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1. Make your goals measurable and with a timeline.

Once you’ve identified your personal feelings, and you have your general goals set, we’re going to tighten everything up and make it all super-specific.

There are two ways you can do this, depending on what the goal is.

A) Super-specific outcome goals.

These goals tend to be more popular with people. They’re goals where you have very tightly defined aims and deadlines, such as:

• Be earning $5k in passive income every month by next year
• Sign up ten clients in 60 days
• Make $1000 with my new Kindle book
• Lose 10 pounds in 45 days
• These goals add a little more pressure on you.

You might use them in a back-against-the-wall situation, where you need to earn a degree of money in a particular time or fit into a dress by your high school reunion.

The disadvantage to this type of goal is that it often puts people in a “take every possible action and see what sticks” mindset, versus making long-term, lasting change.

Also, the goals are often arbitrary numbers. And if they’re not reached, people feel like failures - no matter how hard they worked or if external circumstances got in their way.

For example, you might have a goal to earn $5k in a month, but then a death in the family details you for a week. Or maybe you have a goal to lose 10 pounds, but no matter how hard you work, your body just won’t release the weight.

The best way to use this type of goal is if you have plenty of time to create great habits AND course correct if things aren’t working. For example, if you want to be making $5k a month by a year from now, you can spend a majority of the time building up the right habits for yourself. But if you find yourself in month 6 and you aren’t where you planned you’d be (which we’ll cover more in-depth later on in this book), you can course correct and try something else.

B) “Take-the-right-action” goals.

These are goals where you’re taking steps to get to where you ultimately desire to be. For example:

• Eat greens with at least 50 meals this month
• Drink 80 oz of water each day
• Post on Twitter 2 times a day all month
• Write two books in a year
• Go for a walk three times a week
• Write a love letter to my partner once a month

When to make these kinds of goals: These are the goals to concentrate on when you want to build up healthy habits. For example, let’s say you want to feel healthier. We all know that when you make sure you get in enough greens and water, you start becoming healthier. And so creating goals around getting more of both on a constant basis helps ensure you feel better. These are goals that are a bit more spacious. You’re trusting that the right habits will accrue results over time, and so you’re making lifestyle goals instead of short-term crash diet plans such as “lose 10 pounds in a month.”

It is also for goals that you can’t make specific guidelines around. For example, you can’t say “I want to improve my marriage by 500%”. You can say, though, that you want your marriage to get better - and then create specific things you can do with them, such as write love letters, plan out romantic dates, or do the laundry three times a month because your partner appreciates it. I prefer these types of goals most of the time. Building up the right kinds of habits gives you a long-term edge and creates a more solid foundation for who you want to become.

Before you move on from this section, choose a goal or two from your list if you haven’t already, and set clear timelines as appropriate. Ensure you’ve worded your goals, so they are distinct and MEASURABLE. I want you to know exactly what you’re working towards and the timeline in which you’re going to be doing it.

Remember this isn’t about setting your deadlines in stone, but rather about being specific. You’ll be able to course correct if you find you are not making the progress you’d like.

Choose a timeline that feels like a stretch, but you know it can happen. Creating $500k or losing 100 pounds in a month is tough. Sure, there might be exceptions like winning the lottery or getting some surgery, but for most people, it’s not going to happen. With those goals, you’d be best off choosing a year timeline.

When in doubt and creating a super-specific goal, give yourself a little more time - especially if you’re embarking on something new for you. You can always make the goals happen faster. For now, pick your targets and deadlines and have them ready to work with as we continue with this process.

Don’t worry about the HOW you’re going to make anything happen just yet. That’s coming next. In fact, we’re going to go over an example using all the steps right now.

Example

Step #1: Earn $5000 a Month By a Year From Now.

Let’s kick this off with a money goal.

Let’s say that after you had gone through You knew that you wanted to be earning $5k a month by this time next year. That’s great! Now we can move onto the next step:

Step #2: Brainstorm how you can get there.

Here’s where we’re going to ask ourselves, “How can I make this happen?”

Your mind is a brilliant thing. And when you ask it the right questions, you’ll be amazed at the answers you can come up with. So here’s where you’re going to be very creative. List out all the ways that you can make your $5k/month goal happen (or whatever your goal is). Don’t censor yourself. Just let it all out, no matter how crazy or wild your ideas seem. If you’re too busy judging your thoughts, you’ll block your creativity.

