Have you ever driven your car onto a frozen lake, parked, cut a hole in the ice and started fishing? This might sound like a crazy idea if you’re from a warm climate. Why would you sit there on the ice for hours, freezing yourself silly, waiting for a fish to wake up from its cold slumber and bite your hook?
One way to make this sport more bearable is to build yourself an ice-fishing shanty. About the size of a garden shed, this is a small structure that is towed out onto the ice. The structure has one or more trap doors in the floor where you can use an auger to cut through the ice.
You can furnish these shanties with comfortable chairs and a propane heater – just don’t get your shanty so warm that it melts into the ice or worse yet – through the ice.
“What in the heck does this have to do with email marketing?”
Maybe nothing, but let me continue…
A couple in Princeton, Minnesota, decided they’d rather have chicken eggs than fish, and so they converted their ice fishing shanty into a chicken coop. They added nesting boxes to accommodate 80 chickens and used the trap doors to clean out the old bedding and chicken poop before moving the structure – on wheels – to a new location. When a chicken hawk appears in the sky, the chickens can dive under their chicken coop for safety.
Really, I think this is a much better use for the ice shanty than sitting in the cold for hours hoping a fish has had enough living and is ready for the fry pan.
If you’ve been doing online marketing for any length of time then I’ll bet right now you have assets that you aren’t using fully. It’s just a matter of identifying those assets and converting them into a better, higher use.
For example, do you have…
• Old email lists? • Social media followers? • Products you’ve created but no longer sell? • Content that is languishing with no readers? • Special knowledge you’ve gained on how to do certain things? • PLR products you’ve purchased but not used?
Any of these assets and loads of others I didn’t list can be repurposed to increase your business. Think about it… if an old ice shanty can find new life housing 80 chickens, couldn’t you…
• Revive your old email lists by sending a 30-day campaign of emails people WANT to read? • Start a new, coordinated campaign to bring your social media followers to your website, your squeeze pages, your products? • Update, refresh and re-release your old products, or sell resell rights to them? • Update and repurpose your existing content into audios, videos, new posts, books and so forth? • Take your own specialized knowledge and turn it into new posts, lead magnets and products? • Dig out those PLR products you purchased, find the gold and repurpose those into content and products, too?
You might want to take inventory of everything you have, whether it’s languishing on your website, on your hard drive or in your memory, and make a list. Then after each item, think of 5 ways you can repurpose and reuse it to either build your audience or make more sales.
If you’ve been doing online marketing for any real length of time, then I’ll bet you an ice-fishing shanty that you have thousands of dollars in assets going to waste right now. The challenge is to identify them, decide on a course of action and then get busy.
Most new marketers make the painful mistake of thinking the sale is done when the customer buys the product. Nope. That’s just the first sale. Wise marketers who want to stay in business and continue to profit know there are two more sales to be made.
First, you’ve got to sell the new buyer on how great your product is. If you don’t, you’ll get more refund requests.
Second, you’ve got to sell your new buyer on consuming and using your product. When you do, these new customers are far more likely to purchase additional products from you, often at much higher price points.
Interestingly, you can make both of these sales with one simple technique.
I’m going to assume that the product in question is an information product, and that it’s a good one – no junk. Here’s what you do:
When you collect reviews and testimonials prior to launch (you are doing that, right?) you’re going to ask a couple of extra questions of your reviewers:
1: Which is your favorite section/chapter/video of the product?
2: What did you discover and how will you use this information to achieve your goal?
Your questions might be slightly different depending on your product and your niche. The gist is to get each reviewer to choose a favorite section of the product and tell you what they’re going to do with this information.
For example, “The third video taught me how to add an additional $10,000 to my monthly income with just a few small tweaks to what I’m already doing.”
Or, “The fifth chapter revealed a mistake I’ve been making that nearly cost me my marriage. Now that I’m aware of it, I’ve made a simple adjustment that’s brought my husband and me back together again and we feel like newlyweds!”
