Marc's Blog

4 Incredibly Easy Methods To Achieve Social Media Balance

August 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

It is fair to say that social media has taken over the lives of many people. People’s emotions are controlled by what other people post, and many people spend hours surfing on these social networks without thinking of the tasks they need to complete. Some people have been known to become depressed by spending too much time on their social networks. However, that’s not because social media is bad. The reason people get depressed is because they spend too much time on social media doing the wrong things.

On social media, Facebook in particular, friends take pictures of themselves living the good life. This makes a person feel horrible because they are not up to par with that friend. However, just because a friend took a picture that indicates happiness, that friend may have only been happy in the moment. Not everyone is happy just because they’re smiling in their avatar.

For some people, their uses of social media has gone too far. With more time checking out tweets and liking posts but less time outside and being with the people who are important to you, some people have lost themselves on social media. However, this is the time to break loose of the addiction. Most of us need more balance between the time we spend on social media and the time we spend doing other things. Here are four ways to restore that balance.

Do less surfing. A big reason why most people get trapped in social media is because they surf it too often. Without question, more time is spent surfing social media than is actually spent taking the time to write posts. If you cut down the amount of time you surf by 15-30 minutes every week, you will notice more time opening up and you being able to spend more time doing other things that you love to do.
Limit yourself to three social networks. I do not suggest limiting social networks for the business side, but if you are addicted to social media, more social networks will not do you any good. If you spend 1 hour every day on each social network you go on, and you have seven social networks, that’s a grand total of seven hours being wasted on social media. Limit yourself to three social networks. If you have more than three social networks, enter humongous passwords with your eyes closed for the other social networks so they can’t get hacked and you don’t remember the password. Then, if you choose to recover your password, you will have to click “Forgot your password.” Now you have more time to think about what you are going to do and if you should stop before logging into the social network.
Do more things outside of social media more often. Some people are addicted to social networks because they have nothing else going on in their lives. Some people have no one to interact with outside of home, and more unfortunate, some people have no one to interact with in their own home. You need to pursue other hobbies that take up time. I run for a minimum of 30 minutes every day, and some of my runs exceed two hours.
Get fit. This is not the corny 4th example because I could not think of a good one. Getting fit takes a lot of time, and it gives you more discipline. Getting fit requires you to workout as often as you can putting in as much effort as possible. Soon, surfing social media will no longer be the priority. Getting fit will take its place. In order to maximize the effects of getting more fit, do workouts with a partner. You will both challenge each other to show up every day and get the task done.

Social media addiction take up hours of your time, but if you know how to fight the addiction, you will find more time to do the things you forgot you loved to do. Some people feel that social media is their only source of happiness, but there’s more to life than tweets and selfies. Although I am on Twitter often, I don’t let it consume my life, and no one should have to stoop to that level. If you are at that level now, do these four things so you can successfully break your social media addiction. It may take some time to pull it off, but the more you think about it, the less likely you are going to start. Make the choice to start now so you do not live in regret and a bigger social media addiction later.

The One Factor That All Popular YouTube Videos Have In Common

August 27, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

YouTube Logo

The person in the video is someone who others would want to listen to.

The fact of the matter is that people are more busy than ever. Some people see their time as extremely precious because they are putting in a lot of work. Other people procrastinate too often, and when they are on task, that time is precious to them since they are rarely on task.

Then comes the need to learn more about the niche. The people who want to learn more about social media, blogging, productivity, and more (that would be you since you’re on this blog), there are two options for obtaining more knowledge. The first option is reading through a blog post, and the second option is watching a YouTube video.

Readers have the advantage of being able to skim through a blog post that would normally take seven minutes to read while being able to retain the main information. On YouTube videos, that opportunity is not presented because skipping through a YouTube video may possibly result in you missing out on important information. Then there’s the frustration of finding your place after you skipped through part of the video as well as the lag time for some videos and computers. This frustration leads to most people leaving the video.

That means you need to be someone who conveys information quickly and makes someone feel as if your video was worth every second. You also want to talk about a topic and talk in a way that people would enjoy watching the entire video.

We all know the difference between a good YouTube video and a bad one. I’m sure you could think of some good ones and bad ones right now (if you are thinking of mine, I encourage you to put them in the good pile of your mind). Make sure your YouTube videos are good enough to the point where your friends would want to watch them over and over again without you hounding them to watch your YouTube video “one more time.”