Write out for a solid 5-20 minutes and come up with at least 15 different ideas. For the $5k example, some ideas of things you might find:

• Have a membership website where 250 people pay me $20 a month
• Have five people pay me $1,000 a month for coaching
• Create a $50 product and sell 100 copies a day
• Sell 500 t-shirts a month (I’ve seen this happen!)
• Flip cars
• Offer a writing service
• Create a piece of software and sell it
• Look for a sales job where I get paid on commissions
• Fill out 5000 surveys a month (they’re only worth a dollar?)
• Find a generous person to take pity on me
• Sell everything I own and reinvest the profits into lottery tickets
• Recycle scrap metal
• Buy a few homes and rent them out

As you can see, the ideas are varied. That’s the point. It is all about letting your brain expand, think out of the box, and come up with potential ideas before we get to the next step.

I also want to point out that I know some of these numbers might sound huge to you. $5k/month can sound crazyunattainable.

But all of these things are possible – and more.

I've seen these things happen time and time again when people stretch their minds.

Step #3: Break it down, so it all happens on your terms.

Now we’re going to use that big list and use the process of elimination to cross off what you don’t want to do.

Our stated intention was for you to feel pumped, happy, alive, enriched during the process, so as you’re going through your list, keep in mind the feelings you’d like to be feeling when you’ll be working towards, and achieving, your goals. Cross out anything that contradicts those feelings.

For example, if your favorite feeling is “pride,” you probably won’t want to find a rich person to take pity on you. If your favorite feeling is “secure,” you might not want a commissionbased job.

You’ll also want to cross out anything that seems completely unrealistic but be careful, as what you’ve been thinking of as ‘realistic’ hasn’t got you where you wanted to go…so think twice before crossing something out. Doesn’t fit at all in your personality or skill set (keeping in mind that you can learn new skills – but don't choose, say, coaching, if you hate having a schedule), that you’re totally turned off by, or that just doesn’t seem anywhere as significant as other options.

We’re going to narrow this down to the best business model for you. So go through your list again and look for what fits in most with your desired feelings, what works best for your skill set, what excites you the most, what you have the most to offer with, and what you feel the most comfortable with.

If you’re not sure how much a particular action step fits in with your personal feelings, consider how you’ll feel as you do certain activities. Will you feel excited? Joyful? Happy?

After you whittle down, you may end up having a few options to choose from. And that’s ok! The reality is, it’s possible that you could take one of MANY routes and still end up achieving your desired result.

So if you have a list of a few things that fit in with the feelings you want to feel and your skill set, just make a decision. Use your gut as the tie breaker.

For example, here, let’s say that we decide we want to have a membership site where we have 250 people pay us $20 a month. Now we can move on to the next step.

I know this planning stuff might not be a barrel of fun at this moment, but keep at it. You're going to thank yourself so much later on as you gain clarity and get your feet firmly planted on the right path for yourself.

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Lead generation is an important aspect of content marketing. Without lead generation, you’re basically just publishing and promoting content, hoping that people are going to buy or sign up for your products!

While this sometimes happens in real life, that is, some people will buy things on the spot, the truth is the majority won’t.

You need to have a lead capture system in place, so you can continue reminding your target audience that your brand exists. You can get in touch with them later on to share your news and updates, and to persuade them to move down your content marketing funnel.

The Content Marketing Funnel

Before I discuss the top 5 lead generation methods, let me share with you first what a content marketing funnel is, and why it’s so important in the overall scheme of your content marketing strategy.

Generally, a content marketing funnel has three broad levels:

Awareness stage - this is when your target audience first becomes aware of your brand. They become your leads.

Evaluation stage – this is where your lead evaluates whether your product or service is good for them or not. At this point, your lead turns into a prospect.

Purchase stage - this is when your prospect decides to subscribe to your service or product. Your prospect finally becomes a customer.

When you plan out your content marketing strategy, your end goal is basically to put your brand in front of people who’ve no idea who you are and turn them into customers. Sounds like a pretty tall order, right? That’s because it really is, but it’s very much doable.

Content marketing is basically a numbers game. You want to get your brand in front of as many people as possible (belonging to your target audience, of course). This is because only a small percentage of your leads will turn into prospects, and an even smaller number of prospects will turn into customers.

Top 5 Ways To Generate Leads Quickly

So, here are the top techniques you can apply to help you generate leads quickly.