You can use these in your sales material, but you can also place these INSIDE your product to remind your customers of why they made the purchase. You might place the testimonials at the beginning of chapters, or one the page containing that particular video, or wherever it’s appropriate.
After people buy your product, they naturally forget most of what the sales letter or sales video told them. A week or two later, they might only remember they paid $199 for a product that will teach them how to blog. If buyer’s remorse sets in before they even consume your product, you’re done for. A refund request will be on its way to your inbox.
By adding these very specific testimonials, you remind them that others have found your product particularly helpful. This can get them to read or watch your product and see how great it is. Then instead of asking for a refund, they’ll be wondering what else you can offer them.
A couple more tips:
→ Use these testimonials as well as bullet points in the follow up email series you send after making the sale. This will remind new buyers of what a great decision they made in purchasing your product and encourage them to consume it and use it.
→ At the beginning of each chapter or section, as well as on the page where each video is loaded, add in a list of bullet points telling them what they’ll discover in this material.
Remember, it’s important to not just make the initial sale, but to also sell your customers on the idea that they made a smart purchase as well as selling them on USING your product. When you do, you’ll reduce refunds dramatically as well as encourage your new buyers to make many more purchases from you in the future.
“The Guide to Oysters” was the first ad advertising expert David Ogilvy wrote for his own agency. In the full-page ad, details on different oysters, where they come from and how they are prepared are given, along with photos of each.
It’s a highly informative article; the kind people might rip out of a magazine for future reference. Oh yes, and in the bottom right corner, Guinness Beer is touted as the ideal drink to have with oysters. You guessed it… the ad wasn’t for oysters at all but rather for the beer.
Sneaky, huh?
No doubt you’re already creating “how-to” content for your readers and sending it out in emails, posting in your blog, social media and so forth. And at the end of your content you might promote a related product, too. For example, you tell how to use a certain method to get traffic. Then you offer a product that teaches 20 more traffic methods.
But what if… now think about this, because it’s a bit of a mind shift…
What if your content told how to USE the product you are promoting? You take that same traffic product, regardless of whether it’s your product or an affiliate product, and you write a post on how to use it to achieve a goal.
I have a friend who does exactly this and it’s made all the difference in his business. Before he started using this method, people would thank him for his great content but never buy the product he was promoting. After he started doing this, people started buying. It was frankly kinda spooky how well this worked.
Me, I was skeptical. But numbers don’t lie.
Before this method, my friend worked a full time job. 4 months after he made the change, my friend quit his job and now does online marketing 20 hours a week and surfs, scuba dives and climbs the rest of the week. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal his name or niche, but let’s go back to our traffic example and I’ll give you an idea of how this works.
Let’s say the product you’re promoting is a course on how to do Facebook Advertising, and the headline for your latest post is something like, “How to Get 50 Buyers a Day for Your Product Using Facebook Ads”. In your post you basically outline some info (not all the info, of course) on how it’s done. But here’s the thing… more than once you reference the product you’re selling as being a key part of the Facebook Ad process.
Jumping into the middle of our imaginary article: “When you get to Step 3, just reference the tool on page 43 of the “Super Traffic Course” and you’ll know immediately which ad is more likely to get the best results.” Or something like that… please note I’m doing this off the top of my head.
“If you don’t have the Super Traffic Course yet – seriously? What are you waiting for? – you can grab it here. Or you can spend a few hours gathering the same info that you’ll find on page 43… not the best use of your time, perhaps, but trial and error will eventually see you through if you stick to it. Once you’ve used the tool of page 43 and you have your numbers, you’ll know exactly which ad to run first as well as the best time to run it. Now the next step is to…”
Using this method requires two things:
First, you need a shift in your thinking. Odds are you’ve always written something like, “Tip 1, Tip 2, Tip 3, oh by the way, buy this product.” But now the product is actually an integral part of the content. You are teaching them as though they ALREADY OWN the product, which does something wonderful to your reader – it makes them THINK as though they already own it.
