Top 7 Things To Do When You Can’t Get Motivated…

A few years ago, I had a business partner who simply couldn’t make himself get things done.

He told me he had the best intentions but simply couldn’t make himself do the things on his to-do list.

At the time, I didn’t have much empathy. We were under deadline and I could not at all relate. I’d always just gotten things DONE when I wanted them done, period.

But since then… I’ve definitely had reason to gain empathy.

In fact, just a few hours ago I was getting frustrated with myself. I wanted things to happen and I just couldn’t make progress.

So I asked myself a few questions, pulled out a few things from my bag of tricks, and presto… I’m here writing my second blog post in an hour.

Because of that, I present to you in no particular order –

 “The Top 7 Things To Do When You Can’t Get Motivated”.

7. Ask yourself why. Are you in alignment with what you’re working on? Is it something that truly revs you up and excites you?

One way you can find an answer is to take a couple deep breaths and just ask your gut – “Do I want to be doing this?”

Or, if you’re too stressed to get a clear answer, take out a piece of paper. Label it “Why can’t I get motivated?” and then start writing. See what comes up. If you stick with it long enough, you’ll get your answer.

If you’re not in alignment with whatever you’re working on, be honest with yourself.

It may be time to stop doing it – whether that’s abandoning a project (I have NEVER regretted canceling a project because it didn’t “feel right”… even if my logical counterparts couldn’t understand it) or outsourcing it.

Assuming you ARE in alignment with what you’re working on, here are some more things to do:

6. Listen to classical music at 60 beats per minute. Music at 60 bpm balances the left and right hemispheres of your brain and helps your thinking and creativity.

This type of music always helps me produce better results.

I’ve bought this before and really like it.

5. Work off of a plan. Sometimes to-do lists can be random gobbledygook that ends up just being busy-work. Tim Ferriss once said something to the degree about how being perpetually busy is LAZY. People fill themselves up with loads of crap to to avoid actually thinking.

Instead of loading yourself up with work that may have no rhyme or reason… work off a PLAN.

Set a goal, plan it out (#2 on this post may help), and then create your to-do tasks based off of your plan. If you feel purposeful and know WHY you’re doing what you’re doing, you will likely feel a lot better about doing it.

(Bonus if you break up your plan into small, workable chunks so you don’t feel overwhelmed.)

4. Find inspiration. There are many ways you can inspire yourself:

– Visualize what you’re doing this all for. Think about the emotions you’ll feel when you reach your goal.

PLEASE (!!!) have an emotionally-driven “why” for doing what you’re doing… and remind yourself about it.

– Identify “role models” and model them.

– Read books that motivate you (I personally love Man’s Search For Meaning (which is not meant to be motivational but it inspires the heck out of me), Do The Work,and The War Of Art. I’ve heard some great things about Outwitting The Devil but haven’t read it yet.

3. Move your body. If you feel blocked, it only makes sense to un-block your body by moving it around. This can look like going for a walk, dancing around the house, or some other kind of exercise.

One thing I like to do is just jump around and move my arms, legs, jaw… just shake everything up. It looks crazy, but it ALWAYS snaps me out of a funk.

2. Create accountability. This can look like publicly posting your goal on Facebook, having an accountability partner, or joining a like-minded mastermind where you can share your goals.

If you know that you have to report to other people about what you’ve set out to do, you’ll think twice before ignoring it.

1.  Be OK with it. If you’ve tried to get motivated, and you know that you are in alignment what you’re doing… then just let go. Sometimes these things ebb and flow. I believe everything not only happens for a reason, but for our highest good.

And sometimes letting go and not beating yourself up about it can open yourself up to magic.

For example, a few months ago, I was in a hotel room doing my best to “force” myself to create a presentation. I was set to speak in a couple days and I just couldn’t get motivated to create my PowerPoint.

I pushed and pushed all day, and nothing was happening.

By nighttime, I was getting desperate. I bargained with myself that I would order room service, finish the presentation, and reward myself by getting to go out and play.

Thankfully room service didn’t offer any options I liked, so I walked over to the hotel restaurant. I brought my notebook with me, but mostly just concentrated on eating a fantastic dinner.