YouTube videos are supposed to be enjoyable to watch, not a drag. What are your thoughts on using this component for your YouTube videos? Do you have any other important words of wisdom to share for YouTube achievement? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

6 Tips To Expand Your Blog Audience

August 26, 2014 by Marc Guberti 8 Comments

Growing Blog Traffic Statistics

The size of your blog audience is one of the determining factors of how far your content spreads and how many sales you make. Many of the successful bloggers who have turned blogging into a full-time income also have low Alexa ranks to boast about. The low Alexa ranks indicate that those blogs are popular and getting thousands of daily visitors. Your blog’s growth may be the difference between the sales you are getting now and the extra sales you could be getting later. In order to expand your blog audience, follow these six tips.

Grow your social media audience. The bigger your social media audience is, the more people you will be able to reach. The best way to grow your social media audience is by growing a targeted following. Growing your social media audience is one of the best ways to boost your blog’s SEO.
Get people to stay on your blog longer. The longer someone stays on your blog, the more likely that person is to visit your blog in the future. If you are able to get numerous returning visitors to your blog, those visitors will continuously share your content and tell their friends about you. Some of the ways to get people to stay on your blog longer are by making your blog load faster and reducing your blog’s bounce rate.
Write blog posts consistently. If you are consistently writing blog posts, your visitors will have a reason to come back to your blog every day and eventually subscribe to your blog. Writing blog posts on a consistent basis will allow you to get more blog traffic, and as you add more blog posts to your blog, math will start to work in your favor. If your blog has 100 blog posts, each blog post needs to get 10 visitors every day in order for the blog to bring in 1,000 daily visitors. However, if your blog has 1,000 blog posts, then each blog post needs to bring in 1 visitor every day in order for you to achieve the goal of getting 1,000 daily visitors. You need to ensure that your blog posts are valuable enough to be something that others would want to visit.
Get on more podcasts and interviews. Radio Guest List has been a powerful tool for me to get featured on more podcasts and interviews. Although my credentials help, I have been able to get opportunities from Radio Guest List that I would not have gotten before. What you can also do now is create a page on your blog that tells people you can do public speaking and get interviewed. What you need to do for the long term is build your presence so you become someone that others would want to interview.
Make sure you are getting the most out of your individual visitors. It’s great to have numerous visitors, but you also want to make sure you are getting the most out of your individual visitors. If you cannot optimize on 50 engaged visitors, then how are you going to optimize on thousands of engaged visitors. Set up your blog so people would want to subscribe and buy your products.
Get more people to subscribe to your blog. It is essential to get as many people as possible to subscribe to your blog. The bigger your list is, the more people there are on that list to buy your products. All you need to do at that point is send emails to your subscribers that they enjoy. Getting more blog subscribers is as easy as pie if you know how.

Growing your blog audience is an important way to spread on the web, get more subscribers, get even more visitors and get more sales. What were your thoughts on the list? Did you have a favorite tip or an additional tip (or both)? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How I Plan To Massively Increase My Email List

August 25, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Email-List-2

With over 120,000 Twitter followers and over 10,000 Pinterest followers, growing a social media audience has become easy. Now my top priority is growing my email list. Since this blog’s creation, it has gained a few thousand subscribers. Although it’s a great start, I want to be have tens of thousands of subscribers, and several marketers emphasize how “the money is in the list.”

I have a plan in place for accomplishing this goal, and part of the plan is good news for everyone here. A free gift I give to my subscribers is the Pinterest Mastery video tutorial. In addition to this gift, I will also be writing free guides that will be shared exclusively to my subscribers. That means if I decide to write a quick guide containing 25 different methods to get more repins on Pinterest or something similar, I am going to share it with you if you have subscribed to my list.

Another big change I have already made is using iContact to deliver all messages. This gives me superior flexibility as well as a new structure for sending out emails. In the past, I used WordPress’ subscription option which sent out emails seconds after I came out with a new blog post. With iContact, I will now be sending an email to my subscribers every week with links and short descriptions for the blog posts published that week. Anyone who remains subscribed to the WordPress option will still get emailed when I come out with new blog posts, but I am going to move everyone over from that list to my list on iContact.

In order to focus more of my time into writing the informative guides for my subscribers and launching more products, I will only be writing one blog post every day. Anyone who subscribes to my email list will be sent an exclusive blog post every week via email that will never get featured on this blog. That means if you want more of my content, join the list.

Although I am putting in an extensive amount of work into growing my email list, I am one person, and I need your help. If you subscribe to my email list, you will get the free Pinterest Mastery Video Tutorial just like before. The only difference is that I am working on a guide that contains 27 different methods to get more retweets on Twitter. Right when the guide is finished, I will distribute it to everyone on the list, and anyone who wants the guide in the future just has to subscribe. I also encourage you to spread the word to your friends because there is strength in numbers in accomplishing big goals.