Except… they don’t.
So now they feel like an insider but still on the outside. Darn it, they’re missing something really awesome!
It creates a cognitive dissonance in them that can be easily resolved by… TA-DA! Purchasing the product, of course. This is soooo sneaky, isn’t it? Ha! I love it.
The mind shift on your part is the first thing you need. The second thing is some well executed balancing which will come with practice. You want to give enough info to make the post helpful even if they haven’t purchased the product. Your posts should stand on their own. But they shouldn’t give away all the secrets of the product – not even close.
You’re creating intrigue and a sense of missing out for those who don’t own the product while simultaneously giving good info they can use. See? A balancing act. And all the while you are also making it completely clear that owning the product will make the process easier, faster and in this case more profitable.
My friend says this was the hardest part to learn. He had to figure out how much info to give, what to withhold and how to seamlessly promote the product within the article. He also said the first time he tried was a hot mess, but he kept at it and within a week it was easy and within two weeks it was second nature.
It’s simply a matter of learning a new way to frame what you’re writing.
His posts aren’t super long, either. They’re usually just 500-1,500 words, depending on how much he covers. And then he promotes his posts extensively and shamelessly through social media as well as to his ever-growing list.
Million Dollar Side Point: Half of his posts actually reference and promote free lead magnets he’s giving away to build his email lists. He has lists in a dozen sub-niches to his main niche, and those lists are growing FAST. He especially promotes these posts on social media. And he reposts these posts every month or two and again promotes them on social media as if they are brand new. His rate of list building using this simple technique is blowing my mind right now.
I think I may have ‘buried the lead’ with that last paragraph, so if you’ve read this far, congrats. You now have a secret to list building that others missed!
Bottom Line: Write “how-to” content that works in conjunction with the product you are selling (or the list building lead magnet you’re giving away). These posts work as covert sales letters that set you up as the authority, teach useful skills AND sell the product or the opt-in.
I know it might be different from what you’ve done before. And the first time or two you write content like this, it might seem weird, awkward or strange. But done correctly, it can also be super profitable.
In the 70’s they did an experiment to see if the same college students who turned in their assignments on time also had clean socks. (No joke – they seriously did this.)
The hypothesis was that people who got their schoolwork done would be the same people who got their personal chores done as well. But the results were the opposite of what they expected.
Students who turned assignments in on time were terrible about keeping up with their laundry, and students who kept up with laundry turned in their assignments late. What was happening?
Researchers later realized that we only have a certain amount of attention and willpower we can pay during any one day. If we first pay that attention and willpower to doing laundry, we feel depleted before getting homework done. If we do the homework first, we tend to put off doing laundry for another day or even another week.
In a second experiment, people were left alone in a room with cookies. Some of them were allowed to eat the cookies while others weren’t. Both groups were then given an extremely difficult puzzle to solve.
Those who were allowed to eat the cookies along with a control group who never saw any cookies spent an average of 20 minutes working on the puzzle. But those who had to practice willpower by not eating the cookies only spent 8 minutes working on the puzzle because they’d already spent much of their willpower.
If you go to a mall and give people simple math problems to solve, those who have spent a long time shopping will give up on the simple math problem much faster than those who just walked into the mall and haven’t been shopping yet.
Understanding what these experiments mean for you can completely change how you plan your work and how much you can accomplish in a day and in your life. Each of us has a finite amount of willpower each day, and it gets depleted as we use it. And here’s another surprise: We use the SAME stock of willpower for ALL tasks, regardless of what they are or how important or unimportant they might be.
We don’t have laundry willpower, homework willpower, cookie willpower and math willpower… we just have one amount of universal willpower that we are given each morning when we wake up.
If you think you lack willpower to exercise after work, it’s more likely that you used up all of your willpower at work and have none left. Exercising before work will solve your problem.
