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WordPress

10 Newest Photography WordPress Themes

10 Newest Photography WordPress Themes

It has never been so easy to create a personal portfolio as nowadays. Creating a photography website to show off your skills and works can be done in a couple of hours. Photography WordPress Themes are solutions to help you in this. These ready-made templates are available for a photographer of any level – from an aspiring blogger to a professional studio photographer. Today we are going to find out what attracts so many people to this solution.

Advantages of WordPress

WordPress Themes are gaining more and more popularity nowadays. The reasons for such popularity are as follows:

  • Easy to use content management system. WordPress has been developed for beginners without any coding knowledge. It provides security and incredible ease of use.
  • Flexible structure. These solutions can satisfy any taste and are easily changed to suit your needs. WordPress templates are user-friendly and extremely easy to install. It is very simple to add your own content and keep the information up to date yourself. In addition, themes are well-documented and you install the theme following step-by-step instruction.
  • Affordable price for great quality. The good news is that you see what you buy and the price is much lower compared to a custom site. The great combination of useful functions and great visual appeal cost about a hundred dollars and let you save about a thousand. Isn’t that fantastic?
  • Responsive design. It guarantees the perfect view of your site on any screens of any devices. Responsive design makes your website really mobile-friendly.

Why WordPress templates are excellent solution for photographers?

WP templates combine an eye-catching design and a powerful functionality. A website serves as a professional portfolio and displays works in the most favorable light thanks to stunning galleries and a wide slider on the landing page. The most refined style and clean layouts let visitors focus on the works without distraction. A lot of thought went into the design of the templates and they grab the visitors’ attention, retain it and guarantee unforgettable visual experience.

WordPress templates are flexible enough to be adapted specially for a photographer’s purposes and vision. Such flexibility guarantees that your site will be one of a kind as a result of customization. Even if a template is purchased by different customers, a set of advanced tools lets change the style and layout of a site beyond recognition. Moreover, getting hands-on the website design allows to show off your designer skills and expose your personality.

Most of the templates are equipped with Cherry Plugins to help photographers showcase their services and projects. They go with a set of pre-designed pages and layout variations to find own style while customizing.

We hope that today’s showcase of 10 newest Photography WordPress Themes will tell you more about the themes benefits and inspire of creating a unique and thriving website.

FrameMe – Photography Studio WordPress Theme

This clean tender design let your visitors focus solely on your works without any distractions. The theme includes a pack of stylish pages for all purposes of your portfolio, and a powerful page-builder allows creating new ones without any effort. The theme goes with free thematic images, an amazing Booked appointment plugin, and accurate documentation to facilitate your work.

FrameMe - Photography Studio WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Ramsay – Multi-Conceptual Blog & Portfolio WordPress Theme

This functional theme with a delicate design can make a perfect portfolio for a photographer supplied with an immersive blog. The revolution slider will easily catch your visitors’ attention and showcase the best works. The theme is fully responsive, easily installed and open to refurnishment with Visual editor.

Ramsay - Multi-Conceptual Blog & Portfolio WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Primrose – Multipurpose WordPress Theme

This extraordinary elegant template can be anything depending on your needs, and turning it into a professional photographer’s portfolio is like rubbing the lamp. The theme goes with a stunning flexible gallery, 5 stunning homepages, and infinite possibilities to change the design with Live Page Builder. It goes with one-click installation, bonus modules to extend the functionality and hundreds of fonts and icons.

Primrose - Multipurpose WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Art – Minimal Portfolio & Photography WordPress Theme

If you want to stand out in a crowd, this minimal design will do all the work for your portfolio. The template is translation ready, has user-friendly navigation and social widgets, which will let win any audience all over the world. The Unlimited Color Presets, Powerful Theme Options, multiple icons and 700+ Google Fonts Included will help you adapt the design to your purposes.

Art - Minimal Portfolio & Photography WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Shootz – Photographer Portfolio WordPress Theme

This responsive vibrant theme with free high-quality images will look gorgeous on any screen and within any browser. It goes with beautifully crafted content blocks for presenting your services, works, subscription, blog, and testimonials. Using the latest page builder and the live customizer tool you will create more stunning pages to place all the content you need.

