productivity

23 Lessons I Learned From My Podcast In 2016

December 9, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I have published 21 podcast episodes in which I have interviewed a variety of people. During the entire process (connecting with people, preparation, and the interviews themselves), I learned many new things.

As a part of my end of the year reflection series, I decided to come up with a list of 23 lessons I learned from my podcasting adventure.

I already knew some of these lessons but thought they were important to share. In addition, I needed to remind myself of some of these lessons, especially #17.

#1: Start Before You Are Ready

I had many false starts before I finally launched my podcast. It was two years in the making. What made it happen? I started contacting people about the podcast before I could even think of what I was doing. I then had to think really fast when I got the first yes.

#2: Conduct Your First Interview With A Fellow Podcaster

The first person I interviewed for my podcast was none other than Jeffrey Shaw. Big shout out to you my friend. He gave me some tips after the interview and steered me on the right path.

#3: Don’t Be Afraid To Ask

I contacted some people knowing that they would almost certainly agree to be guests on my podcast. I contacted other people in hopes they would say yes. Some of those people said yes while others said no. I wasn’t afraid to ask people like Seth Godin, Neil Patel, Mike Michalowicz, and many other people.

#4: There Are No Limits.

One of the things I despise the most is when people say they don’t have the right credentials to pursue a goal. If you think of an 18-year-old without a license, do you think about me? I am that 18-year-old, but that hasn’t stopped me from interviewing millionaires, bestselling authors, TEDx speakers, and other successful people. I don’t say this to brag but rather to show you the possibilities.

#5: Be Over Prepared

Each guest is different. Some of them will elaborate with their answers while others will give you quick answers that make you run through all of your questions quickly. If you don’t have enough questions, you’ll have to improvise on the fly. After enough interviews, I decided to come up with at least 20 questions for every guest. I don’t get to all 20 questions, but I do get to the important questions. Everything else is icing on the cake.

#6: Outsource Most Of The Work

I have never edited a single episode and yet they get published as if they were edited. These episodes are edited, but they get edited by one of my freelancers. Without this individual, the podcast would not be possible. I don’t have enough time to devote to editing the audio, so I hired someone else to do it instead.

#7: Go

I continuously hunt for motivational quotes I can share with my audience. I asked Seth for his most inspirational quote and he just said, “Start.” As the conversation unfolded, Seth gave us another motivational quote, “Go.” The simplest approaches are often the most effective. If “Go” doesn’t get you fired up, I don’t know what will.

#8: Everyone Wants Another Breakthrough

I have interviewed several people with six, seven, and even eight figure brands. I have interviewed guests who have achieved everything that many of their listeners want to accomplish. These same guests aspire to hit the next breakthrough. They aren’t settling with where they are now. They continue to push the envelop, and that’s why these guests have achieved great admiration for what they do.

#9: Don’t Give Up If The Launch Is A Bust

While I got hundreds of listeners for my podcast, it did not end up in the iTunes New & Noteworthy section. At this point, some people give up because their intention is to get into that New & Noteworthy section. But to be a successful podcaster, blogger, YouTuber, or anything else of that nature, you must continue producing content, video, or audio for many years to come. Keep those launch ambitions alive, but remember there’s far more to a podcast than those first weeks after the launch.

#10: Have A Structure

All of my podcast episodes follow a structure. The intro, interview, and outro reside within the structure of each episode. I also have an email rubric that I use to contact potential guests. The more structure you have in your life, the more efficient and effective you will become.

I learned the first 10 lessons by pushing through and launching the podcast. The rest of the lessons mentioned here come directly from prior episodes.

#11: Have a team around you that shares the same vision.

#12: Set bigger goals to get bigger results.

#13: The habits you develop will make or break you.

#14: It’s possible to chase your startup dream without quitting your job. To do that, you’ll have to be a 10% Entrepreneur.

#15: Outlining your goal enables you to take action at a quicker rate.