If you decide to go grocery shopping before you get your work done, you’ll use up your willpower making hundreds of little decisions on what to buy and what not to buy. That’s why when you get home from the store you might find yourself wasting time on the internet or television, because you have no more willpower for doing real work.
If you do your creative work first thing when you get up in the morning instead of putting it off to the end of the day, you’re going to get a lot more accomplished.
There are ways you can conserve your willpower and attention so that you have more of it for your important work. For example, you can prepare the same foods for each meal so that you don’t have to decide each day what to make. Better still, you can pay someone to prepare a week’s worth of meals for you. If you don’t understand how willpower works, this may seem like an expensive option. But when you eliminate the attention, decision making and willpower needed to shop for and prepare 21 meals a week and instead use it on your work, you will likely make far more money than you spend on the meals.
Much like Steve Jobs, you can wear the same style of clothes each day so that you don’t have to decide what to wear. Steve Jobs would grab a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck each day without expending any of his attention and willpower on what to wear.
Don’t check your email in the morning. Reading a hundred subject lines, replying to 30 emails, writing 5 emails… this all adds up to a tremendous amount of decision making, attention and willpower that could be better spent doing the work that makes you money.
Any unimportant tasks that you can eliminate or delegate will reduce the number of decisions you have to make and the amount of willpower you expend each day, leaving more willpower and attention for your main focus. You’ve no doubt heard this technique of prioritization referenced as the “highest use of your time.”
A $5,000 an hour professional does not spend 5 hours a week cleaning her home. Why would she, when she can hire someone at $20 an hour to do that for her? She is still able to earn $4,980 an hour employing the maid while doing her own work. But if she spends 5 hours cleaning her own home, she has lost $25,000 in revenue. Or to put it another way, she spends $25,000 a week cleaning her home, which is ridiculous at best and incredibly stupid at worst.
Here are the only three takeaways you need to revolutionize your life and double or even triple how much you accomplish:
1: Eliminate every little job and decision you can, freeing up willpower and attention for what is important. Get someone to clean your house, cook your meals, run errands and so forth. Get rid of anything that takes time and attention but doesn’t provide you with a good return for your time. This might mean eliminating obligations such as being on a committee for a non-priority cause, quitting a hobby that doesn’t give you satisfaction, simplifying your home and belongings, simplifying your wardrobe and so forth.
2: Start your day doing the most important thing, followed by the second most important and so forth. This might mean you first exercise, then perform the highest value work task, then the second highest value work task, etc.
3: While we didn’t cover this, it is important to find something you completely enjoy that is totally unrelated to what you normally do. In other words, get a hobby you thoroughly love and spend a little time on it at the end of the day. This will take you out of the work realm, reduce stress, give you satisfaction and make it easier to get up tomorrow and jump right into your most important task of the day.
When teaching and selling via video, nearly all of us could do just a little bit better. We could be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more enthusiastic, a little bit more entertaining and a little bit more charismatic.
It’s not easy to narrate a long slide show or to face the camera for a length of time and hold attention. Most of us are not professional presenters or announcers and we haven’t been trained in how to hold an audiences’ attention.
But there is one trick I stumbled upon that can instantly improve almost anyone’s delivery, and it’s this:
Speed up your performance just a little bit.
You can do this one of two ways:
Either edit your audio/video to remove any ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, ‘let-me-see’s and so forth. Remove them entirely. Long pauses? Remove them. Anything that doesn’t move the story forward? Rambling? Needlessly repeating yourself? Remove it. If you don’t want to edit your video, get someone to do it for you.
The second thing is to speed it up. Just a little. You don’t want to sound like a chipmunk. But if you slightly increase the speed of delivery, either by speaking faster or speeding up the video, it can make a remarkable difference.
Play around with this and see what happens.
One last thing… smile. Regardless of whether they can see you in the video or just hear you, they will know when you are smiling. Laughter is great, too.
Don’t even second guess when I tell you that an abundance of typos on your sales page will create doubt in your prospect… They’ll suspect you have no clue what you’re doing.
