaxing for a bit sounds good, the prefrontal cortex understands that the assignment must be completed by a certain time and if not, the person will go through a certain punishment that will make life less relaxed. The closer the due date of an assignment, the quicker these two parts of the brain will negotiate to understand which action should be taken.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

The truth is, the action which leads to more relaxation tends to win each time. The closer a person approaches a due date, the more he begins to panic since he feels that he cannot relax as much. The moment this is felt, it is easier to keep the prefrontal cortex engaged. It is easier to continue each assignment since it is understood that there will be more pain the longer the person waits. This is one of the few times where both sides of the brain win. The prefrontal cortex gets to complete the assignment while the limbic system feels less pain.

Another reason a person procrastinates is because he feels a certain rush the longer he waits for an assignment to be completed. He is able to take on the challenge of finishing everything at the very last minute and feels rewarded by doing so. It is all about the idea of cutting it close but still being victorious at the end. When a person waits until the last minute to finish an assignment, he sees a challenge and feels what he thinks is an adrenaline rush. What he is actually feeling is a small dose of dopamine moving quickly through the brain. It is a good feeling that comes with the expectation of getting a reward every time an assignment is completed. This boost gives enough reason for a person to continue coming back to the idea of waiting for as long as he can before completing any type of assignment.

The Inner Struggle In Getting Things Done

Since the hormone dopamine continues to run through the brain during these situations, it causes a person to lose his sense of control. He starts to form a battle within himself to see how much self-control he truly has. While he knows that an assignment is due soon, he also knows that the intense feeling of waiting until the last minute is just right around the corner. He could choose to finish the assignment ahead of time to gain more time to relax later, or he could choose to relax first and push the assignment back to challenge himself to finish the assignment at the last minute. Having self-control means that the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system are equally functioning. There are no boundaries to try and cross to have one side win over the other. Instead, they seem to work together to ensure the highest amount of efficiency within a person. While a person is in control of his mind and what he is doing at the moment, his reaction to the hormones is quite difficult to overcome. It is all about the feelings that would rather be felt – the victory at the last moment to feel the rush of dopamine in the mind or a calming sense of being ahead to strengthen the prefrontal cortex.

While dopamine is the main factor which contributes to the reasons behind procrastination, adrenaline can still exist in this situation. The part of the brain that produces adrenaline is called the amygdala. It is associated with an automatic emotional reaction which is triggered whenever a situation that is difficult for the mind to process arises. This happens when a situation is outside of the boundaries of everyday life.