Marc's Blog

Content Writing and Marketing Services

The 5 Books I Read Every Day

by Leave a Comment

I read a lot of books. I have easily spent over $1,000 on books, and the only reason it’s that low is because I know where to get them cheap ($4 per book if it’s not on Audible or Kindle Unlimited).

Contrary to what people may think, I prefer a paperback over an electronic version. The paper versions feel like they have a better impact. Reading through an electronic version just feels too quick and easy in my opinion.

Lately, I’ve been re-reading the same books over and over again. It’s not that there’s a lack of great content available. In fact, there are plenty of choices.

To create this epic list of five books, I had to say no to some books written by people I’ve come to admire. It was really hard, and I never thought I’d even have a list of five books I’d read every day.

It literally meant rejecting hundreds of other choices. But these five are hear to stay. I’ll read each book for two minutes in the morning. That’s a total of 10 minutes and still gives me plenty of time to do other things and read other books.

I don’t read them from Page 1 to the last page. I’ll skip around and head over to the chapter or story I need to hear in that moment. Without any further adieu, I will share the five books I chose and why I chose them.

 

Rise And Grind by Daymond John

I was an Ambassador for Daymond John’s earlier book Power Of Broke. I was a VIP Ambassador for this book, and when I read the advanced copy, I was blown away.

Daymond went deep when he discussed his work ethic and schedule. He also went deep into many experts’ schedules and mindsets (i.e. Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone).

For my limited number of books I read, it’s great to jump into the mindsets of people like Gary and Grant. But even beyond the self-imposed limitation, the stories and insights from Rise And Grind are amazing!

This isn’t a book filled with tactics. It’s filled with stories, mindsets, and work ethics. Every time I read this book when I was reading for the first time, my work ethic got a little better each time. That’s why Rise And Grind made it on my list of books I read every day.

 

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

Darren Hardy’s book shares a simple idea. Taking the small actions now will have exponential effects over the long-term. This is a book that leaves you fired up when you finish it.

When I took the time to re-read what I underlined, I knew I couldn’t let that fire dimmer. That’s why I decided to add this book to my list. It’s a constant reminder that all of the effort you put in adds up in a big way.

However, The Compound Effect also discusses the other side of the coin. The bad habits you adopt now will have an exponentially negative impact on your life later on.

This book doesn’t just teach you that it’s very rewarding to take the right actions, but it’s also very punishing to not take action or take actions that lead you in the wrong direction.

 

Sports Leaders & Success by Investor’s Business Daily

This is the greatest book you’ve never heard of. While doing research, it took me 10 minutes just to find this book on Amazon (no, I didn’t forget the title). The book has only eight reviews on Amazon and was written over a decade ago.

I promise this book is good, but I’m very lucky I found it. In fact, I stumbled on it by accident. I bought a bulk order of books and this book happened to be one of those books. I put it off for a while, but when I started reading this book, I was amazed.

Think of it this way. During the Olympics, you’ll hear about inspirational backstories and see the world’s greatest athletes compete for their countries. However, you only get that Olympics feeling once every two years assuming you watch the Winter and Summer Classics (personally, I like the Summer Olympics better and spend much more time watching that one).

Sports Leaders & Success is like watching your preferred version of the Olympics in every page you read. You’ll learn the work ethics of the greatest athletes ever, how they responded to pressure situations, and the effort they put in.

The best part is that, no exaggeration in my case, all of the athlete stories were phenomenal. Even though I don’t follow hockey or tennis, I read about some of the top athletes in those sports and enjoyed learning how they made it to the top.

 

Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

 

You can’t go wrong with a book about developing a millionaire mind…especially when that book is written by T. Harv Eker. This book really gets deep at what it means to have that mindset and how you can acquire it.

While books are powerful in the moment, I normally don’t feel the same mindset shifts a month later. That’s why I’m making this book a constant in my life. I don’t want the millionaire mindset to be a one-off that only impacts my life for a month. I want it to be constant.