Further, they may suspect you’re a fly-by-nighter, someone who threw a site up to grab sales and then disappear like vapor in a storm.
Yes, we all make typos – including and maybe especially me. But I take great pains NOT to make them on sales pages, for good reason.
Recently I was intrigued by an email promising to build a news site that would generate an income for me. Okay, I know what you’re thinking already. Yeah. Right. Sure it will.
But what the heck… I clicked the link, scrolled down a bit, and here’s the first paragraph I read:
Last Trending News Your News Dashboard Bring To You The Last News to Easly Click and Post. You Can Pin The The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.
How many errors did you find in this tiny bit of copy?
I found 6 or 7, depending on how you count them.
It should read…
Latest Trending News Your News Dashboard Brings To You The Latest News to Easily Click and Post. You Can Pin The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.
Even then the writing is terrible.
Yes, English is obviously their second language. But they couldn’t spare a hundred bucks to get someone to check their copy for them?
Sale lost.
Lesson learned: Typos in sales letters can and will lower your conversion rates. Go the extra mile to avoid them, and always have at least one additional set of careful eyes look over your pages before going live.
You send out an email to your list promoting your webinar replay. Of course, you might not call it a webinar replay because some people don’t want to sit through a recording that lasts for an hour or two.
They like what they read in the email.
They click over to the page with the replay.
They like the copy on that page… “This is interesting! Maybe I want to buy this… hmmm… let me click on this video…”
“ARGHHH!”
“Two hours long??”
“No way.”
They close the page.
And you just lost them.
Whoops.
What happened?
They liked what you said in the email. They really liked what you said on the page. But when they clicked the video and saw how long it was going to be, they abandoned ship.
How can you fix this?
A couple of thoughts…
First, tell them what they’re going DISCOVER in the video. Sell the video, not the product. Let them know the video is chock full of awesome, usable information. Invoke a strong sense of curiosity as well as the feeling they will miss out if they don’t watch it.
You might think of this step like a movie trailer… showing just enough of all the best bits to pull them to the screen and make them drool for more.
Second, don’t make the video two hours long.
Or even one hour long.
Make it about 10 minutes in length.
“Wait! I can’t sell my program in 10 minutes!”
You don’t have to because you’re going to use more than one video.
Here’s the key…
In the first video, hit the ground running and immediately give them something great such as a huge benefit and what they need to do to achieve it. Leave out the step-by-step instructions of how to do it because you’ll teach that in the paid course.
Then tell them what you’re going to reveal next…
And here you can either use a script that automatically brings up the second video, or if you’re not that fancy, give them the link.
The end of the first video sells them on watching the second video. The end of the second video sells them on watching the third video. They are binge watching your videos, something they are accustomed to thanks to streaming services like Netflix.
In each video, gently let them know that as great as this information is, paid members get the mother lode of life-changing or business-changing info. Using this method has a couple of advantages…
You are hyper aware that every second of video needs to either convey great info or sell them on watching the next video. You don’t allow yourself the business-killing luxury of being boring.
And the viewer gets pulled in bit by bit, much like a seduction. Done right, there’s no way they want to miss what’s in the next video. Throughout the process, viewers are being courted into purchasing your product.
Give it a try… I bet your conversions will increase dramatically.
Social media can be a great place to build your audience and your list. The trick, of course, is to be seen. Here’s how to make that happen…
Get in the game.
If you’re not posting, then you’re invisible. Increase your social media activity and your followers will grow.
To do this: Choose a posting schedule and stick to it. For example, 5 times a day on Twitter, 3 on Facebook and 3 on LinkedIn. Use a content curation app to schedule your posts. And know your audience so you can give them what they want.
Join the right communities.
From a business standpoint, communities are where the valuable conversations take place. Find your communities and join those groups to discuss your niche.
Don’t promote yourself or your products the moment you join. Instead, participate in the discussions and mention your product only when it’s the answer to someone’s question. Your goal here is to build relationships with your targeted audience.
