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5 Surprising Ways To Be Completely UN-Productive

January 20, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

When was the last time you wanted to be unproductive? Chances are you never go into your day asking yourself, “How can I be as unproductive as possible?”

We strive to be productive and enlist certain habits and principles to guide us. However, some of the activities people do each day that they think are productive are actually unproductive.

The problem with productivity is that there is conflicting advice about what actions should be taken to bring forth a more productive you. Conflicting advice brings forth confusion, and ultimately, misconceptions.

We praise certain methods of doing work that actually hurt our productivity. Here are the most surprising methods that, although we often praise them, are the main culprits to being less productive.

#1: Being Available 24/7

Corporations have popularized the ability to be available 24/7. Whether you are calling your customers or responding to their questions, the belief is that you should be available 24/7.

However, if you are available for your customers 24/7, then you are not available for yourself 24/7. You won’t have as much time to create products, grow your social media audience, and do anything of the like.

I don’t answer my emails the moment I get them. Sometimes, it can take me several days for me to respond. I focus on writing my blog posts or doing videos for an upcoming product.

After all of that work is done and I want to take a break, I will then respond to the emails within my inbox.

I used to make it a policy to respond to emails less than 24 hours after they were sent. The amount of time I would spend responding to emails would cut into a majority of the time that I could have spent writing blog posts and creating products.

Being available 24/7 is a myth. The only reason corporations are able to pull it off is because they hire several employees to respond to emails and take phone calls.

If you call Apple Support right now, Tim Cook is not going to pick up the phone.

If you want to be available 24/7, then you need to hire several freelancers who you can trust. That way, you can focus more of your time towards productive activities.

#2: Multitask To Get More Done At Once

In our busy world, we are constantly looking for ways to feed two birds with one scone. Some of us are trying to use that one scone to feed three birds.

The result of our efforts is multitasking. The idea behind multitasking is that you get two things done at the same thing instead of doing them one at a time.

Behind our made-up definition of multitasking lies the real definition. Multitasking is simply the act of doing two things at the same time in a less efficient manner than if you were to approach one task at a time.

I can run and read a book at the same time. I might run really slow, not absorb any of the content, or crash into a lamppost. I can run and read at the same time, but I wouldn’t get much out of the run or the book.

Are you running and reading the same time with your business? Are you trying to write a blog post and schedule your tweets at the same time? Are you listening to music on your smartphone while trying to listen to a tutorial on your computer?

Multitasking in its most basic form is a productivity myth. The only thing multitasking does is makes you less productive. It can even kill your brain.

#3: Work Hard

If Person A worked for five hours today and Person B worked for three hours today, who worked longer. The answer to that one is Person A.

But who was more productive? Answering this questions requires that we explore each person’s work ethic and the work that was actually done.

An interesting thing I have noticed about my productivity is that as my time diminishes, I become more productive. When I have less time to spend on my business, that’s when I become very productive.

I am more productive when I work for 2-3 hours than some people are when they work for over eight hours every day. How does that happen? It’s based on a few factors.

The main factor is how you are working. There is a major distinction between working hard and working smart. You can work hard but not get anywhere. Working smart ensures that you are to make some type of progress each day.

Working smart is simply asking yourself which path is the right path for me, how can I get there faster, and where do I sign up to get started.

Once you work like that, you will be more productive than most of the people who simply work hard.

Another big factor is how much of the work you actually do. Most of my work time is exclusively spent writing blog posts or creating new videos. Those are my top priorities.

But what about everything else I do. What about scheduling over 100 tweets per day, growing my audience, creating slides, video editing and all of that fun stuff.

Outsourced to the last drop.

On a good weekday, I’ll put in three hours of work towards my business. However, I have freelancers who put in at least three hours of work for me every day.

By outsourcing several parts of your business, it is possible for work to be put towards your business for over 24 hours per day without you doing any of that work.

The big dream many entrepreneurs have is their businesses functioning on autopilot. The only way your business will ever function on autopilot is if you outsource the work to other people.

Might as well get started now. That way, you’ll work smarter and actually be more productive.

#4: Use A Productivity App*

If there is one method of productivity that receives a lot of praise, Productivity Apps are it. Under certain circumstances, Productivity Apps CAN make you more productive.