 

Quantum Success by Sandra Anne Taylor

I’ll be honest. When I read books about success and faith, they usually have too much of the success part or too much on the faith. Both are important to have in excess, but I prefer a blend in these types of books. No book I read has the perfect blend in the same way Quantum Success has.

It’s packed with valuable nuggets of wisdom that you won’t find in most books. This book talks about entirely different topics and insights as a whole. This book helps you grow what’s important and not get too attached to a specific outcome or path.

 

 

In Conclusion

My daily routine is reading these books a little after 4 am every day. That way, my mindset is wired. I can also give my physical body a nice rest while I read the pages. Lying in bed gives my body a chance to catch up to my mind.

Each of these books are special in their own way. I rejected books written by some of my favorite authors to come up with this list. Note: I had to reject some books because my mind is a little fuzzy at 4 am and can’t grasp incredibly deep topics, but that doesn’t undermine these books in any way.

It’s literally just two minutes on each book. Sometimes a little more, but not much more. I’ll read one story, one section, or even an entire chapter (granted, a small chapter under 10 pages) if I so choose.

After I read part of a book, I close it and force myself to remember what I just recalled (Note: not learned since I’ve already read all of these books). These books keep me in the right frame of mind.

I think we can all understand that watching too much TV is bad for your mindset as it puts you in a passive state. To flip that, reading a few books that had a strong, positive affect on your mindset will give you the mindset you need to make great things happen.

That’s the mindset I have every day by 4:20 am.

What were your thoughts on these five books? Do you have any favorite books? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Strengthen Your Rise And Grind Work Ethic

by Leave a Comment

Image Source: http://tayloright.com/

No matter how effective your work ethic is, there’s always room to build upon what you already have. I recently realized this in my life when I made a decision to wake up at 4 am every day.

Waking up this early gives me more uninterrupted time in my day to do my work. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t take me long to fall asleep. Right after I’m done interviewing people on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I call it a day.

Normally, I get more sleep and still feel tired at this stage. While I love the interviews, I don’t feel like doing much after a string of them. I’ve conducted interviews for over three hours in one sitting before.

Even after a long day of school, I can fall asleep and wake up earlier. It’s better for me to wake up earlier and super productive than for me to slog my way through the end of the day trying to get work done.

Plus, it feels great going to school knowing that I’ve done so much already. This blog post isn’t about waking up at 4 am. Everyone has different schedules. Regardless of our schedules, we can rise and grind more than we currently are. This blog post will help you strengthen your work ethic.

 

Apply More Pressure To Yourself

Getting up at 4 am is easier than it sounds. If you get to bed past 10 am, then yes, it’s going to be very difficult to get out of bed at 4 am. However, I’m usually out a little after 8 pm. I don’t stay up as late compared to most people, but I’m up and grinding well before any roster in my timezone wakes up.

Just sleep a few hours earlier and you can wake up a few hours earlier. So, waking up at 4 am isn’t me applying pressure to myself.

Applying pressure to yourself is giving yourself closer deadlines and intentionally reducing your resources to see what you can do with what you have.

For a long time (time is relative, even for a 20 year old), I heard the advice of pay yourself and invest, and I did neither of those things. Then I started to take that advice seriously. At one month, I set the goal of taking 20% out of my business and put it towards my savings or investments.

Since I get big goals for my savings and investing, that 20% mushroomed closer to 80%. As an investor, you need to invest early to reap the long-term gains, so to hit my goal for the month, I knew I needed to invest early. That explains the bigger increase than I anticipated going into the month.

I could still pay my team, but now things were closer. I didn’t have a month’s worth of payments readily available in my PayPal account for my team. I could have technically moved money over from savings and been fine, but I made it a point to not do that.

And that’s how I found myself facing pressure.

I knew that my current methods weren’t working as effectively as they could. I got more creative and pursued amazing opportunities I would have never thought of if I was still comfortable.

If I didn’t pay myself first in a much bigger way than anticipated, I wouldn’t have had this additional but very strong reason to make more money.

The more reasons you give yourself to accomplish a goal, the more likely you are to accomplish that goal. And this was a big reason. Sometimes you don’t need many reasons. You just need a few that fire you up big time.