Somewhere in between bites of the delicious food and looking at the beautiful aquarium surrounding the restaurant, inspiration just jumped at me.

I got out my notebook and ideas flowed like wine.

It was amazing… as soon as I stopped PUSHING, the flow came.

I suspect the same may happen for you too.  

URL: Top 7 Things To Do When You Can’t Get Motivated…

7 Ways To Get Anything You Want

 7 Ways To Get Anything You Want

One phrase I hear people say ALL THE TIME is that success is all about "taking action." No matter what your goal is, If you take action, you succeed. If you don't, you fail.

In my experience, that's not the truth.

The truth is that it's all about taking FOCUSED action. That's the distinction that'll make or break you, and help you reach any goal you have.

Here's the difference: people who just “take action” are people who try something, then another thing, then another thing. They follow the shiny objects. Then they generally get upset that "nothing works." From their perspective, they've tried all kinds of things, but absolutely nothing is yielding results.

People who take focused action, on the other hand, don't have that problem. They have a long-term mindset and are committed to their progress.

Here are seven things you can do to take focused action and finally see the results you're looking for:

1. Have a plan with a built-in measurement system.

You can't take focused action if you don't know where you're going. So have a measurable goal and an established timetable. Maybe it's 90 days, 180, or two years out. Then work backward from that plan. What needs to happen for you to get to where you want to go?

For example, let's say you want to lose 10 pounds in two months; what needs to happen? Maybe you need to get to the gym two more days per week and say "no" to at least one late-night dinner per week.

Whatever you want, having a specific goal — and measurable metrics along the way — will help you get there.

2. Have a to-do list or action plan that doesn't freak you out.

Once you create your plan, take daily actions toward whatever you're wanting to create. Make your to-dos manageable — ideally with three to five items per day.

If you could accomplish one or two bigger tasks (out of your three to five) per day, imagine how productive you'd feel at the end of the week?

This is counterintuitive. Most of us have mile-long to-do lists. But the reality is that most people get overwhelmed by those lists and end up doing far less. Or they might do the opposite and get caught up in all kinds of busy work, failing to prioritize the real change-making tasks.

Going the "less is more" route will help you see major momentum without burning yourself out.

3. Chip away consistently.

The best action-takers don't need to see immediate gratification. They know that if they keep plugging away, eventually all of their momentum will add up and they'll see major results.

They know that most "overnight" success stories are years in the making, and they're in this for the long haul.

4. Get help.

If you're trying to get to a new uncharted territory for yourself, it makes sense to cut your learning curve as much as possible.

Invest in courses and mentors who can help you get to your end destination in a faster (and cheaper, when you consider months of trial and error) way.

5. Work with your strengths and delegate the rest.

It's often a lot cheaper (in time and money) to hire people for the things you're not good at. People who take focused action don't waste time trying to learn things that will only slow them down and/or frustrate them.

They hop on sites like Elance, Fiverr, or ask for recommendations, and quickly hire out what they need.

6. Have a positive attitude.

Odds are, obstacles are going to come up. Successful, focused action-takers look for solutions quickly instead of getting into victim mode.

This way, things don't hold them back, and they can keep their focus on getting to their destination as quickly as possible.

7. Make choices based on your goals.

There are always tons of opportunities out there. People who are great at taking consistent, focused action only say "yes" to things that are consistent with where they ultimately want to be. They don't flitter from shiny object to shiny object because their eyes are on the goals they've set out — period.

8 ways to sell more books

 

 8 ways to sell more books

Even though writing a book is not easy for most people, many authors tell me that selling their books is far harder for them than writing them.

Most people are writers OR marketers – not both.

That said, here are some tips you can use to sell more copies of your book – even if you’re horrific at marketing:

1. Turn your book into an audiobook.

Audiobooks are a super-simple way to sell more copies of your books.  There are lots of people who only consume books by listening to them when working out, driving, or running errands. I find that offering audiobooks often accounts for 10-20% of all of my book sales.

There are lots of ways you can create an audio book. Read it yourself, hire a voice-over artist, or, if you’re based in the USA, go on ACX.com and work with a voiceover artist on a no-money-down, 50-50 royalty split. This makes it risk free for you.