However, there is a danger with using productivity apps.

The danger is that you must use them on a device. More specifically, you must use the Productivity App on a device with millions of other options.

If you use a Productivity App on an iPhone, all you have to do is click on the menu button. Suddenly, the Productivity App disappears and you see all of your other apps.

Maybe the Angry Birds app distracts you. Maybe the ABC News app does the trick. Maybe it’s Safari. The moment you get out of that Productivity App for the slightest second, you are exposed to numerous distractions. And this is true regardless of which device you use.

What’s hot on YouTube? What’s trending on Twitter? Maybe, just maybe this time I’ll beat my high score in Flappy Bird.

Some Productivity Apps in their design are brilliant. But the nature of devices and the way we use those devices can sometimes undermine the power of Productivity Apps.

If you can find a Productivity App that locks your device into that one app for a certain amount of time, then that Productivity App will work. The apps themselves are not bad.

But since I don’t trust myself to not browse around on a device, I use a notebook to stay more productive. I write all of my goals with pen and paper. I use real sticky notes instead of the digital ones.

What I have observed with goal setting is this: There is truly a more potent feeling when you write a goal versus when you type it on your computer.

Typing produces the same font that anyone else can produce with a keyboard. Writing the goals on paper is like writing your own signature. Only you get to do that.

Plus, your notebook will never crash. If your device crashes, or the Productivity App isn’t functioning correctly, then you are going to lose valuable time.

Even if you find a Productivity App that keeps you locked in, never handicap your productivity to that one app alone. Sometimes the old ways work the best.

#5: Commit Yourself To Accomplishing Everything On Your Workload

For some people, accomplishing everything on their workload would be productive. Most people who find themselves committed to this goal could be more productive.

The simple reason is what the workload entails. Is the workload easy or is it challenging? What types of results would you get from accomplishing the work? Would you be better off, or does the workload consist of “Get-By” Work?

This misconception strongly applies to all of the lone-wolves who believe it is possible to be a successful solopreneur.

Just because all of the work you do is important for your business doesn’t mean you should be doing all of that work.

There are certain tasks within your workload that can easily be delegated to other people. Thus, the idea of outsourcing resurfaces. Think about all of the things you do and then ask yourself if any of those tasks could be given to someone else.

Then think about what all of that extra time would get you.

Outsourcing is the only reason I am able to create courses on Udemy. It’s also the only reason I am still able to write three blog posts every week.

The truth is I was considering going down to only writing two blog posts per week so I could focus more of my time towards Udemy. Outsourcing changed that. What can outsourcing parts of your business change for you?

In Conclusion

We all want to be productive. There’s no question about that. The confusion begins when we ask ourselves which methods of boosting productivity will actually boost our productivity.

Multitasking for instance does not work. Speaking of work, it is possible to be more productive than the person who puts in more hours than you.

In the end, the methods that work best for your productivity are the ones that you must be guided by. Certain methods work for me that don’t work as well for others and vice-versa.

However, these five methods need to be thrown out of your way of thinking because there are more efficient tactics out there.

Outsourcing alone will transform your productivity and what you achieve. And there are plenty of other ways to boost your productivity as well.

What are your thoughts about this list? Which one of these methods came to you as the biggest surprise? Do you know of any other surprising methods that would decrease productivity? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Ways To Use The New Twitter Polls

January 18, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Did you hear? Twitter came out with another epic update. Maybe you saw it in action in 2015. This year is the time for you to use those Twitter Polls for your business.

Out of all of the methods of boosting my Twitter engagement, never before have I seen something as powerful as creating a Twitter Poll.

In less than three minutes of publishing my first Twitter Poll, over 20 people engaged with it. None of my tweets have ever received that much engagement in a short amount of time.

What was that first poll? I’ll reveal it to you in the first of five ways that you can use the new Twitter Polls.

#1: Discover What Product Your Audience Wants

Since I am a digital marketing expert, most of the products I create are digital marketing related. I decided that I would create a course about a social network, but which one to choose…

I narrowed the list of potential courses to four. I would either create a second Twitter course or create a course about Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. What course would I create next?

Twitter Poll to the rescue!

The data from this poll revealed that most of my Twitter audience believed that Twitter is the most important social network for business owners to master.