Have you ever noticed in the superhero movies that towards the end, the hero is faced with a pressing series of reasons for why they need to take action. In every Iron Man movie, Tony is faced with several reasons for taking action:

  • The villain wants to kill him
  • The villain wants to kill his girlfriend
  • The villain wants to destroy or dramatically change all of society
  • People are counting on him, and there’s no one else who can get the job done
  • Even when Tony has his cast of Avengers, he’s still an essential part, and without him, the Avengers lose (the same can be said about all of them)

Even with Stark Enterprises and all of his business responsibilities looming over him, Stark decides to save the planet a few times. I don’t care what reasons he has for growing Stark Enterprises. When the bad guy raves havoc, there’s no way to beat that list of reasons.

The pressure mounts, the hero takes action, and then we head towards the end of the movie. Then at that point, you have an idea of what will happen (hero wins!) but just want to see how it plays out.

 

Both Bookends Work

The extra early rise I have each day gives me uninterrupted time to grind. Originally, I wanted to entitle this section “Use Both Bookends,” but since I can’t see myself doing that right now, I didn’t use that title.

If working late into the night is your thing, then go for it. One caveat I have for that approach is that your willpower must carry the weight of the rest of the day on its shoulders.

When I wake up at 4 am, my willpower hasn’t carried any weight. It’s in it’s prime. In the past, I did the last night thing. On the day before a vacation, I sometimes work past 2 am because I know I can sleep on the way to the destination.

I’ve been productive during those rare moments, but I prefer my 4 am routine. You may prefer something different, and there’s absolutely no problem with that. Whatever helps you achieve your grind is the approach you use.

Just make sure you establish a routine. I wake up at 4 am, and the first thing I do every day, without fail, is read different parts of the same five books for two minutes each. Those five books give me the right mindset to rise and grind.

The second thing I do every day is make myself some food. Pear and toast are all I need to start working. When the day gets brighter, I’ll go out on one of my runs. While I enjoy beating the sun as an entrepreneur, I prefer running in the morning sunlight.

 

Do More Thinking

We are so busy that we often have little time to think. I’m not talking about the in-the-moment pigeon holed thinking we all experience when we perform a certain task. As I write this blog post, I only think of ways to make it better. I’m not thinking about what I need to do for my business to move it to the next level.

If I do that, you’ll see it in my writing and my content will be subpar.

However, I do carve out 10-15 minutes of each day to do nothing but think. I take a satellite view of everything I’m doing. I examine what’s working and what’s not working. When I pressure myself as mentioned earlier, it forces me to look for new but very specific opportunities.

When I crunched the numbers, I realized that podcasting accounts for most of my expenses. I was surprised when I learned that. However, I believe sponsored ads take away from the listeners’ experience which is why you’ll never hear ads during the show.

So how does my podcast help pay off for the big boost in expenses? The answer is Patreon.

I originally thought I didn’t need it, but seeing that my podcast costs so much money to maintain each month, I created a Patreon Page where anyone can contribute as little as $1 per month to support the Breakthrough Success Podcast.

That’s something you don’t think about doing if you don’t take 10-15 minutes to think of ways you can move your business forward. In my case, it also helps that I keep track of my income and expenses in a Numbers document.

Thinking in this way will help you get more clear on your priorities. If you don’t know your priorities, write a list of your revenue generating activities. Those are your priorities.

When you discover your priorities, you’ll also discover new opportunities similar to how I got started on Patreon in an effort to pay off my podcast expenses without ruining the experience with sponsored ads.

 

In Conclusion

We all need to rise and grind more. Our work ethics are never final products. Lately, I’ve been waking up at 3:50 am so I can finish reading my five books by 4 am. That way, I prep my food slightly earlier and easily start working by 4:30 am.

I know these times sound crazy to many people. I recommend you give it a try to see if it works for you. Sleep earlier, wake up earlier. I’ve also embraced life as a night owl before staying up as late as 2 am to do videos.