Shootz - Photographer Portfolio WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Oriana – Minimal Portfolio & Photography WordPress Theme

If you want to have a stylish website to represent your services as a photographer, use this fully responsive theme with an awesome minimal design. With nothing in excess it will greatly improve your online presence and due to high load speed and SEO-optimization will be noticeable in the search results. It is easy to customize, and goes with social networking support, thorough documentation and can be installed with just one click.

Oriana - Minimal Portfolio & Photography WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Raymond Jones – Photographer Portfolio Landing Page WordPress Theme

Use the benefits of this fully adjustable theme with a glaring appearance and well-knit one-page structure. The theme boasts an intuitive interface with blogging support with different layouts, footers, and headers. The powerful plugin for web building allows creating a fully-fledged fast-performing site to your demand without any programming skills.

Raymond Jones - Photographer Portfolio Landing Page WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Performance Portraits Photography WordPress Theme

Enjoy the perfect solution for creative professionals and launch your own unique website with this SEO-friendly template. The versatile, well-designed pages will tick all the boxes and the high functionality of this theme will suit any photographer’s needs. The theme has the advantage of fast response rate, popular plugins including languages support and e-commerce, MailChimp subscription and social integration.

Performance Portraits Photography WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

PClick Photography WordPress Theme

Create a great portfolio website with this modern responsive theme that is provided by the support of the most useful plugins. It goes with an amazing Revolution Slider to showcase your major works on homepage and filterable galleries which your visitors will find easy to view. The flexible layout and tons of fonts, theme options, and widgets let you diversify your website and create one of a kind.

PClick Photography WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Flashing – Photographer Portfolio WordPress Theme

This responsive theme with immaculate glamorous design and creative tools will suit a photographer of any level. You are free to configure the style, layouts, menu, headers, footers, Google Fonts, and create new pages in an easy drag and drop way. The theme goes with a helpful support to solve any problems and a detailed documentation to facilitate the process of installation and customizing.

Flashing - Photographer Portfolio WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

As you can see, all you need to create a unique photo project is right in front of you. Any template will perform faultlessly and make a perfect online portfolio. You can create a fully-functional website and work on its design infinitely until the result satisfies your needs. For further awareness, we recommend you to click demo to see all the infinite possibilities of each WordPress theme. We hope that such browsing experience will deliver you more inspiration to think of your own photography portfolio.

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Internet Marketing

How To Design an eBay Store [Tutorial for Dummies]

If you are planning to launch an eBay store, you have surely browsed lots of the ready-made resources with custom designs. We bet you are wondering how did they do that. Did you try to search for the answers to your questions? What info did you find? A number of sites trying to fish out hundreds of bucks from you for a design?

How To Design an eBay Store
Photo by Mathieu Turle on Unsplash

No worries, you can design a store yourself and you don’t need to know coding for that. This guide is going to provide you with all steps of creating your own custom store design.

What you’ll need first is an active eBay store with full access to it. You will also need a server to host a .CSS file on.

BeautyZone EBay Template

BeautyZone EBay Template

Details |  Demo

Now it’s time to start setting up your eBay store from the very beginning.

Click this link to look through some good ideas on how to create a beautiful store.

Use “Quick Store Setup” option for the purpose to set up your eBay store. When everything is ready, you can begin to Manage your store. Do this by logging into your eBay summary, scroll down and click “Manage my Store” on the left navigation bar.

You will get to the page where you will be able to edit your store and add features. We guess you will want to add some categories to your store at first turn. You can create up to 300 different store categories for your brand new eBay store. That is, you don’t need to worry about making too many of them. Add as many categories and subcategories as you need/want. You can easily create categories by clicking “Store Categories” on the left navigation.

Now click the ‘Add Category’ button and create your category. Give it an appropriate name. You can create 5 categories at a time.

Once your 5 categories are ready, you can either add more or click a particular category link to access it and create sub-categories inside.

When you create all your categories, move on to the next step. Can’t think of a particular one? Don’t worry. You can come back to it at any moment and add/remove categories.

Display settings

Now we are going to proceed with editing your Display Settings.