Now I know what the majority of my audience within that sampling wants. They want a Twitter course.

All I have to do now is create a course that focuses on a more specific area of Twitter (I already have the Twitter Domination course on Udemy).

#2: Have Fun With Your Audience

People like to use polls to focus on their professional side. Some of your polls should be polls that have nothing to do with your business.

These types of polls further connect you with your audience. Asking questions like if your anyone in your audience owns a dog, cat, or both allows you to spark conversations and get more engagement.

You may wonder what the point of creating these types of polls is (other than connecting you with your audience). The additional reason these polls are beneficial is because the people within your audience will remember who you are.

You are not going to forget the social media expert who asked you if you would rather have a hot dog with mustard over a hot dog without mustard.

If you post too many of these types of polls every day, they will get annoying and your audience will get confused about what your message is.

However, if you post these types of Twitter Polls only once in a while, then you are more likely to get strong engagement while ensuring that your audience knows exactly what you do on the professional side.

#3: Blog Post Ideas

Every blogger at some point struggles to think of blog post ideas. To get more ideas, you can now use Twitter Polls and ask your audience what they want.

You can ask them what topics they want to see more often in your blog. But here’s where strategy comes in.

Twitter Polls are currently limited to four choices. The first three choices are actual topics related to your niche. Here’s what the 4th choice must be word for word:

Other (please specify)

Asking your Twitter followers to provide you with a specific answer will encourage those people to engage in a conversation with you. You can make the conversation go further by thanking your individual followers for giving you suggestions.

The best part is that you will get many of these suggestions the moment you tweet the poll. In just a few minutes, you could suddenly have several new blog post ideas that you can build content around.

#4: React To Live Events In Real-Time

Oreo shook the social media world with its famous tweet about dunking in the dark. The context behind the tweet was the first blackout in Super Bowl history.

For the first time, we understood the power of real-time social media.

But now we are armed with more capabilities than before. We can now use Twitter Polls to get people’s opinions about something that recently happened.

Whose performance did you like better at the Oscars? Did the umpire make the right call? What do you think happens in the next episode?

All of these questions can be turned into Twitter Polls that get massive engagement.

When Twitter talked about extending the character count to 10,000 characters, the reactions were mixed. It trended as the hashtag #Twitter10K. Since it was a trending topic related to my niche, I decided to create a poll.

Let’s just say I was very happy with the engagement the poll received. Especially since the decision to put up the poll was spontaneous on my part.

#5: See Which Of Your Social Media Content Your Audience Likes The Most

Chances are your social media posts cover a wide range of topics. You can create a Twitter Poll asking your audience which social media posts they like the most.

Instead of wondering if your audience likes your blog posts about Twitter more than your blog posts about Facebook, you can ask them with the Twitter Poll.

In Conclusion

When used right, Twitter Polls allow you to learn more about your audience. You can discover what they want more of. Once you discover that and then give your audience more of what they want, they will appreciate you more.

They will return to your blog more often and buy your products. All because you know what they want and are willing to give them what they want.

What are your thoughts about Twitter Polls? Do you envision yourself using them this year? Are there any other ways to use Twitter Polls that you know of? Sound off in the comments section below.

4 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic From Pinterest

January 15, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Pinterest has emerged as one of the premier social networks on the web. With over 100 million monthly active users who typically spend 1.5 hours on the social network every day, Pinterest is a critical social network for all bloggers to focus on.

Pinterest has a completely different set up from all of the other social networks. While Twitter and Facebook continuously copy each other, Pinterest has an approach that no social network can rival.

The way pins can be organized into boards makes it easier for your followers to find exactly what they are looking for. Think of blog categories on steroids.

The visual cues Pinterest generates can lead to a big increase in blog traffic. Not only does the design of Pinterest encourage traffic, but it is also easier to go viral on Pinterest.

While on other social networks you typically need thousands upon thousands (if not millions) of followers to go viral, it is possible to go viral on Pinterest with only a few hundred followers.

All you need is a powerful picture that catches people’s attention.

But let’s now shift gears and focus on using Pinterest as generating a consistent stream of blog traffic. Imagine getting dozens of daily visitors from Pinterest. Then imagine that traffic growing to hundreds of daily visitors from Pinterest alone.