Videos are the one thing I normally do that I don’t see myself doing at 4:30 am. However, I can easily see myself doing videos from 11 pm to 2 am. There’s nothing else to do, and later in the day, I’d rather talk and let the words rush out than write and think about each sentence.

What are your thoughts on my approach to rising and grinding? Do you have any additional approaches or strategies for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Why I Hire Employees Before I’m Ready

by Leave a Comment

I frequently hire employees before I feel ready. In fact, I often hire new employees not being fully sure if I can pay them. This is why I usually go for a part-time route. If something bad happens, I can decrease hours or pause the contract but not terminate it.

However, that rarely happens, even when I don’t feel ready upon the hire.

The truth is that you will never feel ready to hire your first few employees. As you hire more employees and generate more income, you may feel ready to add several employees to your team at once.

So why do I recommend hiring employees before you feel fully ready? You’ll learn why in this blog post.

 

This Is An Important Skill

Building your team is vital to your success. Learning how to hire the right employees will allow you to make better decisions in the future. You need to practice making these types of decisions now so you can make the right decisions when you’re ready to significantly expand.

Every successful entrepreneurs reaches the point of massive delegation. There are many tasks that are necessary for the company’s survival but not for the CEO’s to-do list. Delegating tasks within your business will help you advance to the next level.

 

Another Reason To Make More Revenue

If you want to achieve something, give yourself as many reasons as possible to achieve it. If you add more people to your team, you have two new reasons:

  1. Make more money so you can pay for the new employees
  2. Make more money so you can help your employees pay for their living expenses

I don’t take any hiring or firing lightly. It’s a big moment when you realize that you are someone’s primary source of income. You want to perform better so your team can pay for their food, homes, and other essentials.

I almost always make more revenue when I hire someone because of the extra time and boosted impact of my success on others.

More Time To Generate More Income

Hiring an employee to take on various responsibilities within my brand gives me more time to pursue the most profitable activities. I can also explore new opportunities that I wouldn’t have had the time to pursue.

Without delegation, I would have never started the Breakthrough Success Podcast or hosted two virtual summits which each had over 50 speakers. Delegation makes more possible, and when you explore other areas, you find tasks within those areas that you’ll soon need to delegate.

 

Better Life-Balance Possibilities

While it’s not my style, if I needed to, I could outwork almost anyone. I’d strategically split my exercising routine to several 5-10 minute bursts instead of running for at least an hour.

My preferred style is to strike an overall balance. On some days, my only break is going out for a run. On other days, I literally do zero work. Last year, I took a two week vacation that actually felt like a two week vacation. I did virtually zero work during the day.

All I did was interact with my social media audience and schedule some prewritten emails for an affiliate launch. For two weeks.

I’d be very bored if I only had to work four hours each week, but I want that luxury for moments when I want to use it.

I work hard and play hard, and delegation allows me to capture the best of both worlds. I know that I have to continue putting in the effort to keep this lifestyle going, and this desired lifestyle motivates me to work harder when I’m working.

 

Expand Your Thinking

People spend so little time expanding their thinking. I’m not expanding my thinking as I write this blog post. I am thinking of specific words, sentences, and ideas that will add value to this blog post. I’m not thinking about my Instagram strategy right now. It’s something I want to address, but I can’t right now.

That’s because I’m writing this blog post.

That same example holds for virtually any activity. You can’t think about X when you’re doing Y. It just doesn’t work that way. If you attempt it, you’ll produce mediocre work on Y and have a clouded mind about X.

In order to expand your thinking, truly freely, you need to pause everything you are doing. No interaction or active task. Just you, pieces of paper, and a trustworthy pen or pencil. That’s what you need to expand your thinking. When all of those opportunities present themselves at once, I can plan out my Instagram strategy.

Most people never reach that moment because of all of the tasks they need to do. There’s always something.

You can always schedule social media posts. You can always optimize the ad. You can always write another blog post.

There comes a time for doing, but there’s also a time for expanding your thinking. I’ll have some workweeks that seem like they’re only four hours. However, I’ll spend much more than four hours of those weeks thinking and contemplating my next moves.

