In a week of 168 hours many assignments require your attention, so setting up priorities in advance is the strategy to get you going instead of making you overwhelmed.
If you are committed to build profitable business around certain niche and to impact potential buyers with content and value, your strategy may be to focus on targeting influential individuals i.e. influencers instead of entire marketing segment. Another option can be that with your blog, software, information products or other goods you become an influencer yourself.
This article will help you to implement strategies for finding more time to do your dream job, especially if you are switching careers or need to work long and focused hours to support yourself.
To start successfully and strategically in the field of influencer marketing answer these five questions:
• What do you want to be known for?
• What thoughts can you convey, and how do you want to communicate them?
• Who is your audience and what are their needs, pains, and desires?
• What is your content strategy?
• Who are their influencers?
One of time-wasters that prevent influencers from working efficiently are excessive meetings and many business leaders advocate eradicating meetings almost completely. Instead of being too strict on meetings-diet, I would advise the maximum clarity in every interaction. According to Brandeis University findings, 56% of projects fail due to poor communication and the single factor that can make or break a project is effective communication.
Certainly, for some projects we need buy-in from other people and face-to-face interaction is indispensable to get a complete feedback. But most of the time aligning our timetables gets too complex and we put off things that matter into eternity instead of dealing with them on time.
Those things that matter can be time-sensitive business proposals that if we do not say ''yes'' to somebody else will start working on. Other examples include quality time with friends or family where we are truly engaged instead of being distracted, and secondly there is a slot of time we dedicate to ourselves (preferably early in the morning) where we can reflect on the day ahead of us and set our mind to be a bit better than yesterday.
We truly prosper when we get incremental shifts in our lives and schedule: little by little tiny improvements bridge the yawning gaps between where we are and where we want to be. It gets especially motivating for us if we are in transition between jobs and if one job pays bills for us and what we do in after hours between 18:00-02:00 leads us to our dream career. Certainly, working 14 hours per day is not sustainable in the long run, but if the situation at the time is like that we should invest our energy in working a bit longer and more efficient.
Some of my favourite influencers Jack Canfield and Michael Hyatt emphasize that we should organize our obligations around similar tasks in a day that are allocated for that. For instance, Friday is the only day when Michael does external meetings and from Tuesday-Thursday his entire working hours are dedicated to delivering excellent written and public speaking content, which is his unique strength.
In Michael's article you can see how he structures his days and although it got him many years to live life on his own terms; we all can start from somewhere and write down how your ideal week should look like, with all the activities we want to pursue and then adjust our activities to it.
I also like to plan my next day in advance, plus I jot down my daily five successes in a planner. This strategy I adopted from bestselling author Jack Canfield and I fill in 4x5 table with literally several words: The Daily Success, The Reason (why this success happened), The Big End-Result (which may get accomplished several years or even decades after this day), and The Next Step. These different time perspectives during writing are important because I remain focused on both the big hairy goal and the next action to take. Let's say my Daily Success was publishing this article on Huffington Post; The Reason why it happened is because I wrote quality content for readers; The Big End-Result is that I become a published author and The Next Step is I will think about titles and topics for next three to five articles during the weekend.
Also, writing down daily gratitude keeps me on the track of my ideal career. I literally write 5-10 things that come to my mind that make me happy such as my family, a dear friend celebrating birthday, the gorgeous meal and laughter I experienced, the rooftop over my head, the first journey to Asia that Facebook reminded me of, even the stuff I am getting rid off that brings me closer to my dream home. Also, during the day if I feel tired or irritated for whatever reason it may be, I instantly recognize that state and try not to linger in that mood for too long.
Instead, I raise myself from those negative feelings with the state of gratitude. Focusing on the resources you have, while you remain humble is the best step to move towards your dreams, including your ideal job.
Depending on your lifestyle, you can select the best planners to get your days organized. Some of you prefer Moleskine or Dapperdesk, and for me the defining criteria is more about whether the planner fits the bag and it is spacious enough to organize my thoughts instead of using multiple notebooks.
Another very important factor to consider when you are getting closer to your job as an influencer is to start perceiving yourself as an entrepreneur and investor, instead of an employee. To fully integrate this mindset shift into your life, learn from the well-renowned influencer in the field of financial education, Robert Kiyosaki who provides his free tools.
Remember that when it comes to financial education, reliable internet resources can make you ways ahead than those in your age group who prefer not to think about it.
And if you are still not confident that your financial choices today will positively shape your future, just remember that in the world of investments 80% of all transactions are performed online and that technology provides to us better access to company information nowadays.
If you are still reading this article and you want to take your future into your hands as an entrepreneur or a freelancer, you should decide to invest time after working hours into developing your capabilities and your brand until you can switch completely to building your brand. In one of the next post I would recommend my all-time favourite resources for doing so, but for now, on your road of self-discovery read 30 Days of Branding by Simon Middleton.
One of the best ways to build your brand as an influencer is to start blogging and for that you need 5 things: a domain, a hosting, a website, topics your are knowledgeable about and consistency.
When you choose WordPress hostings, you can look at diverse parameters such as price, disk space, the number of monthly visitors, etc. Go Daddy is praised a lot , but on this link you can compare different WordPress hostings by yourself.
Ideally, your hosting and website should be like your first and last name so that you build your brand around your current expertise. In case you will shift industry or you will introduce new products, you can easily adapt the website that has your name, rather than changing the industry specific name.
In terms of designing your WordPress blog, you can choose free themes, but also you should refresh it with unique photos and visual content. Although you can rely on your iPhone camera and the effects you can get with filters on Instagram, Pixlr and Prisma, you will still need ol' school camera in certain situations to engage your users with photos and videos of better resolution and unusual angles. If you are an influencer for extreme sports, you actually need special action cameras to update your fans during wild kayak rides or new biking routes.
Finally, when it comes to consistency you should have a system behind everything you are doing and do not commit to writing a blog unless you are certain that you will find time to do so. The secrets of blogging giants such as Seth Godin, Neil Patel, masterminds of Copyblogger and Contently lie in the fact that they publish high quality posts on certain days of the week and they package it with a lot of passion and enthusiasm every day.
Right now, my focus is spread on four projects and I had to decline many opportunities and people to make sure I own my time and entrepreneurial lifestyle.
To encourage you to do the same, I want to share with you Michael Hyatt's steps to avoid crazy busy attitude in your life.
•Recognize that your current load is unsustainable.
•Acknowledge that the real problem is you, but that also means you have the power and freedom to change it.
•Develop an abundance mindset. Often, fear is the motivator that gets us in these tight situations when it comes to a lack of margin. Simply saying, "There's more where that came from," can set you free from that.
•Create your ideal week.
•Enroll the people around you within the week.
•Most importantly, actually put this into practice as you want to be effective over the long term: create a margin and pace yourself.
In the end, life is a marathon, not a sprint. And as influencer you want to last long.
What is the greatest time management challenge you faced when you shifted towards your dream career? Let me know in the comment section.
Photos: Parroket, Fastcodesign, The Muse.