Use great eye candy.
You already know that visuals attract eyeballs and make your content more shareable. No doubt you’re already using a visual on every post. But is your visual pulling its weight?
Instead of grabbing the first picture you see, think about what you want your visual to convey. What emotion should it evoke? Should it be playful? Happy? Heart-wrenching? Silly? Hopeful? Celebratory? If you’re not sure, think about your message.
Then choose something that really sings. HINT: You can’t go wrong with pictures of people’s faces – we’re wired to look at others.
Build your own advocacy group.
Studies show that social media advocates increase the credibility of your messages. It’s a form of social proof when other people Tweet your latest blog post or post a link to your latest podcast. Not to mention the extended reach of your advocates.
And did you know your message is more likely to go viral if others are promoting it rather than you? It just makes sense. So start building your own team of people who post for you. They could be happy customers, vendors, virtual assistants and so forth.
You might even have a reciprocal agreement with other marketers to promote each other’s content.
There you have it… 4 reliable ways to take your social media marketing to the next level. Post more often, join the right communities, make the very most of your photos and build your advocacy groups.
Write these down and choose one to do this week, one next week and so forth, until all four are an integral part of your social media marketing efforts.
There are times in our lives where we are compelled to stop and take a look at ourselves and ask the question: Who am I?
Obviously there are several follow up questions to that one, most often: Am I happy? Or What do I want now? But really all the follow-up questions we might ask are simply extensions of the first: Who am I?
We might ask that question on the eve of graduation from high school, or university, just before we start that first job, as we enter that first or last relationship, begin a family, buy a house, or start a business.
How do you answer that question? What would you identify yourself as?
Each of us is unique in the world, but we also each try to conform to a type. A mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a professional, an employee, an employer, an entrepreneur. You tell yourself that you are the role you are in.
Whatever you think fits you most comfortably is what you conform to. That is what you think you owe to yourself and others to be. And of course, you want to be that to the best of your ability.
In the case of building an online business, we are entrepreneurs.
So let us look at that word and honor what it really means to fit into that role. Our goal isn’t the financial gains, since for the entrepreneur that is simply a scorecard. Our role is to gain independence and freedom, to follow our passions and to dream bigger than a normal 9-5 job would allow you to.
It is to see gaps in the market that others don’t and to not be afraid to take risks and leaps in investment. Being an entrepreneur is often to follow your gut feelings and to want more: to see the bigger picture.
You have to be who you are in this world, in accordance with how you define yourself no matter what, and as always – remember that money is not the only goal – the journey is!
What happens when you combine the latest scientific evidence with everyday simple habits? You start to feel like you can do, be and accomplish anything.
First, a little background to set the stage…
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, neuromodulators such as dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine and others modulate and enhance the activity of particular brain circuits and suppress the activity of others. For example, when dopamine is released, it makes certain brain areas work better and others work less. Dopamine improves energy and motivation and causes us to focus on things outside ourselves. It enhances our well-being inside while putting us in an outward, goal-orientated mode.
Dopamine works with epinephrine in the brain and adrenaline in the body. When dopamine is released, epinephrine tends to be released, too. And when epinephrine is released, dopamine may or may not be released. This is important because epinephrine is involved in generating a sense of agitation, urgency, desire and willingness to move. You’re feeling like, “Let’s get up and do this!”
You’ve got energy but you’ve also got agitation. If dopamine is present with epinephrine, you’ve got the perfect combination for getting things done. But if you’ve got epinephrine without dopamine, now you feel agitation and stress without motivation. Dopamine is released when something good happens and it’s also released in anticipation of things that make us excited such as reaching a milestone in our goal.
Then there are the serotonin and oxytocin systems that work together not for goal achievement, but to make you feel good for where you are and what you have in the moment. When the serotonin system is engaged, we feel rewards for what we have in our immediate environment or for what we already possess.