I go as far as to have a Think Day every once in a while. I literally do nothing for my brand but think of ways I can advance it the next time I’m working. I look at opportunities I wouldn’t have even considered in the hustle and bustle of today’s world.

It’s great to hustle, but you need to occasionally remove yourself from the hustle to take a satellite view of everything you’re doing. With that satellite view, you can see what you’re doing right, what needs to be improved or eliminated, and what opportunities you need to explore next.

 

In Conclusion

In the short-term, hiring an employee will take up your time. You need to find the right person and filter out the wrong fits. Even when you find the right person, you need to train that individual.

You can’t assume that the employee will flawlessly perform the task. You’ll need to frequently communicate, especially in the beginning. Only after this process will you see the long-term benefit.

You’ll have more time to pursue more important areas in your brand. You’ll have a better work-life balance.

The most successful people are long-term thinkers. It’s why Amazon is so successful. While it’s easy to look at their success and think they were always like that, it actually took several years before Amazon even broke even.

Anytime it looked like Amazon would finally break even, Jeff Bezos decided to invest for the long-term and continuously sacrifice the short-term. That’s why Amazon may become the first trillion dollar company.

You may not report a net loss of $39 million. However, you can learn from the most successful entrepreneur right now.

Making the move towards delegation is an example of long-term thinking. There may be some bumps, but hiring employees will open up more time and boost effectiveness.

For instance, I had no idea how to optimize Amazon Ads. That’s why I entrusted a service to help me create and optimize Amazon Ads for one of my books.

What are your thoughts about hiring employees? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How I Balanced Teen Life With Growing A Massive Online Brand

by Leave a Comment

I recently turned 20, leaving my teen years behind me. During those years, I grew a massive brand, wrote millions of words of content, and interviewed some of the top influencers in my niche.

The question I’ve gotten the most is this one:

How do you find the time to do all of this at a young age while in school?

I still get that question since I’m still in college, but I thought I’d answer it with this blog post. It would give me a good look down memory lane and provide some insights I know you’ll take away from the content.

 

Start With Elimination

The moment I realized I’d take entrepreneurship seriously, I significantly cut down on useless activities. I cut my TV watch time from 4 hours every day to 4 hours every week. This one decision alone saved me 24 hours every week.

Eventually, I gave up video games completely which saved even more time.

There are habits in your life that are doing you more harm than good. You need to cut off these habits right away. They are preventing you from accomplishing your dreams. You need to get fully dialed in, and that means eliminating any activities that don’t get you fully dialed in.

I only take time off to pursue a small number of active activities and strengthen relationships. Active as in not passively looking at a TV screen.

 

Quality Of Time

Once you’ve eliminated the bad habits in your life, it’s time to strengthen the quality of your time. Some writers can write 80 words per minute while other writers can only write 40 words per minute. One writer fulfills twice the output than the other writer in the same timeframe.

Boosting the quality of your time comes down to four key steps. The first step is clarity. Get clear on what you should be doing now that will help you achieve your biggest long-term goals.

The second step is to boost efficiency. It’s more efficient if you can get a task done in a shorter amount of time.

The third step is to boost your effectiveness. This usually comes with practice in being efficient. Master efficiency first and effectiveness tends to follow you.

The final step is to always stay in the moment. Every second you think about your past or future is another second when you are standing still and not doing anything beneficial for yourself. Constantly thinking forward or backward prevents you from moving forward in the present.

 

Research Your Way To The Top

Anytime I want to become good at something, I research it like it’s the guaranteed secret to becoming a billionaire. If you know it existed, I’m sure you’d research hard for it too.

I can consume content for hours on a single topic just to get better at it. I carry out my research in long waves and then short bursts when I know what I’m doing.

All of the research in the world only provides the foundation. Building the building requires that you take action. At some point, I swap most of my researching time with implementation time. I did hours of research to learn how to grow on Twitter. Then I did it.

To this day, I continue researching on Twitter. However, it’s not nearly as much as before. I might read an article a week about Twitter but that’s it. On the other hand, I can read content marketing related articles for at least an hour a week. I need to stay sharp in that area, and I feel like I’ve pretty much mastered Twitter.

