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Create a Challenge for Yourself

Another way to bring out your competitive spirit and become more productive is by creating challenges for yourself. This isn’t making a bet with anyone else.

Rather, it’s just pushing yourself to the limit to see how much you can accomplish.

You can do this on small daily tasks or large tasks.

Example: Let’s suppose you’re writing a book. You might set a timer for 30 minutes and see how many words you type in that time. Then reset the timer and try to beat your previous number of words.

You can also set up mid and long term challenges.

Example: You might record how many words you create on a weekly basis, and then try to always beat your previous record.

Or if you’ve already previously completed a task (such as writing a book), you might try to complete the task even faster the second time.

Tip: Do you know someone else who has a similar to-do list or goals? If so, you could race against each other to complete your tasks.

For example, you could race to see who completes a 100-page book first.

If it’s a business-oriented goal, then search business and marketing forums (like the WarriorForum.com) for people who are willing to join your challenges. Ideally, you should all create public blogs that you update on a daily basis.

Tags: Time Management

Choose Your Directories

There many different places to submit your website and many different ways to submit. For example, you can submit manually to the main directories or automatically using special software.

The best thing to do right now is to choose your directories. If you have a limited amount of time you’ll want to focus on the ones that will give you the most benefit first.

You should also know that some of these are paid directories and other ones are free. Unfortunately, it’s often the ones you have to pay for that will give you the most benefit. You should take a look at your budget, and how much time you have and make your decision on directories based on that.

After you’ve chosen the directories you’ll need to sign up for them. Look at their terms of service, as always. If you’re having trouble finding good directories this is a good list:

 Yahoo directory.
 Best of the Web.
 Dmoz
 JoeAnt
 GoGuides.org.
 UncoverTheNet

Tags: Directory Submission

Bring Out Your Competitive Spirit

You probably realized that this tip is really a one-sided bet.

That is, you’re betting a friend that you’ll be more productive and get your to-do lists and goals complete. If you lose, you lose your money or valued possessions. But the only thing that happens if you win is that you get your money back.

If you’d like to make it even more motivating, you can actually make a bet with a willing friend. In this case, you don’t have to deal with painful amounts of money. That’s because the real motivator here is your competitive spirit.

If you’re the type who likes to win, then this might be a good way to make yourself more productive.

Example: You can bet your friend dinner that you’ll make your first $100 online by the end of the month. If you win, you get dinner. If you don’t meet your goal, you need to buy dinner for your friend.

To make this even more motivating, tell all your other friends, family and colleagues about your bet. The more people who know, the more uncomfortable you’ll be if you do NOT meet your goals. And that means you’ll likely be ultra-productive just to avoid any discomfort or embarrassment.

Tags: Time Management

- Get Your Submission Ready.

It’s important to get everything you need ready for submission before you actually start the process. This helps keep you organized so that there are no roadblocks in the way when you do submit. As you go through the submission process you’ll notice that there are many different categories available. Different directories classify niches in different ways, so it’s helpful to browse the sites to plan in advance.

Another important step to getting your submission ready is researching your keywords. Just like it was helpful for article marketing, it’s also helpful for directory submission. Since you don’t have much room for descriptive text, you’re going to want to focus on your main keyword or a few main keywords.

Finally, you need to craft an appealing description for your site. Remember that many people go to these directories to find relevant websites. Your description needs to be as enticing as possible. This will help you get more traffic because more people will click on your site’s link and visit.

Tags: Directory Submission

Directory Submission

Submitting your website to directories is another option to generate traffic. Many of these link directories have their own visitors who love to find websites they are interested in by just browsing through the directory. Many of them are even highly ranked in the search engines and have a high page rank, which means they are more likely to give you a boost in the search engine rankings.

Once again, you’re going to get backlinks as well as targeted visitors from the directories you submit to.

Keep in mind that these are different than article directories. Link directories are generally collections of links from all around the Internet. Some of them are focused specifically on one single niche, while others are collections of websites from many different niches.

Tags: Directory Submission

Rewards Punishments

Rewards don’t work for everyone, especially those who don’t use rewards that truly motivate them (or those that treat themselves to the reward no matter what).

In that case, you may find that punishments work.

Here’s how to use this tip to increase your productivity…

First, decide on an amount of money that would be truly painful for you to lose right now. Whatever that number is, add 10% to it.

Example: If $1000 would feel like a hardship for you, then tack on another $100 to make it a total of $1100.

Next, give that amount of money to a trusted friend along with a written agreement that outlines how and when you’ll get the money back. You can do this in one of two ways:

1. Set up milestones. When you meet each milestone, you get a portion of the money back.

Example: You might set up four milestones where you get 25% of your money back. Alternatively, you might set up a series of milestones where you get 10% of the money back for the initial steps and 50% back when you complete the final step.