Think about when you hug your family members or your pet at the end of the day. You think about how much you love them and that hug and those thoughts release serotonin. Serotonin gives you ‘here and now’ rewards for what is good in your life right now, whereas dopamine makes you feel good about the rewards that are out there in the world waiting for you.
The serotonin system can be accessed anytime by feeling love and gratitude. It promotes quiescence and calm and gives the warm soothing feeling that you’re good with everything that you have. If you think in terms of primitive man, then dopamine sends people out to hunt, forage and take risks; while serotonin brings them back home again where they feel warm and safe with their family.
Serotonin and oxytocin, along with dopamine and epinephrine, have to be balanced. Certain “A” type personalities who run 24/7 on dopamine and epinephrine burn out. They become not just unhappy but miserable because they can no longer access serotonin and oxytocin. That’s why there has to be a balance.
The question is, how do you align your serotonin, dopamine and epinephrine reward mechanisms in a way that allows you to get as much work done as quickly as possible and with as little stress as possible? That’s where it gets tricky if you don’t know what I’m about to reveal.
These 17.5 simple habits you can perform every day will enable you to enhance the effect of these neuromodulators and become almost super-human in your ability to get things done. I know that 17.5 seems like a big number, but you’ll see that most of these things are simply little tweaks to your day that can make a big difference in how you feel and perform.
These are habits to incorporate into your everyday living that will make you not just more productive, but also happier, have less stress with more energy and generally feel better about yourself and life. Tall order for a few new habits, right? But this is scientifically proven, so let’s dive in:
1: Get enough sleep. If possible, be in bed no later than midnight. Get up at the same time every morning. Reduce or eliminate overhead lights in the evening before going to bed. Make your bedroom as dark as possible.
2: When you get up, move your body and get some sun in your eyes. You don’t have to do your full-blown exercise regimen, but at least do something like yoga, jumping rope or walking for 15 minutes right after getting out of bed.
If possible, get this movement outdoors where you can get some sunshine into your eyes, telling your body it’s a new day and time to release dopamine. Moving for fifteen minutes is going to get the norepinephrine system primed because you have the adrenal glands which sit above your kidneys and they kick out norepinephrine and cortisol and get your system awake.
3: Have real, tangible, written goals. Not, “I’m going to make more money.” That’s too vague. “I’m going to increase my income by $2,000 a month by June 12th” is a better goal.
4: Have a goal for what you will accomplish before noon. The dopamine system works best when you pick a goal and have a target you want to hit. This is why it’s so crucial to identify what you’re going to accomplish before noon or even in the first hour or two of your day.
5: When anything other than your goal leaps to mind in those first hours of the day, push it aside and stay focused on your goal. Why is it crucial that you not get distracted? Because if you stay focused, you’re going to get the dopamine reward.
Moving forward might feel a little tough if you didn’t get enough sleep but if you can reach that goal then you’re going to feel a dopamine release. This in turn will make it easier to accomplish your next goal of the day, as well as improving your ability to focus on singular goals.
6: Stay off of social media in the morning. You can also get your dopamine by flipping through Facebook or Instagram but this won’t help you to achieve your goals.
You want dopamine. You’re going to get dopamine. But the method you choose will determine if you get stuff done or if you waste your time. Identify what you want to accomplish in those first hours and then laser focus on that.
7: Make accomplishing an early morning goal a daily habit. By getting something done right after you wake up that NEEDS to be done, and by doing this nearly every single day, you are priming your dopamine system to work with you in goal achievement.
8: Exercise daily. Physical movement is a key component of achieving any large goal. Stress will stop you from moving forward on your goals, and the best way to combat stress is to exercise.
When there’s even a low level of stress in the system, exercise will quiet the activity of the threat detection center (amygdala) in the brain and allow you to be more creative and get more done.
9: Write out your daily goals the night before. When some people wake up, they are raring to go. But for others, they feel groggy and it takes them time to transition out of sleep and clear their head. That’s another reason why the fifteen minutes of movement is helpful when you first get out of bed. This amplifies the epinephrine and dopamine system.