2.  Post on Goodreads.

Goodreads is a social networking site for readers and it’s very powerful in getting the word out about your book. Studies show that more people buy books based off of Goodreads recommendations than Amazon reviews. Post your book on the site and get active there.

3. Get your book translated.

Many countries are hungry for new information. Depending on what your book topic is about, it could be very profitable to get your book translated into other languages. You can either pay for translations or use a site like Babelcube (thanks to Steve Scott for sharing that with me) that’ll work with you on a royalty split.

4. Put your book on more than just Kindle.

Use a free tool like SmashWords to distribute your book to Apple, B&N, OverDrive, Scribd, Oyster, Kobo, and more. If you’re not using the Kindle Select system, you may as well get the free sales from other places. There’s no cost for you to submit them.

5. Get a better cover.

Out of all of my tests, I’ve found that the #1 thing that helps increase book sales is a great cover. Make sure yours looks like something you’d find on a bookstore shelf.

Until recently, I always used this gal on Fiverr. She has been great, but I just tried hiring someone over at 99Designs.com to see if a more expensive cover will help book sales a lot more. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. Send me a tweet in a week or so and I’ll tell you what performed better.

6. Offer bonuses for buying.

Use your social media and/or email list to offer a bonus for people buy your book. Not only does this give people incentive to buy from you, but when they do, your book’s sales rankings will increase. This will help even more people see your book.

7. Reach out to podcasters in your niche to do interviews.

There are lots of podcast hosts who are eager to get new content for their shows. Go to the iTunes store, do a search for your niche, and contact people who have shows in your field. You can offer to do interviews or submit episodes for them. This is a great win-win that lots of hosts go for.

8. Get more reviews.

There are all kinds of ways you can get reviews. Here are a few ideas: join a review exchange, beg your friends and family, post a Goodreads giveaway, offer Free Days, contact reviewers on Amazon who have reviewed similar books and offer them a free copy in exchange for their review.

Even if you follow one of these tips, you should see more book sales. If you follow multiple, expect to see a pretty spectacular compound effect.

How to publish a book

The other day I posted this on Facebook:

Since then, I’ve been feeling really inspired to write up a post showing more people how they can get their books written and published.

This is a big topic, so I’m going to do my best to mention everything here. If I forget anything, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to make this an ever-expanding resource.

I guess what you should know, before I begin, is that I currently have 40 or so books out under different pen names. I have several #1 bestselling books on Amazon and regularly sell a lot of copies of books per day.

That said: I think I’m pretty well versed in creating and publishing high-quality books in short time spans.

There’s a lot here. Here’s the Table Of Contents:

Creating your outline
Writing your book
Proofreading your book
Publishing your book
Promoting your book
So let’s get going…

Creating Your Outline.

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Before you can publish a book, you have to write it and the first step is to outline your book.

There are lots of ways you can outline a book. I’m going to explain how to do it for 3 types: generic non-fiction books, original non-fiction (like biographies), and for fiction.

For a generic non-fiction book:

First, write down the main points you want to communicate in your book.

So for example, let’s say we’re writing a book on “how to publish a book”. Here’s what I think of right away:

• Creating the outline
• Writing the book
• Proofreading the book
• Publishing the book
• Formatting the book
• Promoting the book

I generally like writing a book with 8-12 chapters. So to get inspiration for more topics, you can go run a search for books on “how to write a book” (results here). Alternatively, you could search “how to publish a book” (results here).

Then you look through the search results. For example, one of the first books that come up when you search Amazon for “how to write a book” is this one. Click on that, and then the “Click to Look Inside” button:

Once you do that, click Table Of Contents. Here’s the first page of what comes up:

You could go through the titles and see if anything else strikes you as important to include.

You want to publish a book with great content so do this for 5-10 different books.

Then go through the reviews on Amazon for each book. See what readers wanted/didn’t want.

By the time you’re done, you should definitely be able to choose 8-12 of the best chapters to include.

And as a disclaimer, I’m not saying you should go copy other books. That sucks. But this is a great way to get your mind going and get some fresh perspective on something you’ve probably been thinking about a LOT.