2. Get it back only when your overall goal is complete. Here you don’t get the payments as you complete milestones. Instead, you only get it back at the completion of your stated goal.

Tip: Getting all the money back at once or getting the majority of the money back at the end works best for most people. That’s because it’s more painful to lose most or all of the money as opposed to just a small portion of your money.

Also, you may give something else up that’s important to you. For example, do you have a particular possession that you’re especially fond of, such as a classic car or some other antique or collectible? If so, you may consider giving that to a friend in lieu of cash.

Tags: Time Management

Offer To Buy An Ad

In addition to the free links you’ll be getting from posting on the forum, the owner of the forum will probably have some ad space available. A lot of webmasters stay away from buying these ads because they think it will be too expensive. That’s sometimes not the case at all.

When you contact the forum owner you should ask what is available as well as the cost. If you do find that the costs are too high you can always negotiate. Even if it’s not clear whether the owner has any ad space, you can always offer to buy some because it might be something they haven’t considered before.

If it’s a very large forum that doesn’t seem to be privately owned, there is still a way for you to get your ads on their site. This is actually a method that may be even cheaper than dealing with the forum owner directly. You can actually go into your Adwords account and target certain websites.

That means you can find a forum you really like (that already has Adsense on their site) and bid on ads that will appear there. This is a way to target people you know are going to be ideal prospects for your site – sometimes for dirt cheap prices.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Distractions Procrastination Perfectionism.

All of these things can hinder your productivity. But one way to keep on track is to reward yourself as you cross things off your to-do list and meet your goals.

In order for this to be a useful way to increase your productivity, you need to set up rewards that you truly want (and not something you would do for yourself anyway).

Secondly, your reward must be proportionate to your goal.

So small steps deserve small rewards, while meeting bigger milestones and goals should result in bigger rewards.

Example: Let’s suppose you want to complete and publish a book. You may set up a smaller reward for yourself for finishing the book, such as splurging on your favorite bottle of wine. Then you can set up a bigger reward for making your first 100 sales, such as going out of town for the weekend to your favorite vacation spot.

This won’t work for you’re the type who’s tempted to enjoy the reward without actually meeting the goal. For example, maybe you decide to buy the wine anyway even though you’re only half finished with the book. If this sounds like you, see the next tip (Tip 18) for a different type of motivator.

Tip: You can make this tip even more effective by telling your accountability partner about your intended goals and associated rewards.

Tags: Time Management

Create an Effective Profile

You should always create a profile to go along with your forum username. As you post more and become more known people are going to be interested in reading your profile. You’ll want to have some meaningful content written there that describes what your website is about, as well as a link to your website. You might be surprised at how many people will end up visiting your site through your profile.

People are naturally curious about others who share great information. That’s why you’ll get visitors to your profile and why it’s a good idea to have it ready.

Once again, you can’t forget the fact that you can include your website in your profile. These profiles often get indexed by the search engines so you’ll be getting yet another back link to your website.

Tags: Forum Marketing

Get Someone to Hold You Accountable

There mere act of publicly stating your goals is one way to motivate yourself to achieve them, which in turn makes you more productive. But here’s another way:

Recruit someone to hold you accountable on a daily or weekly basis. (In return, you can do the same for him.)

Here’s how it works…
Let’s say you decide to touch base with your accountability partner three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday).

On Sunday night or early Monday morning, you tell your partner what all is on your to-do list for Monday. On Monday night, your partner contacts you and specifically asks you what you accomplished.

After you tell him what you did or did not accomplish, then you tell him what’s on your to-do list for Tuesday and Wednesday. Again, he contacts you on Wednesday night and you tell him what you did or did not do. And again, you tell him what’s on your list for Thursday and Friday. And so on.

You can see why this works.

Most people feel embarrassed telling their accountability partner that they didn’t finish the tasks on their to-do lists. And if you’re like most people, you’ll feel even more uncomfortable lying.

So in order to ease this psychological discomfort and embarrassment, there’s only one thing for you to do: Take action.

Tip: Be sure to choose a partner who’ll reliably contact you and hold you to your to-do list. I say this because sometimes if you tell a friend you watched TV instead of outlining a chapter, he might say something like, “Oh, that’s ok – you can do it tomorrow.”

You don’t want someone who’ll rationalize or make excuses for you (or let YOU get away with making excuses). You want someone who’ll hold your feet to the fire and strongly encourage you to stay on track.

Tags: Time Management