 

Delegation

The moment you start delegating is the moment you’re heading to the big leagues. You only have so much time available. No matter how efficient and effective you become, there will still be things that you can’t get done in a given day.

Delegation hands off tasks to others so you can get the most important tasks done. I don’t edit episodes, write show notes, schedule episodes, create and optimize Amazon book ads, or grow my Twitter account anymore. I plan on handing off even more tasks in the future. That way, I can focus on the important stuff.

The Most Wasted Moments

I don’t always listen to music in the car. Sometimes I listen to an audiobook. When I’m not driving, I can also write a blog post. We have smartphones with so many capabilities for content creation and consumption.

Car driving and grocery shopping are two of the many common activities that usually go to waste. Instead of listening to music, you can listen to a podcast episode and learn how to move yourself forward. You can even do a podcast episode in your car.

One of the guests on my show was driving around the city while I interviewed him. And his audio was surprisingly spot on. Most people are listening to music or unproductively sitting in traffic during that time.

It doesn’t just apply to driving and grocery shopping. There are many wasted moments that can easily become more productive moments. Anytime you find yourself idly scrolling through your smartphone just to let time pass by, you can be planning out your next piece of content instead. You can be reading articles.

Pay attention to how you are wasting moments that most people would waste. Then, find a way to either consume or create meaningful content.

 

Creating VS Consuming

I’d rather spend most of my time creating content than consuming content. Even if it’s educational content, you can’t create when you’re consuming. If anything, consuming content helps you gather ideas, but you need to create far more than you consume.

We spend too much time consuming emails, reading, listening to, and watching other people’s content. While I recommend a daily dose of content consumption, the time you spend creating needs to outweigh the consumption phase.

I only start my day by doing one of two things:

  • Exercise
  • Create Content

Most of the time, I create a piece of content before I even exercise. It gets me on the right foot to start the day. I can exercise and do anything else knowing that I wrote my first blog post.

I actually prefer exercising when I feel like I’m about to burn out. I know I’m about to burn out when I’m looking at a bunch of stats related to my business over and over again. That’s when I close the computer and start exercising or consuming content.

I prefer to consume content in the evening because that’s when my productivity drops anyway. It would be a mistake to consume content at the start of the day because that sets you up to consume more content throughout the day. By creating all of your content at the start of the day, you can consume during the evening.

And when you’re the host of a podcast with guests on the show, you get to simultaneously create and consume content. I consume at least five hours of content every week just by interviewing people.

 

In Conclusion

It’s possible for anyone, regardless of their schedule, to pursue their dreams. I grew my brand as a college student but also as a high school student which was much more time consuming.

I may hear about someone who has the impossible schedule and that I would never understand. A schedule is only as impossible as you make it out to be. You can take advantage of moments that most people wouldn’t even think about utilizing.

Even though I’m no longer a teen, I still live by this approach. If it isn’t broken, there’s no reason to fix it. I’ll experiment and look for ways to add on to this approach, but I don’t tinker too far away from the working mode.

What are your thoughts on my approach? Do you have any suggestions? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

4 Steps To Accomplishing Long-Term Goals

by Leave a Comment

Long-term goals seem far away. It’s easy to think that if we don’t do anything today, it’s fine because we still have so much time.

That couldn’t be any further from the truth. This thinking is why most people don’t accomplish their long-term goals.

If you want to accomplish your long-term goals, you need to take daily action towards those goals. Each day, you need to be closer to the destination than you were the day before.

However, some people don’t know how to create that sense or urgency or what they should do in the first place. To accomplish your long-term goals, follow these steps.

#1: Identify Actions That Get You Closer

There’s a difference between taking action and taking purposeful action. Action just fills up your time. It can be productive or unproductive but you have no idea. With this type of action, you’re putting in a lot of random effort and hoping you get lucky.

Purposeful action is completely different. With purposeful action, you determine the winning actions before getting out of the gate. You look at your long-term goals and determine what actions get you there faster.

To determine your purposeful actions, you’ll need to conduct research and think. Conducting research will give you a variety of options while thinking will allow you to determine which options are the best ones for you.