#16: Writing a book increases your authority within that subject.

#17: Perseverance is vital regardless of what ambition you pursue.

#18: Speaking to a targeted audience may mean reinventing your methods of delivery. If you are a KeyNote presenter, you’ll have to go without the slides if you wish to speak at a TEDx.

#19: The email list is the most important platform you have for your business. If you don’t have an email list, create one now.

#20: Fear can be a motivator that results in you accomplishing your goals. From personal experience, fear of the deadline works very well.

#21: Don’t say yes to any client who comes your way. Only say yes to the clients you want to work with.

#22: Several guests on the show grow their businesses exponentially with the help of referrals. For some, it meant raffling free prizes to people who got you more email addresses. For others, it meant cross promotion.

#23: Recruiting affiliates for your products will allow your products to spread farther than you could have spread them on your own.

Which lesson was your favorite? Who would you like for me to interview? Have any lessons for us as we head towards 2017? Sound off in the comments section below.

Performance Report November 2016

November 25, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

November was a slow month that picked up momentum towards the end. At the end of the month, I came across an important discovery about my productivity and desires. Here’s a review of my Performance Report for November 2016:

Growing The Blog

I mentioned one of my goals was to schedule all of my content past the first month of 2017. I didn’t schedule a single blog post. With that said, I wrote all of the content. It’s just a matter of scheduling everything.

Each month, I’ve posted the goal of getting 1,000 daily blog visitors. As the months have gone by, that goal has become more and more distant. I’m changing that with a new approach.

By the end of the year, my blog will get updated five days per week. Here’s how it will work.

Monday: Guest post
Tuesday: A blog post I write
Wednesday: Podcast episode with transcript
Thursday: Guest post
Friday: A blog post I write

Getting two guest posts per week is currently the biggest challenge. I hired a freelancer to help me find the right guest bloggers. If you believe you are the right guest blogger, I invite you to fill out this form.

I have no problem with writing two blog posts. The challenge is scheduling everything. I find that part of blogging the most annoying of all. Just as I do with any annoying tasks, I outsourced that task to my freelancer.

By getting rid of other tasks, I increase my focus on the tasks that I work on. Here’s the other big part of my plan.

I’m Officially Back To Creating Udemy Courses

I had my first good month in a while on Udemy so I’m motivated to create courses on that platform once again. Mega course and membership site ideas like Total Social Media Domination and Unlock Your Potential will be self-hosted, but I’ll be putting up a few mini courses on Udemy.

The $0.99 Book Experiment

I recently came across Adam Houge’s work. He’s a successful self-published author who has sold over 2 million of his books. Many of his books are $0.99 and about 40 pages long.

Writing these types of books is very easy. At my maximum, undisrupted level of productivity, I could write one of these books in under three hours.

I’ve decided to write one of these books each week and charge $0.99 for it. I will continue until the first quarter of 2017 and then assess my progress. I thoroughly enjoy writing these types of books because it’s virtually impossible to add fluff.

The point of these books is to fill you up with knowledge that you can act upon within 30-60 minutes (the amount of time it will take for you to read one of these books).

With that said, I’m still in the process of getting Unlock Your Potential out to the world. That book will be an exception to the rule.

The Kindle-Udemy Combo

An intermediate tip that finds its way on many blogs is to repurpose your content. I do just that with all of my $0.99 books. Here’s how it works:

#1: I create the outline for my Kindle book.

#2: I write the Kindle book.

#3: I use the Kindle book as an outline for my Udemy course.

#4: I create the Udemy course.

I am repurposing all of my $0.99 Kindle books to Udemy courses that will be advanced, interactive versions of the books. I aspire to write one book and create one Udemy course every week. My freelance army is about to get bigger.

Learning On Udemy

Not only am I creating more Udemy courses, but I am also enrolling into more Udemy courses. With plenty of discounts and several free courses that I never went through, I can use Udemy to take my learning to the next level.