Use Display Settings to add a title to your store, view your store URL or change it, edit your Store Logo, and Add/Edit your Store Description.

Store Name

Your store name should include the product you sell. For instance: World of Warcraft TCG – loot cards, spectral tiger etc.

Store Logo

Choose a logo from your PC if you have it there, enter a URL, or choose a basic eBay one. Your store logo size must be 310×90 pixels.

Store Description

Don’t post such kind of messages: “Welcome to our store, we hope you’ll enjoy your visit”. Be concise, clearly state what you sell and use keywords for the items you sell. This will help with your search engine rankings on sites like Google, Yahoo, and others. If the keywords are mentioned properly, this could lead your potential customers to all of your items.

Theme and display

The Theme and Display section allows you to edit your store theme, edit Left Navigation Bar settings, and make changes to the Store Header Display. You can change the way items are listed on your homepage as well.

Store Theme

Choose one of the best eBay templates from eBay or another depository. You may just leave customizing a theme and create a custom one later. In fact, this section doesn’t really matter. Just choose something that looks attractive and matches the colors of your items.

Home Furnishing EBay Template

Home Furnishing EBay Template

Details |  Demo

Left nav bar settings

Select to show your Search Box, choose which categories to show, and choose to show Store Pages and Buyer Display options.

Store Header Display

Turn on the Store Page Header and turn it off if you are going to create a custom store. Choose which type of eBay header you would like to display. Please note that you can only change this having a premium store.

Item Display

Choose whether you want to show your items on your store as a list, or in a Gallery View. We recommend gallery view because it looks like an online store. And it’s just aesthetically appealing.

Promotion boxes

You need Promotion Boxes to place small pieces of information here and there on your store. The info may include sales and special offers promos. You can also use Promotion Boxes for creating slideshows of items you are currently selling. Moreover, you can create Countdown Timers for the items that are ending in stock.

Custom pages or the start of the custom design

Supposing you have created your store. It looks nice, the colors are eye-pleasing. Then you will see other shops that are fully self-designed, have header displays, animations, and more. Now you really wish you could also have such kind of store. In fact, anyone can design the store they want, but not everyone knows how to embed it into eBay.

Well, you can do it this way.

You need to have HTML code ready. It must include images, your design, and a .CSS file. Don’t have a CSS file? Scroll down to the relevant section and read about that because it is required to create a decent storefront.

We will start with the Header

When your Header image is uploaded to your file server, or a site like Photobucket, Imageshack, or Tinypic, and your HTML code is ready, go to Manage My Store > Display Settings > Theme and Display > Store Header Display. Click the “Change” link.

Click the Radio button “Yes, include additional information in the header” and then enter your HTML code. Save your changes.

Now you will see that you have 2 Headers Displaying: your custom header and the normal eBay header. Disable the normal eBay header if you want only custom one to be displayed. You can do this by taking the following steps:

  • Go to Display Settings
  • Go to Theme and Display
  • Go to Store Theme
  • Click “Change to another theme”
  • Go to Easily Customizable themes, and select the “Custom Header only” theme
  • Choose your colors
  • Save settings.

After these manipulations, this header will appear on all store pages, including your About Me Page

Main page – custom items list

Now we are going to edit the Body area. This is how you will create your main storefront, fully customized and designed.

Please carefully follow these steps:

  • Click “Custom Pages” on the Left Navigation
  • Click “Create New Page”
  • On the next page, select “Text Section”
  • Name the page (same as Shop Title recommended, as this will become your main page)

It’s time to enter your HTML for the page now. Do you remember that this guide assumes you already have the designs and code?

At this point, some of you may have problems. Below you will find some tips and info to help you out.

Be careful when adding your designs. Most merchants use CSS for their stores, therefore we will guide you in that way.

Search bar

You will surely need to add your search bar to your custom page to enable people to search your items. You can do this by entering the relevant code in your custom page and editing the text, which is Bold, to your own store information. Please also remove the spaces between the opening and closing signs. This is necessary to prevent the code execution and displaying a search bar.

Next you will want to make the page load the CSS from an external file. This is because eBay does not allow you to host a CSS file, and it needs to be loaded elsewhere. This can be done with the code as well.