It’s possible, and it can happen for you. In order to get more blog traffic from Pinterest, follow these four tips.

#1: Pin Consistently And Frequently Throughout The Day

For a long time, I took every article I read seriously. Then, after reading enough articles, I ran across some articles that were contradictory to one another.

One article said tweet four times per day while the other article said tweet 10 times per day. It is impossible to agree with both articles. At that point, it’s one or the other.

Confused about what to do next, I experimented and decided to tweet once every 15 minutes. Each time I increased my tweeting frequency, I got more blog traffic.

So I decided to apply the same methods to Pinterest and see what would happen.

When I started to pin more often throughout the day, I saw a significant increase in my blog’s traffic. Within days of trying this out, I was averaging 50+ visitors per day just from Pinterest.

I started this strategy when I had less than 10,000 Pinterest followers. But in my experience, you don’t need a massive amount of followers to gain a lot of traction.

One of the pins I sent went viral and got hundreds of likes and repins. The funny thing. I only had 500 followers when I published that pin, and it went viral a few days after I pinned it.

#2: Use ViralWoot To Get More Followers

The size of your audience does impact how many people see your pins. Therefore, your audience size also impacts the blog traffic you get from Pinterest.

However, deciding to buy 100,000 fake Pinterest followers doesn’t mean your blog will get thousands of visitors from Pinterest overnight.

You need real people who will look at your pins and engage with them. You need those people who will click on the picture and read your blog posts.

Following people who are likely to follow back is the best way to get targeted followers. However, if you follow too many people and not enough of them follow you back, then you right your ratio going out of control.

At one point, I had 13,000 targeted followers and was following 50,000 people. While it beats having no followers, it took me several months to bring the ratio back to a 1:1 ratio.

The best way to get REAL followers in bulk is with ViralWoot. The way ViralWoot works is that you follow people and get awarded with some points (these points are referred to as seeds on ViralWoot). The more points you have, the more people can follow your account.

The more points you have, the more followers you can get. The cool thing is that some of the people who you do follow to get the points may decide to follow you back.

If you don’t have the time to follow people on ViralWoot, or you want to maintain a certain ratio, then you can buy points from ViralWoot. This is different from buying fake followers since ViralWoot is a website that real people use to follow other users.

#3: Include A CTA In The Description

Not all of your followers will know that by clicking on the picture, they will get led to the blog post. Some people go on Pinterest to look at the nice pictures and share the pictures that they like.

Not all Pinterest users are thinking, “Let me see what this blogger wrote.”

However, many people are used to clicking links on social media that lead to blog posts. Most of us are so comfortable with clicking links that we don’t even think about what we are doing before the link gets clicked.

The way you entice people to click on your pictures is with a call-to-action. In the description of my pins, I will either write the title of the blog post or a brief intro that leaves the follower waiting for more. After I write that part of the description, I will tell the person to click on the picture to read the rest of the blog post.

Here’s one of my pins where I did that:

As you can see, the pin picked up more engagement than my average pin. Part of the reason that pin generated more engagement was because of the CTA within the description.

The CTA’s main function is to simply tell your followers what to do next. How can you expect one of your followers to click on the picture if that follower is not told what to do next?

Remember that this is Pinterest we are talking about. The typical user experience is to browse through pictures and stay on the platform for as long as possible. A CTA encouraging your followers to visit your blog will get your followers off Pinterest (temporarily) and onto your blog.

#4: Pin Your Content On Group Boards

I know what some people are thinking right now.

“But Marc, I don’t have a large Pinterest audience. How am I ever going to get blog traffic from this thing?”

Everyone starts out with no audience—even the famous people. So for any social network, including Pinterest, you just have to put in the work and grow your audience.

But Pinterest is, in part, special exception. It is the ONLY social network where you can get tens of thousands of followers OVERNIGHT.

I’m sure that got your attention.

All you have to do is get invited to become a contributor on a group board with tens of thousands of followers. You don’t get all of those followers for your account, but as a contributor, you can pin anything relevant onto those boards that you want.

You can even pin your blog posts onto those group board.

The next time you are looking through popular boards in your niche, look for the boards with a lot of contributors. If you see this icon next to a board, then that board is a group board.

At that point, you must get the person to accept you as a contributor. Some of these group boards will have descriptions that give you an email address or form you can use to submit your request.