I bought three Udemy courses during one of their sales about the following:

Reading books faster
Singing (yes, that’s something I want to do)
Growing a podcast

I already went through the course on reading books faster, and what I like best about Udemy courses is that you can quickly go through them by not completely going through them.

What I mean is that you can look at the titles of each video and watch only the videos that most interest you. I didn’t watch all of the videos for the course about reading books faster. Rather, I simply watched the videos that I knew would serve me best.

There are plenty of courses I need to get through before I can even consider buying more.

The Different Mediums I Use To Learn

I am learning by reading books, listening to audiobooks, listening to podcast episodes, and watching training courses. I read before going to bed and listen to audiobooks while on the bike.

During the Thanksgiving Break I adopted two more learning methods, so I’ll have to determine how to fit them into each day.

Books I Read

I didn’t read 12 books this month, and that’s part of the reason I invested my time and money into the speed reading course. And the most important lesson I got from the course was to view a book as a tool in which you don’t have to read from cover to cover.

For reading, it’s better to spend 20% of the time to get 80% of the ideas than it is to spend 100% of the time to get 100% of the ideas.

But these are the books that I did manage to read:

Invisible Selling Machine by Ryan Deiss

How To Talk To Anyone by Leil Lowndes

Virtual Freedom by Chris Ducker

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

This wasn’t my best month of reading, but I probably got the most insights from this book line-up.

Blog Posts I Wrote

How To Create A Content Calendar: Content calendars help you plan out your content production. Here’s how you create one.

5 Secrets For A Successful Blog: Some are secrets while the others are common knowledge that isn’t common practice. #2 is the biggest secret of them all.

10 Dos and Don’ts For Writing Smooth Content: Kate Simpson stopped by to write a guest post providing valuable insights you can use to write better content.

4 Keys To A Successful Blog: If you thought the secrets were cool enough, I’ve now got keys for you. Regardless of what niche you are in, these four keys to a successful blog apply to you.

How To Write Valuable Content When Pressed For Time: Andrew Howe stopped by to write an epic blog post on writing great content even when the clock is against you. This is an important skill because with life and an online business, the clock is almost always against you.

Podcast Episodes I Published

Finding The Next Wave Of Consumer Demand With Mike Michalowicz: Episode 13
How To Achieve Explosive Personal Growth With Aaron Walker: Episode 14
How To Achieve Personal Freedom With Rob Cubbon: Episode 15

December Goals

Normally I have a section in which I look back at the previous month’s performance report, but I feel it is unnecessary for future reports since I look back at the previous month in various parts of each performance report.

With that said, these are my goals for December.

#1: Launch TSMD On December 30th

The membership site I’ve been talking about for months finally has a release date. Since I have been working very hard on this membership site, I am eager to share the final product with everyone.

While the focus of the membership site is to give you enough insight to help you take action, it isn’t one of those libraries of content that seems to stretch on for countless days.

However, you can ask me anything about your social media strategy, and you’ll get access to my expertise.

#2: Create Some FB Ads

While I have attracted hundreds of thousands of organic visitors to my blog from social media, for the first time ever I am attracting visitors to my blog and landing page with the help of paid social traffic.

Since Facebook is the superior social network for social advertising, it only makes sense for me to focus my efforts on Facebook first. I will create Facebook ads for Total Social Media Domination since it would result in recurring revenue that I can use to scale up my business.

#3: Learning Goals

Because I want to learn as much as possible, here are my specific goals to help me acquire more knowledge:

#1: Read 10 Books

#2: Watch 15 Udemy Courses

#3: Listen To 5 Audiobooks

#4: Listen To 20 Podcast Episodes

I’m all in with my learning.

In Conclusion

I place a strong emphasis on learning. Not only do I acquire more knowledge, but the simple act of learning motivates me to put in the work.