When I say think, I’m referring to complete solitude for 10-15 minutes where you map out your ideas on several pieces of paper. Then you’ll have a better understanding of your purposeful actions.

Determining purposeful action doesn’t always require research. For instance, I want four speaking gigs in 2018. My goal is to submit at least 15 pitches per month because you only get the gig by making the pitch.

#2: Set Nearby Milestones

If you set a long-term goal, especially an annual goal, it can seem distant. You apply little effort because you have several months to play with. Then, days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months.

The distant long-term goal is suddenly approaching, and you’re a long way from the finish line.

To break the cycle of this common storyline, you need to set nearby milestones. Just like most people, I set New Year’s resolutions. However, I don’t stop there. I crafted my Q1 goals based on my annual goals.

After I crafted those Q1 goals, I then crafted my January goals. You need to break your long-term goals into shorter intervals on the way to achievement. You can even break it down further into weekly goals to create more urgency.

In addition to the added urgency, the closer deadlines will also give you more clarity. What actions do you need to perform today and this week to get closer to your goal?

#3: Get Help

Getting help has multiple meanings. The most cost effective way for people to get any help is to ask their successful family or friends for advice. If you don’t have good mentors within your family and friends, you can start contacting more successful people and asking for their advice.

Many of those people will respond because successful people love sharing their secrets. Any newfound secret to success doesn’t remain a secret for long because successful people love telling others about them.

As a bonus, I recommend that you, regardless of your niche, start your own podcast. You’ll connect with so many awesome people and get to pick their brains. I could literally write an entire book about how the Breakthrough Success Podcast has changed my life.

Get mentors in your life. Even if you have to pay for a coach (strongly recommended by me and many Breakthrough Success guests), you need someone who has achieved the success you’re looking for to guide you.

In addition to finding a coach or mentor, you also need to delegate your tasks to trustworthy employees.

Remember how I told you how you can discover the purposeful actions that will lead to achievement?

The other actions still get in the way. Scheduling emails, writing social media posts, creating pictures, and editing content are some of the actions that may get in the way of your purposeful actions.

Any action that gets in the way of your purposeful actions needs to get delegated. You will make significantly more money by focusing on a few purposeful actions than by doing many actions that keep you busy but don’t move the right needle forward.

If you pursue too many actions in a given day, you risk moving the wrong needles forward while thinking you’re moving the right needle forward. Every successful entrepreneur has a team behind him/her, and even if you start with a part-time freelancer who you give less than $100/mo, it’s a start.

#4: Keep Yourself Accountable

You can have an outside group of people keep you accountable. This is one of many cases where having a coach is very useful.

However, you also need to keep yourself accountable. Every day, you need to set goals and make it your duty to accomplish those goals.

The easiest way to keep yourself accountable is to give yourself as many reasons as possible for taking action.

The more reasons, and the more potent those reasons, the better. Some people use supporting their family as a reason for taking action. The more you care about all of the reasons behind your actions, the more accountable you’ll keep yourself.

In Conclusion

It’s possible for anyone to accomplish their long-term goals. However, you can only accomplish these grand goals if you plan them out and take purposeful action.

What were your thoughts on this process for accomplishing long-term goals? Do you have any suggestions? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

 

How To Get Your Audience Involved In Your Content Brand

by Leave a Comment

Most content brands follow a very simple structure. The content creator creates content and the audience consumes it. Sure, there are other things that go into it. You have to promote content, create a content calendar, and do things like that.

But at its core, most content brands exist as content providers for people to consume.

Advanced content brands flip that concept on its head. Yes, they still produce content, and yes, their audiences engage with their content.

But these advanced content brands do something different. They break the 4th wall. They get their audiences involved in their brands.

You’ve already seen this happen again and again. But you need to notice it happening around you for it to have an impact on your brand. Here’s what I’ve noticed from advanced content brands.

Invite Your Audience To Fill Out Surveys

I’m not talking about those five minute surveys that you make 10 cents on. Several years ago, I was filling out those types of surveys. It’s an easy way to make money, but 10 cents isn’t much to celebrate about.