And having your goals already written means you don’t waste time trying to figure out what to do that day; you simply get busy and do it.
10: Try morning fasting. Not eating when you first get up will stimulate the release of norepinephrine. It also slightly increases the amount of dopamine because it puts you in a kind of anticipation of a goal, which in this case is food.
There’s this ancient mechanism whereby when our blood glucose is low even though we might be a little hungry and a little bit agitated, it tends to focus us on things outside ourselves. And because we need something outside of ourselves, we’re less content to just sit on the couch.
Contrast this with how you feel after eating a big meal. All you want to do then is sit down and relax. This is why by not eating in the first hours you’re awake, you’ll likely get more done.
11: Overcome stress by focusing on an immediate goal. If stress is stopping you from acting, you can get focused by setting your sights on an immediate goal and a horizon that you know you can accomplish.
It can even be a trivial goal, like you’re going to make coffee, sit at the computer, open a file and read 3 pages. Fixating on the large goal can be paralyzing but focusing on what you can accomplish right now is incredibly freeing and helpful in releasing dopamine.
Even accomplishing a tiny goal couples the neural circuits for focus with the neural circuits for goal directed behavior with the neural circuits for energy and agitation. You’re getting those aligned and they’re coherent.
Conversely, when you look at the news and Instagram and your email and Reddit, your neurochemical systems are split. They’re incoherent. And it’s no wonder that by noon you haven’t accomplished much.
12: Chunk your efforts. You have something called ultradian cycles, not to be confused with circadian cycles, where the brain works well for a time and then needs a break. For many people this is 90 minutes.
You might set a timer for 90 minutes and then take a break to do something entirely different such as a bit of exercise, reading something unrelated or whatever you choose to rest your brain. Some people prefer the pomodoro technique which is bouts of just 20 minutes, but if you’re like most people you can effectively work longer than that.
13: Write down your pop-ups. When distractions pop into your mind “I should check email” or “I need to put soap on the shopping list” just write it down on a pad you keep next to your work. This frees your mind to continue focusing on the project at hand while training it that mind chatter can be dismissed rather than acted upon.
14: Get a second dose of sunlight. Cortisol and norepinephrine naturally start dropping through the afternoon, which is why it’s a good idea to get a little bit of sunlight towards the afternoon hours. This might also be a good time to get your exercise, too.
15: Abstain from caffeine later in the day. Unless you need to pull an all-nighter, it’s best to stay away from caffeine starting mid-afternoon. Caffeine later in the day will negatively impact your dopamine and norepinephrine system.
16: Eat complex carbs later in the day. There’s a naturally occurring amino acid called l-tryptophan that’s present in turkey and in complex carbohydrates like pasta, rice and things like that. L-tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin, which is why many people find it useful to eat the majority of their complex carbohydrates late in the day to promote the secretion of L-tryptophan and help them transition to more relaxation and sleep.
17: Eat low carb during the day. Since you can have complex carbs for your last meal, it’s a good idea skip them during the day to keep your energy levels and focus levels high.
17.5: If you want to, take a short afternoon nap. Many people (but not all) benefit from a short nap in the afternoon to recharge their batteries. If you find that a short nap is better for you than a long one, you might set an alarm or sleep in a semi-reclined position to prevent over-sleeping. This can also be a great time to do a little meditation, listening to something that puts you in a trance or even lulls you to sleep for a few minutes.
People who are truly effective in both their work and their home lives have found a way to toggle back and forth between these two systems and control their dopamine system rather than having it control them. If you can learn to go from full performance to full relaxation, you’ll get so much done it may shock you. Mastering the transitions between these systems gives you an outsized effect on performance and relationships in your life.
Try adding as many of these habits as you can and pretty soon when you get up in the morning you’ll find yourself automatically in forward motion and naturally and joyfully achieving more of your goals in life.