A few months ago, I had completely given up on Udemy and self-publishing, but now I’m returning to those two opportunities. When I wrote my first $0.99 book, I realized that I have a strong passion for writing books. Since I had neglected this passion for too long, it made me more susceptible to procrastinating.

And the same thing applies for creating Udemy courses.

So what are your thoughts on this performance report? Do you have any good book recommendations for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Power Tips To Get More Goals Accomplished

July 1, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

goal accomplishment

No matter what your profession, you want to accomplish more goals. And you want to accomplish your goals twice as fast. If you are still working for an employer, you want to get twice as much done for your startup so you can achieve better results.

Everyone wants to be more productive . But the problem is that most people aren’t very productive. We often find ourselves busy with all of the tasks we must complete in a given day, but being busy doesn’t mean being productive.

What we get done in relation to our ambitions actually determines how productive we truly are. Some days I may work for only an hour and feel very productive. Yet on other days I may work for six hours and feel like I accomplished nothing.

Getting more stuff done requires shifting your mindset and examining all of the work that you do in a given day. These five power tips will guide you.

#1: Focus On A Few Big Tasks

Most of my weekly scorecards are filled up with goals from the top to bottom. On some weeks, I’ll give myself 15 big goals to complete. I keep all of these scorecards in a single folder. This allows me to take a walk down memory lane to see what I was working on that is now complete.

Those memory lane walks are sweet, but they also reveal a lot.

I didn’t know it when I started, but keeping all of these scorecards allowed me to have a file containing the secrets to my productivity. I have scorecards in which I accomplished every goal (very rare) and scorecards in which I accomplished very few.

It turns out I have a higher chance of getting all of my goals accomplished if I give myself fewer things to do! Even when the fewer goals are more challenging than all 15 combined.

It’s actually easier, and more productive, to focus on accomplishing fewer, challenging goals than it is to accomplish numerous, simpler goals.

Numerous goals requires that you to spread your energy across a larger playing field. But the more you spread your energy, the less focus you have to concentrate on each individual goal.

Productivity is not measured by how many checkmarks end up on your scorecard. Rather, it’s measured by the impact on the work you are trying to accomplish.

#2: Outsource The Smaller Tasks

With that said, we must complete numerous tasks for the survival of our businesses. If we focus on fewer things, the rest of the business will fall apart.

For a long time, my focus was on completing the numerous tasks that called for my attention. I was always busy, but I wasn’t always productive.

For example, one task was growing my Twitter audience and providing them with content. But the tasks associated with my Twitter account eventually became busy work and detracted me from accomplishing other, equally important goals

At the same time, my income wasn’t increasing and my blog subscribers weren’t growing. While that , I simply didn’t have any time to address those issues.

Then I learned of the magical “O” word: outsourcing.

Outsourcing is the act of paying money to buy back some of your time. I no longer schedule my tweets myself or try to grow my Twitter audience. My freelancers do that for me. And they help me with my podcast, Pinterest account, picture creation, and spreading the word about what I do.

If I have to devote a lot of my time to accomplish these smaller, yet important, tasks, I can’t imagine my business moving forward. Outsourcing saves me a lot of time by taking tasks off my hands. But it also saves me time in other ways.

For instance, if you want to create an app but don’t know how to code, hire a developer and have that person create the app for you. Not only will you save time on creating the app, but you will also save time on learning to code.

#3: Give Yourself A Deadline

Deadlines create a sense of urgency. Urgency leads to action. Without specific deadlines to meet, procrastination will dominate your life. The problem with a “soon and later” mentality is that neither soon nor later ever happen.

That’s why I create a weekly scorecard filled with deadline specific goals. The scorecard creates that sense of urgency I need to get my work done. The goals are challenging, but not impossible. And each is marked according to priority.

The deadlines boost my focus because of the time constraints. I force myself to focus on higher priority goals and get those done before starting on the less important tasks.

Each deadline should be accompanied by a plan. What must you do each day in order to achieve a specific goal? Is it possible for you to take time off in the middle of working, or is this an all-in type of goal?