If you are not sure what CSS File to add, or what to include in your CSS file, check out this link, it may turn out to be useful.

You will now want to add other pieces of code, which allow displaying certain things.

Here are some useful exclusive eBay codes.

{eBayUserID} – this displays your User ID, feedback, and links to your Me page.

{eBayFeedback} – this displays your Feedback.

{eBayStoresItemList DISPLAY=”n”} – this displays your items. Replace N with 0 for List view, and 1 for Gallery View.

{eBayStoresItemList TABLEWIDTH=”n”} – replace N with a value 10-100 to choose your store width. Recommended numbers are from 60 to 100.

Navigation bar (sidebar)

Navigation Bar is next on our list. You can do this by creating a Promotion Box and then remove the original Sidebar.

Here are the steps to follow to create your navigation bar:

  • Go to “Promotion Boxes”
  • Click “Create New Promotion Box”
  • Choose Communicate to your Buyers.
  • On the next page, choose “Left Navigation – Upper”
  • Enter your code, making sure to align the navigation bar correctly with your header and body areas.
  • Make sure you do Text Links instead of images so that Search Engines have more keywords to play with.
  • Click Save.

Now you need to delete the default navigation. In other words, to stop displaying both navigation bars on your store.

You can do this the following way:

  • Go to Store Design
  • Go to Display Settings
  • Go to Theme and Display
  • Click Left Navigation Boxes
  • Click the “Change” link.
  • Uncheck all the components, and save.

Now you can create additional pages like FAQ following the steps above, and choosing FAQ instead of the Text area.

To make your new custom page your Storefront main page, go to Custom Pages, and select which one you want to display as your Homepage on the drop down menu.

Your turn

We hope this tutorial was useful for you and now you know how to design an eBay store. Have any questions/thoughts/additions to it? Please leave them in the comments section. Are you ready to share your experience of designing an eBay store? Your success stories are also welcome.

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WordPress

Top 7 WordPress Themes For Professionals

Top 7 WordPress Themes For Professionals

Pre-made solutions became popular these days because of their user-friendly interface and high-functional range. The thing is the ready-made website templates allow you to save lots of time while launching a site. Moreover, you can also save some money, because the prices for the pre-made solutions are pretty sweet. However, it doesn’t mean that their functionality is low as well. We would recommend you to follow the plot to find out how these 7 best WordPress theme for professionals can help you to develop yourself and your biz in general.

In fact, a lot of entrepreneurs prefer ready-made solutions. Modern website templates have a great design and an advanced functionality. To say more, they come with lots of stunning features that allow you to enrich the website’s functionality.

Moreover, WordPress themes are one of the most user-friendly and easy-to-use. Thus, whether you looking for the WordPress themes for recruitment agencies, or for the online CV WordPress themes, it will take you no effort to use them. Usually, WordPress themes come with a Live Customizer and a Power Page Builder. These features will help you to carry the theme as easy as never before. Thus, there is no need to have programming knowledge or coding skills. Everything is pretty intuitive and understandable.

As you can see, WordPress is a great content management system to build your site on. So, let’s take a closer look at these top 7 WordPress themes for professionals.

Startup Company Responsive WordPress Theme

Startup Company WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Would you like to launch a startup company website? Well, take a closer look at this fully responsive WordPress theme that will help you to make your dreams come true! Its eye-catchy design allows you to capture the target audience, and, thus, to improve your income in times. Moreover, you can showcase the best projects and top-notch services in a stylish gallery. Click the demo button to check all its potential!

DreamRunner – Business WordPress Theme

Business Bureau WordPress Template

Details |  Demo

This catchy business bureau WordPress theme was built to make life much easier. This theme is pre-loaded with an Elementor – modern Power Page Builder. Thanks to Elementor you can easily manage the theme, and there is no need to have coding skills. Furthermore, the theme has a great documentation. Thus, you can get to know all the processes at a glance!

Job Portal Responsive WordPress Theme

Job Portal Template

Details |  Demo

Looking for a bright and memorable WordPress theme to create a stunning job portal site? Pay much attention to this impressive WordPress theme with a sleek design and an advanced functionality. It comes with a rich choice of pre-made pages for all the purposes. In addition, there are lots of marvelous page’s and blog’s layouts to spice up your website’s design. By the way, a pre-loaded blog allows you to share some cool stories and prime news with your readers.