10 Signs That You Need To Be More Productive

August 24, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

We are all very busy people. We get swamped by the workload, have to put in hours of work every day, have family commitments, and other types of commitments as well. Many people make the common mistake of believing that being busy also means being productive. There is a difference. As a result of the mistakes people make, productivity dips. Before you decide whether you need to increase your productivity, go through these 10 signs that will allow you to know whether you’re in trouble or not.

You complain about being so busy. Being busy means going to the grocery store, doing chores, and a plethora of other things unrelated to your work. If you always complain about being too busy, you are not getting the important work done.
You watch too much TV. I define watching 10 hours of TV every week as too much. Some people will nod their heads in agreement while others will get overwhelmed considering that the average American watches 32 hours of TV every week.
You always fall behind. Everyone falls behind on their work at a certain point in their lives. I have fallen behind, and chances are you have fallen behind too. However, if you are always falling behind in your work and it is becoming a trend, you need to increase your productivity. If you keep on falling behind, you will spend the rest of your life catching up instead of expanding.
You live in the 365 day mindset/trap. New Years resolutions. Did you forget about them? Over 80% of people never get their New Year’s resolutions accomplished because they believe they have an incredible amount of time to get the job done. Let’s say your New Year’s resolution is to gain 10,000 Twitter followers. That means you would have to gain an average of 28 followers every day. That’s not impossible at all. People think that if they wait a month and start on February, they can get the same goal accomplished by gaining 30 followers every day from now through the entire year. However, some people with this goal may wait to start on the first day of September because they realize they have a lot of time left. Now, there’s only 122 days to get the task accomplished which means someone would have to gain 82 followers every day from September 1st to the end of the year. It’s so much easier to start early and stick with it.
You Google it too often. If you Google anything related to “how to,” it means you want to be able to do that. The person who Googles “how to make money online” 100 times wants to make money online. If you are Googling “how to be more productive” numerous times, then you need to boost your productivity. Instead of constantly searching for more ways to be productive, stick with the methods in this blog post and you will be fine. I’m a 16 year old in high school and the school’s track team. I think I’m qualified to talk about productivity.
You would never think of waking up early in the morning. I’m a night owl and early bird at the same time. I get to bed past midnight and get up before 8 am. Waking up early in the morning allows you to be more productive because you have a greater chance of starting the day off with a positive attitude.
You wing the first hour you wake up. The first hour of waking up dictates how the rest of your day is going to go. If you wake up and hold grudges for the first hour, you are going to hold those grudges and have a bad day. If you read a motivational book, do a workout, or do what you love, you will have a day filled with motivation and empowerment. The first hour controls how productive you will be for the rest of the day, and if you don’t know what you do then, you need to create a schedule for what you will do for that first hour.
Do have too much on your plate. I had a score card overload, and I am not proud of it to this day. I wrote down 19 different goals on the score card that each took up a significant amount of time. I thought I would be able to write 20 blog posts, proofread an entire book, write a completely different book (and finish that book), do 10 YouTube videos, write 20 scripts, and prepare for the summer bootcamp my brother and I did at Fordham University (among plenty of other high level tasks) was an impossibility. I had too much on my plate and ended up being very unproductive for the entire week. Less is more because you get to focus more of your attention on fewer things.
You are striving for the wrong types of goals. If your goals are having a house and being rich, that’s a problem. You need to set more specific goals so you are able to be productive. Instead of saying how rich you want to be, throw in a number. Do you want to make $100,000 by the end of the year? In addition, ask yourself what kind of a house you want and when you will get it. Do you want to move into a three floor house this year and live in a mansion five years later? More specific goals lead to more specific paths, and those specific paths lead to more productivity. Specific goals give you something to strive for.
You read through this blog post word for word. Only 20% of people actually read the blog post (the other 80% stop short at the headline). If you have been reading this blog post word for word, then that means you are looking for some tidbits on being productive and asking yourself if you really need to be more productive. If you read up to this part of the blog post, chances are you need to be more productive.

Now that you know the signs that you need to be more productive, you need to increase that productivity as quickly as possible. Luckily for you, I wrote an entire blog post with 10 different methods you can use to increase your productivity. If you liked this blog post, then you are definitely going to like the other one as well.

It’s So Much Easier

August 24, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Easy

To watch than do.

To work for someone else than work for yourself.

To walk than run.

To quit than continue.

To continue doing the wrong things than quit.

To settle than thrive.

To get discouraged than feel optimistic.

To take than to give.

To live in despair than in happiness.

To want more than to be grateful for what you already have.

Just because something is easier does not necessarily mean it is better. We are constantly searching for the shortcuts to avoid putting in more time and effort. Taking shortcuts results in the final result not being as good as it could have been.