Offer lead magnets

Lead magnets are one of the best ways to get people to sign up to your mailing list. You’ll often hear this mentioned in the online marketing community, “The money is in the list.” Many successful marketers stand by this saying. So, if you want people to subscribe to your list, you’re going to learn how to use lead magnets.

Now, technically lead magnets are ‘bribes.’ This is because you’re basically ‘bribing’ people to give up their contact details, such as their email addresses or phone numbers, in exchange for your lead magnet.

You can, of course, just put up a sign on your website asking people to enter their name and email address or any other info you want. However, people are going to ask, “Why should I give you my details?” or “What’s in it for me?”

And this is where the magic of lead magnets come in. When you offer people a ‘bribe’ they can’t resist, something so valuable and so useful to them, they’re going to be so much more willing to give up their contact info.

They’ll tell themselves, “I really, really need this eBook or this guide. The information is really useful. I can’t believe they’re only asking for my email address in exchange for this life-changing information!”

Do you see what happened there? People are more easily convinced to follow your call to action if you give them what they want!

There are many kinds of lead magnets you can use. The most common ones you’d see on the Internet are downloadable PDF eBooks, reports, white papers, checklists, etc. You’ll also see some brands offering email courses or video courses in exchange for people’s email addresses!

To find out what the best lead magnet is for your brand, you may need to do some split testing. The important thing to note is that the best lead magnets answer people’s pain points. Ideally, it shouldn’t be something they can easily Google the answer to.

Go all out on your lead magnets. Make it valuable and rewarding enough, so that your audience will feel like they really have no choice but to give up their contact details!

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a popular way of getting new people to learn more about your brand and your business. You’re essentially publishing your content on someone else’s website. You get instant exposure to highly targeted traffic, and you’re able to immediately expand your network (basically widening your content marketing funnel!).
Now, guest blogging may sound easy. But there’s a ton of work that happens behind the scenes. For instance, not all your target sites may accept guest posts. You would need to look for sites that are highly relevant to your own industry.

You need to have a good track record, too. This means you’re not going to get accepted as a guest blogger if no one knows who you are. So, you need to have published some valuable blog posts on your own site (or others) to even make other webmasters consider your request.

You can easily point them to your portfolio. From there, they can see for themselves if you got what it takes to contribute to their website.

When pitching your request to webmasters, you need to do your research. You should check if they have content guidelines. You also need to know what kind of content their audience likes. Think of yourself as someone who regularly writes for that site and cares for their audience.

Getting your guest post request approved is the hardest part. You’re probably not going to hear back from most of the sites you reach out to. But, once you get over that hump, and you start working on your content, then that’s where the real fun begins!

Some sites have strict editorial guides you need to follow. For instance, you can only use one link all throughout the post, or that it needs to have a certain number of words, or you can only link to your site via the author box.

You’d need to take all these into consideration, and figure out how you can write your content in such a way that people will be curious enough to want to know more about you. This will make people want to head on over to your site and become part of your community.

Target long-tail keywords

One of the foundations of a successful content marketing strategy is blogging. And when it comes to blogging, the longer and more valuable the content, the better it will be for your content’s SEO. When your content is SEO optimized, then you’ve got better chances of ranking high up on search engines.

It’s important to mention that keywords aren’t created equal. There are short keywords and long keywords. Short keywords are 1-2 words in length while long keywords have 3+ words.

As you can imagine, there are tons of competition for short-tail keywords. Normally, the sites that appear on the first page of Google search results are well-established sites with hundreds or thousands of other sites linking to them!

How do you think you can dethrone these authority sites when you’ve only been around for a few months or a few years, and you’ve only got a few backlinks to your site?
This is where long-tail keywords come in. When you target long keywords, you’re essentially going after keywords with lower search volumes but with far less competition, too.

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Introduction

Many people dream of being successful, yet they never achieve it. At times we have all failed. There are many reasons why you may feel like a failure or that you will never be a success. These are some of the reasons you might recognize for your own failures:

1. Procrastination

It's normal to procrastinate a little, but often we put off doing difficult or unpleasant tasks that we have to do and end up sabotaging ourselves. Procrastination is the number one thing to fix if you want to be successful. Your mindset will suffer when you procrastinate because you're not thinking about being productive or about moving towards your goals; in fact you're doing the opposite by avoiding that.