If not, the next approach you should take is messaging the owner of the group board and ask if you can become a contributor.

The very final approach would be to comment on one of the pins asking if you could be a contributor. The worst thing that can happen is that the owner of the group board says no and then deletes the comment.

While you shouldn’t rely on contributing to other people’s group boards for having a large audience, incorporating group boards within your strategy will expose your pins to a larger audience.

In Conclusion

Pinterest is a mammoth of a social network. It’s growth has outpaced the other social networks by a landslide, and Pinterest is continuing to gain momentum.

While Pinterest may not be as big as Twitter and Facebook, my belief is that Pinterest will eventually reach the same user numbers as Twitter and Facebook. All of the top social networks will eventually hit the one billionth user milestone.

Facebook was the first to reach that milestone, and it won’t be the last. My belief is that Pinterest will eventually surpass that milestone as well.

Pinterest is rapidly growing. If you aren’t using it seriously now, then it’s time for you to start.

What are your thoughts about using Pinterest for getting blog traffic? Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you have any other tips for boosting blog traffic with Pinterest? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get Over 2,000 New Subscribers In One Day With Udemy

January 13, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Every blogger wants more subscribers. They put in the effort to create landing pages, promote those landing pages, create pop-ups, and do anything else possible to grow the email list.

Growing the email list makes sense. That’s where the money is. In addition, an email list allows you to know who your visitors are. Knowing who your visitors are allows you to write blog posts and products tailored to them.

Some bloggers gain a few new subscribers each day. Only a handful of bloggers gain dozens of subscribers every day. An even smaller number of bloggers gain hundreds of daily subscribers.

What if I told you there was a way for you to gain over 1,000 new subscribers in one day. Imagine taking your email list from zero to 1,000 in less than 24 hours.

This isn’t wishful thinking. This goal can be easily achieved.

The way you gain 1,000 subscribers in one day (regardless of your audience size) is with Udemy. Udemy is a platform that allows you to create your own training courses.

You can get students to join these training courses and learn from you. The cool thing about the students is that you can send them all email blasts just like any other service.

Udemy also provides options that allow you to segment which students receive your email blasts.

Udemy Segmented Email Blast

For the newcomer to Udemy, students are just like subscribers. The only difference is that these students are also enrolled into one of your training courses.

But how do you get 2,000 of these students in just one day? The answer is by creating a free coupon for your course and promoting it to the mountain tops.

I recently created a new training course with Joe Parys about developing a winner’s mindset. It only took us a few hours to create the course.

Udemy training course

Then we went to work promoting the free coupon that we used for the course. Creating free coupons for Udemy courses is important for social proof and growing the email list that you have on Udemy.

We had to promote the free coupon to the mountain tops. It’s funny that when it comes to free coupons for Udemy courses, marketing them is the easy part.

For most products, marketing the products is more time consuming than actually creating the product. It takes less than 10 minutes to promote a free coupon. After those 10 minutes, the students come flooding in.

Our course currently has over 2,000 students. Most of those students came within the first day the course was created.

Here is how we promoted the course (this is the same method you can use to promote virtually ANY Udemy course).

#1: Promote The Course To Facebook Group Pages

Udemy is well-known for its discounts and free coupons. This reputation is so strong that many Facebook Group Pages have emerged in which instructors post free coupons to their courses.

Some of these Facebook Group Pages have over 10,000 members. All you have to do is post the link to your free coupon, and then hundreds of people will enroll into the course.

You may be offering a lot of content for free, but you are getting more students on your list. Think of offering a free coupon to one of your courses as promoting a landing page with a massive offer.

Here is one of the Facebook Group Pages that I am a part of

Udemy FB Group Page

The best part is that the audience is right there waiting for you. It doesn’t matter how many likes and followers you have. Post a free coupon into several Facebook Group Pages like this one, and then the magic happens.

#2: Promote The Course In Forums and Bargaining Sites

Promoting the course in Facebook Group Pages is a great way to easily get hundreds of new students. Some people who use this method even manage to get a little over 1,000 students.

But in this blog post, I promised methods that would let you get 2,000 students from one of these coupons.

The truth about Facebook Group Pages is that they are just one part of the equation. For all of the work we put into Facebook, we got a few hundred visitors from Facebook.