I’m talking about the surveys that give them a voice in your future decisions. In these short surveys (you only need 3-5 questions), ask your audience what type of content they want to see more often.

These surveys allow you to determine what your audience wants. By providing more of what your audience wants, they’ll engage with more of your content. As your audience engages with more of your content, more people will come across your brand.

The best part about surveys is that your audience will appreciate being heard. They’ll appreciate giving you a suggestion and seeing you took action based on that suggestion just a few years later.

You’ll also get plenty of epic content ideas which are vital for all content brands.

Invite Contributors To Your Content Brand

As you promote your content brand and it gets older, you’ll hear more stories about people who have been engaged with your brand for several years. These are your core fans who love what you produce and want to help.

They are the ones who will fill out your surveys, but some want to help on a bigger level.

One of the best ways to activate your audience is to give them permission to contribute to your success. This is why I opened the doors to guest blogging on my site. As I write a blog post every day, I technically don’t need the help, but I’ll happily take it.

The great things about contribution relationships is that they’re usually win-win. Contributors help me by providing more content and promotion power, and I help them by putting them in front of my audience.

You can find contributors on other popular content brands (i.e. these brands’ blogs, channels, podcasts, etc.) and ask them if they want to contribute some content for you. As you get more of these people to say yes and publish more of their content, your audience will catch on.

Soon you’ll get plenty of submissions each day as more people become more involved in your content brand.

Reply To Comments

I don’t know how Neil Patel does it. He responds to every single comment. On time.

I respond to virtually all of the comments I get, but sometimes it takes me a month to get back to people.

It’s something I am working on, and I know it will get more difficult as my content brand grows even more.

But it’s important.

Replying to your comments makes your audience realize that you pay attention to them. It’s one thing to continuously produce content. Taking the time to reply to someone who consumed your content and left a comment is a whole new level.

And let’s remember that few people leave comments. If you enjoy this blog post, are you going to leave a comment? I get hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, but I don’t have hundreds of thousands of comments to show for it.

In this blog’s history, only 0.7% of visitors have left a comment. That percentage also includes my replies, so the actual number is much smaller.

Am I just a terrible marketer then? Not quite. These are results you can see on almost any blog, even the really good ones.

To leave a comment, you have to read the blog post, have takeaways, and want to spend the 10-15 seconds it takes to leave a comment. In our fast world, people don’t have that kind of time. In that same period of time, you should find another great piece of content to read and get started on it.

I mention this because a comment indicates this person cared about your content. Even for a controversial topic, this person cared enough about your content and its message to share his/her thoughts.

These are comments you need to respond to. Let your audience know that you care, and they’ll care about you even more.

Create Polls

You can use polls to gather people’s opinions to form conclusions that theoretically apply to the whole.

Polls get your audience more involved in your content and lets you know how your audience thinks. Before I even started this blog, I did a Poll of the Day on one of my other blogs. I may bring that back in the future.

Polls get your audience involved in what you’re doing. Even if it’s a silly question that has no value for your brand (i.e. chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream), you condition your audience to engage with your content on a deeper level.

Answering a poll takes less than five seconds, and those are seconds most people are willing to give you. Part of it is to share their opinion, and part of it is to see what everyone else said.

For instance, aren’t you now a little curious about whether I prefer chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream? Wouldn’t you want to know what my entire audience thinks?

It’s not something you would passionately Google. It’s more of those “Why not…as long as the data is in front of me and easy to interpret” scenarios.

But what if I asked my audience whether they prefer writing blog posts or creating podcast episodes. That’s something more interesting and related to my niche.

And it gets my audience more involved in my content brand.

In Conclusion

As content creators, we need to show more appreciation to our audiences. That doesn’t just mean creating content that they love. It also means taking the time to acknowledge individuals who acknowledge us on a deeper level.

The future winners will be the ones who can connect with more people in their audiences on a 1-to-1 level.

What are your thoughts on these tactics for getting your audience more engaged? Do you have any tactics you’d like to share? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.