For a non-generic nonfiction book (like biographies):

Begin with the end in mind.

“What do I want to communicate in this book?”

Then create your chapters with that in mind.

So for example, let’s say you want to write your life story. There’s a LOT you could include in that.

So maybe you decide your outcome is to show people they can persevere through any circumstances in their lives.

You’d go through and make your outline considering what you want people to get out of the book.

“What are the most important elements that’ll best help people ‘get’ my message?”

In doing this, it will help you realize what makes sense to include and what doesn’t. So maybe you’ll mention the story about when you won the spelling bee, but not the delightful family picnic that was memorable but not necessarily helpful to your outcome.

Choose your best 8-12 points and then you’ll have your outline.

For fiction books:

Write down a general synopsis of what’s going to happen in your story. This would be a couple paragraphs to a page in length.

Your outline would then be a section-by-section breakdown of the synopsis.

Writing Your Book.

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There are many ways you can write a book. I’m going to list my favorite:

a) The “normal” way. This tends to be pretty overwhelming for people, but for some, it’s the only way it’ll feel right.

If you’re going to write a book yourself, work from an outline and schedule yourself to write a chapter every 1-2 days.

This might sound like a lot but if you’re writing via stream of consciousness (no editing or censoring yourself), it’s very do-able. Just aim to get your rough draft done.

We’ll go over proofreading in the next section.

(If you go this route, here’s a great book to prod you on.)

b) Record and transcribe. If the idea of writing everything is overwhelming but you know the content needs to come from you, then simply record everything you’d write.

Literally take your outline, get a recording device, and just speak everything you want to include in the book.

Then get it transcribed (here are some resources) and cleaned up.

You can expect to pay a transcriptionist anywhere from $20 – $100 per audio hour. So if you talk for 2 hours (around a book length), you’ll pay $40 – $200.

For cleaning up the book post-transcription, you can either do it yourself or hire someone.

A good cleaner-upper will be able to take on your voice and do an exquisite job of sounding like you. Simply forward them your emails, Facebook posts, blog posts you’ve written, etc.. and they’ll be able to understand and then take on your voice.

c) Hire a ghostwriter Option 1: More Expensive/Less Headache. If you want to publish a book but don’t have the time/desire to deal with much else, then go this route.

When you hire a ghostwriter, you’re basically paying someone to write your book for you. When you publish the book, YOU still get the credit for being an author. They get paid for writing the book. Many NY Times bestselling authors have their books ghostwritten.

Why do ghostwriters do this? Well, they get paid for it.

Some of the really good ones ask for credit on the books too. But most people are happy to just get the upfront money.

You can hire people to write your books in many places. Some options are posting a job onelance.com or guru.com or checking out my resources.

(Hiring people is a little bit of an extensive process, so if you go that route, I recommend myOutsourcing A Kindle Book course.)

A ghostwriter can create an outline for you, but personally, I like to take the time and create the outline myself.

Here’s how I work with a ghostwriter:

1.  Give them the outline.

2.  Make a quick Screencast video explaining the outline. Maybe the bulk of it is pretty self explanatory but there’s a specific point you want covered in Chapter 7. Explain that.

(Your thoughts can be a lot messier when you’re communicating them to a writer versus going the recording/transcribing route.)

3. Forward the writer different things written in your voice, just like I mentioned with the “record and transcribe” section. Forward them emails you’ve written, Facebook posts, blog posts, whatever. This way the writer can mimic how you sound.

Ghostwriter costs run the gamut. Variables include how quickly you need the book back, what your subject is, quality and experience level of the ghostwriter, and a whole lot more. You can expect to pay anywhere from $500 to thousands of dollars for a book.

I went this route with one of my books that sells 10-20 copies a day. To be honest, I still haven’t even read the entire thing. I skimmed it, spot checked it, and knew the content was phenomenal… but I haven’t read the whole thing.

d) Hire a ghostwriter Option 2: Cheaper/Faster/More Time Involved. There’s another, cheaper route that takes a little bit more time than Route 1. Basically, you can break up the chapters in your outline into different “extended articles”.