The more detailed your plan is, the easier it will be for you to implement it and accomplish your goal.

#4: Add A Deadline Motivator Into The Mix

Deadlines are as potent as you make them. Some deadlines will carry no weight whatsoever, while others will loom over your shoulders. The potency of a deadline motivator determines the potency of the deadline itself.

For most people, the biggest deadline motivator is accountability. Share your objective with a few people whom you can rely on to help you reach it. Now you’re accountable. Don’t tell people who will try to discourage you. Why even talk to them in the first place?

Accountability is a strong and easily accessible deadline motivator.

I am in the midst of working with a big deadline motivator. Towards the end of August, my first season of NCAA cross-country begins. Practices begin at 7:30 a.m., so I want to schedule as much content in advance as possible.

That is why I set these three goals for myself to complete before the end of August:

Write 30 blog posts.
Create 30 YouTube videos.
Interview 50 people for my podcast.

These tasks are in line with my overall content plan and will get me through 2016. Chances are I can run and grow my business as easily as I did in high school, but I want to be prepared. Thus, my view of the deadline motivator has made the deadline very potent.

I’m still doing a lot of exploration in my niche to discover new opportunities and stay up to date. Nothing will change but I want to have my content finished and ready to go.

What potent deadline motivator can you think of so that your desire to meet the deadline is just as strong? Make it as potent as you can.

#5: Less Talking, More Doing

Most thoughts pertaining to my business rattle through my head. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about them.

I spend most of my business hours putting in the work. The only business activity I engage in when I am not actually carrying out the work is formulating a plan to carry it out more effectively.

The more time you spend working on your business with the right plan in place, the more you will get accomplished. Productivity involves working efficiently, but no matter how efficient you become, you always have to put in the work.

In Conclusion

Goals pile up. And multiple goals require spreading your time and energy across multiple tasks. That’s the story of most entrepreneurs.

The most successful entrepreneurs are experts at prioritizing and knowing when to say no. Not all objectives are created equal, and certain tasks are simply not worth the time.

Outsourcing eliminates unworthy tasks. Saying no to certain tasks allows a stronger concentration of focus on the opportunities that will yield the strongest results.

What are your tips for accomplishing more goals? Did any one of these tips resonate with you the most? What goals do you want to accomplish this year? Sound off in the comments section below.

The Ultimate Productivity Set Up

June 7, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The thumbnail only tells part of the story.

I reveal all of the methods I use to continue boosting my productivity while living the teenager lifestyle. With the help of the set up, I have written 14 books, created 22 training courses, published 1,300+ blog posts, and accumulated an audience of 400,000+ social media followers.

Plus I go into detail about how I actually use my sticky notes to boost my productivity. I assure you that I don’t use sticky notes for the pure reason of creating a better thumbnail.

Watch the video to learn the productivity set up that you need to adopt today!

[Tweet “The Ultimate #Productivity Set Up.”]

Myth Busting: You Have To Work Hard To Be Successful

April 27, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Some of the most successful people get by on four hours of sleep. Working overtime leads to more pay. It’s easy to assume that being a workhorse will allow you to become successful, but nay, that’s not how it works.

In this video, I will share with you the basic concept of achieving success. It isn’t about how much work you put in. There’s so much more to success than that.

If you like this video, then I would love it if you subscribed to my YouTube channel and spread the word.

[Tweet “Myth Busting: You Have To Work Hard To Be Successful.”]

Myth Busting: All Work Is Productive Work

March 23, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There are two types of work. One of those types of work is productive work. It is the type of work associated with accomplishing goals and heading towards your dreams.

The other type of work holds you back from your true potential. The worst part is that this type of work looks like productive work on the surface.

In this video, I will discuss the two types of work and bust a common myth about productivity.

I hope you enjoy the video. Please let me know what you thought of the video, and if you like it, then don’t forget to subscribe. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.