Udemy free coupon results graph

Facebook gets the wheel rolling. Some people who see your free coupon may decide to promote it in other places such as popular forums and bargaining sites.

But promoting the course on your own guarantees that your courses get promoted in forums. Moreover, there are forums specifically for Udemy coupons.

The one forum that you must get your course on is the OzBargain forum. Out of all of our sources of traffic, OzBargain brought forth the most visitors. In that same graph picture above, OzBargain is the green bar on the stacked bar graph.

And it makes sense that OzBargain would be the best source of traffic. Take a look at that beautiful Alexa rank

Ozbargain Alexa Rank

Udemy instructors can’t promote their courses directly on OzBargain due to OzBargain’s terms, but if you create a really good course, someone may promote it on OzBargain for you.

So now you know how to promote your course so it gets over 2,000 students in one day. You will then be able to communicate with those students in almost any way you please.

Udemy has some restrictions, but these restrictions are not severe.

The most notable one is that you can’t promote any paid products other than your Udemy courses. In addition, you can’t promote landing pages. Udemy doesn’t want their students to have to enter an email address somewhere else to access something.

Other than that, Udemy promotion rocks. You can promote your blog posts even if your blog includes a pop-up or has an opt-in box in the sidebar. You would suddenly have 2,000 extra people to send the email to.

Imagine how much extra blog traffic you would get. 50 extra visitors? 100 extra visitors? 500 extra visitors? That all depends on the click-through rate.

In Conclusion

Growing an email list is made easy with Udemy. While there are some restrictions in place, Udemy lets you do most of the things you can do with something like iContact or Aweber.

I personally use iContact and Udemy jointly since I believe they are both good to have. However, if you are on a small budget, then it is better to exclusively focus on Udemy.

That’s because one of the coolest parts about Udemy is that it’s all free. It doesn’t cost a penny to put up a training course. You and Udemy share the profit.

Email subscriber fees? No problem with Udemy. They have you covered too. Imagine how much you would have to spend if you had 10,000 subscribers. Here are iContact’s rates:

iContact Rates

I highly recommend something like iContact in joint with Udemy if you can fit it within your budget. However, if you replace the word subscriber with students and use Udemy instead, it costs you $0.00/month to have 10,000 people on your list. You don’t get autoresponders or that advanced type of stuff, but Udemy is a reliable place to grow your email list.

What are your thoughts about using Udemy to grow your email list? Do you have any other tips for getting more free coupon sales? Sound off in the comments section below!

How To Measure Your Productivity

January 11, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

We all have goals. Some of those goals require what would appear to be monumental leaps while other goals don’t require much of a jump.

Regardless of what goals we pursue, we all understand the need to be productive. Better to get the same work done in 30 minutes than get the same work done in an hour.

That is the typical focus of productivity. Most people focus on getting a lot of stuff done and then getting that stuff done as quickly as possible.

If only that was how productivity actually worked.

Productivity isn’t a matter of hours worked and how much stuff you can say you did. The central focus of productivity is what work you are actually doing. Then the traditional methods of viewing productivity come in.

Is The Work You Do Productive?

Let’s say that in a month, I can create a thousand outlines for different blog post ideas this month or I can create four training courses that are each two hours long.

Even if both of those activities took up the same amount of my time, I would feel more productive creating the four training courses than doing 1,000 blog post outlines.

The problem with creating too many outlines is that the niche I am in constantly changes (if a new social network comes out, I have to write about it. Maybe Facebook ads changed again). And quite frankly, I could look at an outline upon second glance and realize it’s not a good blog post for me to write.

And being presented with 1,000 blog post outlines and having to choose one of them would be overwhelming. I won’t feel any better when I have to choose one blog post outline out of the 999 outlines that would be left.

However, creating four training courses would make me feel productive. I would provide more videos for my Udemy students and generate more revenue at the same time.

On the surface, writing 1,000 blog post outlines may look more productive than creating four training courses. This is another example that emphasizes the battle between busy work and productive work.

Creating an outline before you write a blog post allows you to write that blog post faster. However, at a certain point, creating the outlines just becomes busy work.