The benefits of calling these “extended articles” and not “chapters” is that they don’t seem as intimidating to a writer.

When a writer gets an assignment to write 10 “extended articles”, each article seems independent of the other articles. It’s not a big deal. It’s just writing a few pages on a topic.

However, if you ask that same person to write a book, they get intimidated. All of a sudden they feel it’ll take way longer and they’ll need to charge 2-3x as much. Just saying the word “book” freaks some people out.

If you go the extended article route, then you can hire the same writer to write all the articles. Or, you can hire different writers to write different articles. This will get your chapters back much quicker, but you’ll need to do more clean-up work.

So here’s how this works: you’ll get back a bunch of extended articles. You’ll then hire a proofreader/cleaner-upper to make everything sound like it’s in the same voice. (You can find these people on elance, guru, or in my resources).

Then you (or someone else) adds an intro and an ending.

Proofreading Your Book

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If you’ve hired a ghostwriter via Option 1, you shouldn’t need to have the book proofread.

If you’ve gone any of the other routes it’s probably a good idea to have an extra set of eyes on your book.

A good proofreader will make sure:

• All grammatical errors are fixed
• The book is in your voice (assuming that’s what you want)
• Everything sounds consistent
• All unnecessary words are taken out (for example, a lot of people overuse the word “that”. It’s often not needed. And the more clear and concise your message, the more people will be able to glean from it.)

A good proofreader also reads the book with the end in mind. What’s your outcome for the book? Is this book delivering that? Before you publish a book, you definitely want to have it proofread.

There are some proofreaders you can hire right here.

Publishing Your Book

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You can either self-publish or go with a major publisher.

Because I know marketing, I’ve always gone with self publishing. I love this route, though for my upcoming Radiating Royalty book, I’ll probably work with a traditional publisher.

Since I haven’t done that yet though, I’ll just speak about self publishing.

So you’re going to want physical and Kindle versions made for your book.

Physical books still sell, though Kindle outsells them something crazy like 3 to 1.

To get the physical versions made, I use CreateSpace.com.

You pay $25 (I think) and they’ll list your physical book for you on Amazon.com.

You just upload the book (make sure it’s formatted correctly) and either upload your cover or use their free cover designer. They even provide a free ISBN number (the bar code on the backs of books).

(Formatting can be a huge pain, but I use John for it. He formats them perfectly for $50. No-brainer.)

To get Kindle versions made, go to kdp.amazon.com.

It’s free to list your book.

Kindle is awesome, just a PAIN for formatting. I’ve gotten many a bad review because of books looking like crap on Kindle, so I had a tool created to alleviate that. You can get it right here.

After you have your book set up on both CreateSpace and Amazon, just send Amazon a support ticket and ask them to merge both your books onto one page.

Presto… you published a book and you’re listed on Amazon. 

Promoting Your Book

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There are lots of ways you can promote your book once it’s on Amazon.

One great way to start building up momentum is to have “free days” using KDP Select.

Basically, when you use KDP, you promise to ONLY put your book on Amazon for a limited time (no Barnes & Noble, no Apple, etc).

The benefit to you, among other things, is you can offer your book for free for a few days.

When you offer your book for free, Amazon will publicize it for you. You’ll get lots of downloads, which hopefully translates to more reviews, which boosts you up in the search engines.

You also start to get featured on the bottom of other books in your niche, like this:

This is definitely one of your best strategies to get more exposure on Kindle.

My partner Mario also put out a course on how to rank #1 on Kindle. I won’t mention everything in the course here since thousands of people have paid for it, but I recommend it if you want to get as much exposure as possible.

Using KDP Select is an excellent starting point either way.

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A few points to note:

With the exception of two resources, I don’t get anything for sharing with you. I just thought they’d help.

I’ve been writing this for 3 hours now and my head is a little foggy.  If you have questions/want me to clarify, post in the comments. I’ll keep editing this.

And if you’d like to share this blog post with other people, that’d be awesome. I’d really love to help lots of people get their genius out into the world. 

Let’s also stay connected on Facebook so I know what other posts would be of benefit to you.