2. Fear

Fear of failure and fear of success can both stop you from achieving high level success. Success means change, setting new goals, and a defined line between before and after. This fear is what prevents your mind from being in the right mindset for success. Sometimes we're even guilty of sabotaging ourselves (through procrastination or other means) so that we “prove” our fears right by not being successful.

A fear mindset is one where everything is seen as too risky or too dangerous which means you'll never move forwards. Conquering the fear mindset is the hardest thing for many people who are not naturally optimistic or courageous.

3. Being Unrealistic

Part of dreaming about being successful is that it hasn't happened yet. When we imagine things it can be both good or bad. Those dreams can drive us to achieve further or they can always be just out of reach so we eventually give up because we never achieve them.

Setting the right goals and being able to motivate yourself is important in being successful because if you set unrealistic goals you'll always feel like a failure. There's a very good analogy about teaching fish to climb trees which illustrates this. If you think you're always a failure then maybe it's because you're setting the wrong goals.

4. Being unsure of your path

Part of success is knowing where you're going. You might have a vision of where you want to be but no real understanding of how to get there. Without having an idea of your route you may freeze up, instead choosing to stay in a “safe” and known place rather than risk the change that may come with success or the shame of taking yourself down a failed pathway.

If you're not sure about the next step are you sure you've even taken one? Many people struggle to even start their journey or get bogged down without realizing how close to the finish they are. Imagine you were chipping away at a wall, you've been chipping forever and don't feel like you will ever make it through so you quit. What you didn't know is that with only 5 more chips you would have made it. How sad.

If you want to be successful then you need a success mindset and you have to tackle these behaviours and more if you want that to happen. Change can be difficult, it can be hard, but by changing these behaviours using these simple ways you can start cultivating the right mindset to be successful.

Be Willing to Change

There is nothing more threatening to a success mindset than not being able to change. If you cannot change you cannot be anything more than what you already are and therefore cannot be successful.

To be successful you have to be able to embrace change but you also have to be able to accept things as they come. On your journey there will be failures, there will be successes, there will be change and there will be surprises or things you didn't plan for. To have a success mindset you need to cultivate your ability to adapt to change and to be more accepting which will help stop you being afraid of success.

Step 1: Embrace Opportunities

Imagine you're home alone and your friends are busy. You have the opportunity to go out and see your favourite band, but you'll be on your own. Do you take it?

Many of us have more opportunities than we realize but we don't take them because of fear. We're afraid of being ridiculed, of people assuming something in our actions, or we're simply afraid that the opportunities we see aren't real. Many times what we imagine in our on heads doesn't live up to the reality and that can be a scary thing.

If you want to develop the right mindset for success you have to start confronting your fears and jumping at every opportunity, even if it might mean failure.

Step 2: Accept Everything, even Failure

We all fail. Failure sucks. We feel miserable, people laugh at us, and it's something we want to avoid because we don't like that feeling. The sooner you can accept that sometimes failure is inevitable and even necessary the easier it is to accept change and stop being afraid of success.

Acceptance is not resignation. Acceptance means that you know no matter what your actions and their outcomes are moving you constantly forwards. Any action that does that is bringing you closer to success.

Imagine success as a road you're walking down. The road has obstacles, tree branches or maybe worse. You may fall, you may be able to step over them, or you may have to walk around because the road is blocked and find another way. Every step you take, even if it's to go around one of those obstacles still brings you one step closer to your destination.

The only time this stops being true is when you give up or turn back because you're choosing to move away from success and choosing to fail. That doesn't mean that sometimes the road doesn't take you backwards. Sometimes you have to step backwards to get to a different route but it's the keeping going which will make the difference between ultimately being successful or not.

Step 3: Conquer Fear

By no longer being afraid you will not see change as something to be scared of or avoided. When you procrastinate because you're not sure you want the change success brings you can't ever succeed so you simply have to choose to conquer your fear.

Start by understanding what it is that is making you afraid. Are you afraid of the change? Are you afraid of failure? By understanding what the obstacle is you'll be better prepared to work around it because it has a name.

Practice getting around that. You can imagine the situation in your head and role play with yourself through it. You can even roleplay how you would handle failure to reassure yourself. The worst thing you can do is let the fear win by doing nothing. The first way to change if you're going to be successful is to actually be willing to change and embrace that change when it happens. You can do it!

See Failure As Success

The great Chinese General Sun Tsu wrote a book on war tactics. While you may not be waging a battle, much of his advice can be applied to life situations. One of his most powerful pieces was to see failures as a form of success.