It is no longer productive because you aren’t writing the actual blog posts when you create the outline. Eventually, you have to look at one of those outlines and decide to turn that outline into a blog post.

Just because you do something does not mean you are being productive. If you wanted me to tell you all of the productive things I did in a given day, I wouldn’t rattle off everything I did on that day. I wouldn’t mention the fact that I put my clothing away or that I washed my dishes.

I would mention the number of blog posts I wrote and the number of videos I created.

Give Yourself A Hyper-Specific Definition Of Productivity

I’m not going to lie. Hyper-specific sounds way better than plain old specific.

We know there is a difference between busy work and productive work. What you may not know is how that difference applies to your life. What is the busy work that takes you away from your productive work?

You may be surprised to hear two things. Most of the work you currently do is probably busy work. The second thing you’d be surprised to hear is that answering the previous question is one of the easier questions of productivity to answer.

To identify the difference between busy work and productive work, you have to envision yourself in the “entrepreneur’s perfect world”. For sake of argument, here’s what that world looks like:

You are a billionaire
You make money on autopilot
You have a team of 100,000 people working for you free of charge
This team can do anything you ask them to do

Basically, you could retire right now and still make more money in one day than everyone else makes in a year. You are that 1%.

So what work would you still do?

When I asked myself this question, I came up with a small list of tasks that I would actually do for my business. Writing blog posts and creating videos were the two tasks that were on the top of the list.

My definition of productivity got very specific very fast. A few other things made it on the list too. But all of the tasks that did not make the list were distractions.

Scheduling social media posts, creating pictures for my blog posts, scheduling my blog posts, and growing my social media audience are four of several tasks that I suddenly viewed as distractions.

Distractions sap away at our true productivity, even if those distractions may be necessary for the growth and survival of our businesses.

Rise And Grind

In his book Power Of Broke, Daymond John shares several of his core beliefs that played a large role in his entrepreneurial success. One of the first things he mentioned is that when he wakes up, the first thing that enters his mind is “Rise and Grind.”

It simply means putting in the work every single day with as much intensity as you can muster.

We have already established that hours worked and stuff done are not the most reliable places to look when measuring productivity. However, productivity is also about consistency.

Consistency turns the work into an effortless habit that you can then constantly improve upon. Writing these blog posts is effortless for me because I have written thousands of blog posts on various blogs to reach this point.

When you rise and grind every day, you will eventually find yourself comfortable with putting in more work each day than most people would want to do in a week. Combine that with doing work that matters, and you’ll be a productivity master in no time.

Soon enough you’ll have to write your own blog posts about productivity 🙂

In Conclusion

Productivity is not measured by hours worked and amount of stuff done. It is measured by the type of work that you do, how much meaningful work gets done, your time commitment towards the work, and your consistency.

This blog post was designed to challenge the traditional thinking of productivity. Being busy and being productive are two completely different things.

However, being productive and truly being productive are also two different things.

For a long time, I thought I was being productive when I scheduled my tweets. It turns out during that stretch I was productive, but I wasn’t truly productive.

For me, truly productive means writing blog posts and creating videos.

What does truly productive mean for you? How do you measure your productivity? Are there any other questions about productivity you want answered? Have a tip for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get Your Twitter Audience To Remember And Trust You

January 8, 2016 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

Before a blog visitor decides to subscribe, that visitor must trust you. When visitors enter their email addresses, they are trusting you with the following:

Their email address
The fact that when they see your messages in the inbox, those messages will be epic

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Twitter is the best social network for generating blog traffic. It is the single social network that transformed my blog and me as a person.

The reason people within my Twitter audience visit my blog is because they have come to trust the content. It’s the same reason why we click on the same people’s links over and over again.

When we see tweets from certain users, we stop what we are doing and click on the link. We read the article they tweeted.

We only see the headline but we are immediately hooked into reading more. When I see a Jeff Bullas or Kim Garst tweet in the home stream, I pause what I am doing and read what they recently tweeted.

How do we create that same effect for our tweets and our content? How can we grow an audience of people who will stop what they are doing and read our content right when they see one of our tweets?

The answer is to build trust which is easier said than done. But it is doable. As you continue to build trust with your audience, you will discover that building trust with your audience is easier than it sounds.

Building trust is broken into two steps. The first step is the preparation step while the second step is to build on top of the foundation gradually over a long period of time.

You will never get someone’s complete trust in one day, but if you stay consistent and build the trust over time, those same people will come to trust you.

But first comes the foundation. Here’s how you get that set up on your Twitter account:

#1: Have The Right Profile Picture

Your profile picture is the first thing people will look at. Since the human mind can register pictures 60,000 times faster than text, we’ll look at the profile picture before we read the bio.

The first impression comes just before we read the bio. The accounts with blurry profile pictures (or worse, that…egg) won’t receive much attention.

The clear profile pictures that either display a nice picture of you or your brand’s logo are the winners that get the most attention. All of the other pictures don’t win.

Even if it takes you 30 minutes to find the right picture of yourself, those 30 minutes you spend now will help you to build trust with your audience later.

#2: Create A Background Picture

The background picture is another critical factor towards building trust. It is the second most important part of your Twitter account.

The background picture you choose for your Twitter account must help someone understand what you do. For someone who has never heard of me before, my background picture creates the quick intro:

But in addition to getting people to know who I am in one picture, I do a subtle promotion. At the left corner is a picture of my free eBook’s cover.

It’s going to be an eBook cover that they see often. People looking at my Twitter profile don’t have to scroll down too long before they see the pinned tweet that promotes the same free eBook.

The background picture can promote one of your products and let people know who you are at the same time. Kim Garst does a phenomenal job with her background pictures. Here is one of the pictures she recently set as the background picture.

Some of the picture focuses on what she does and other parts of the picture focus on her product.

At this point, some people may look past this method thinking that it would take too much time to create a nice background picture. However, who said you have to create the background picture.

I don’t know how many people are on Kim Garst’s team, but I can tell you for sure that I did not create my background picture. Someone else created it for me after I made suggestions as to how the background picture should look.

That way, you can have an epic background picture without the creation phase taking up too much of your time.

#3: Write An Effective Bio

Once people take the time to look at your profile picture and your background picture, the final part of your foundation is writing an effective bio.

Captivating pictures will result in people taking the time to read your bio and learn more about who you are. They want to know about what you do as a profession but also what you do outside of your profession.

I am more than a digital marketing expert, author, entrepreneur, and blogger. While all of those things do apply to me, there are certain parts of my life that are important in crafting my identity.

For instance, I am a Red Sox fan in New York—the rare breed of human that is more rare than a shiny Pokemon.

I have had conversations with many of my followers that have nothing to do with digital marketing. Some of those conversations are directly related to the Red Sox.

Take a look at my bio. I have had conversations with people based on what I put in that bio about my personal life.

I have exchanged dog pictures with some of my followers and let others know what my fastest times are in certain running events.

When people get to know you as a professional AND as a person, that’s when trust begins to develop. You want to be a people’s person who is easy to talk with.

Each hobby you write within your bio that has nothing to do with business gives your audience another opportunity to connect with you. Some people followed me because I like dogs, and these same people have had conversations in which we talk about our pets.

Later on, these same people read my blog posts and wait for my next piece of content.

#4: What You Tweet

After the foundation has been built, the final factor is what you tweet. If you consistently tweet valuable content throughout the day, then you will appear in your followers’ home streams more often.

The more you appear there, the more your followers will remember you. By consistently tweeting valuable content, the same people who see you often will come to trust you.

To determine what is valuable content, ask yourself who your audience is and what type of content they would specifically want to read. I read many articles about running faster, but my audience of people who want to learn more about social media would not get the same value from those articles that I do.

That’s why I focus on tweeting digital marketing related content. It’s what my audience wants.

In Conclusion

Most of the work involved with building trust is setting up the foundation. Once the foundation is laid out, you build upon that foundation by tweeting valuable content.

However, once you gain your audience’s trust, you must use this privilege responsibly. We know that trust is something that we shouldn’t abuse. It’s difficult to gain trust but it is so easy to break that same trust.

If you stop tweeting, or you tweet less frequently, fewer people will remember who you are, and as a result, they won’t trust you as much. Never become overconfident that the trust from your audience will last forever.

That way, you will strive to always build upon the current trust and constantly provide your audience with your best content.

What are your thoughts about using Twitter to build trust? How do you get your followers to remember who you are on Twitter? Do you have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.