Translation Agency Fully Responsive WordPress Theme

Translation Agency WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Looking for a WordPress theme for translation agency? Take a look at this mobile-friendly WordPress theme with a sleek design. There are so many features that will help you to stand out with your business. For example, a wide range of content modules allows you to add a various content type to your web page. Thus, you have an opportunity to enrich the functionality of your site. Moreover, there are also a lot of custom widgets that allow you to build a stronger online presence.

Olins – Multiniche Responsive WordPress Theme

Olins Multi Niche WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Olins is a clean and well-structured WordPress theme that will fit multi niches sites. Whether you carry a photography, animal-related, business, or personal CV site. Its great design and fully customizable nature allow you to create a unique site whatever your niche is. This theme has a built-in blog, which allows you to share some interesting stories with the audience.

Minimal WordPress Theme

Chela - A Minimal Agency WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

This theme has a minimal and clean design, which will help you to emphasize your services, products, and content in general. In addition, you can highlight the best works and projects in a classy portfolio. Meanwhile, a contact form allows clients to contact you in case they need some more info about your services. No doubts, this theme is a great eco-system that will help you to build a successful career.

Online CV Fully Responsive WordPress Theme

Online CV WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

This WordPress theme for resume is a great solution to represent your skills from the best side. Its catchy and sleek design will help you to emphasize the content. Meanwhile, a social integration allows followers to tell the whole world about your site and your skills in general. In addition, this theme is crossbrowser compatible, therefore, customers can check your site using Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, whatever.

As we can see, modern WordPress themes for professionals allow you to highlight the skills and to spread a word about your services. Moreover, it is really easy to use these themes thanks to top-class features and tools. Therefore, we would recommend you to get one of these WordPress themes and to show your skills the whole world. Good luck!

By the way, how did you like the showcase? What theme is your favorite? We are always happy to hear from you, so, feel free to leave the comments in the section below.

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WordPress

New WordPress free themes from TemplateMonster

Top 10 Free WordPress Themes for Running an Efficient Website for Nothing

Do you still believe that it is impossible to get something for nothing? Does your life credo sound: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch?” TemplateMonster will fundamentally change your belief because the company offers absolutely free yet quality products to run powerful websites. Along with that, for your attention, there is the list of the best WordPress themes for blogs for the paid option, that can be turned into full-featured and well-organized websites for all occasions – from the personal blog to corporate online platform.

Why You Should Use WordPress for Launching a Blog

WordPress started in 2003, is an open-source content management system that has stood the test of time. This CMS is extra flexible, well-supported, stable, and packed with advanced functionality and extensible features that enable developers or average users to create almost any website for their projects. With WordPress themes, it is possible to build a massive enterprise website that will serve a large client base and generate huge traffic.

If you are seeking a powerful, trustworthy and community-back platform for your enterprise website, WordPress stands above the rest. Alongside with an absolute dominance on the web and the largest developer community, this content management system boasts the easiest interface with sensible default settings and an incredibly customizable core. Moreover, it offers a drag and drop media filer uploading that allows integrating various contents with no effort. WP is constantly improving and always keeps up with the times going through regular updates.

Free or Premium: That is the Question

WordPress is a perfect choice whether you’re about to run your first or tenth website. In addition to all its indisputable benefits, there are tons of premium and free ready-to-use templates that can be easily transformed into personal blog or enterprise website. When you are on a tight budget, you can opt for free WordPress themes. If they cost nothing, don’t think that they are of poor quality. All free WP themes go through a strict review and are tested for compliance with standards. They are developing due to the latest web design requirements as well but can feature less functionality. However, depending on your site building purposes, a free theme packed with an ordinary set of options and plugins can meet your needs to the full. So, why to pay if you can use the theme for nothing.

Take a look at these newest, best WordPress themes that come with SEO optimized clean code, outstanding design and set of usable features enough to create a powerful website for all occasions. They look simple yet attractive that allows engaging and focusing visitors’ attention on your content.

Eye-Catching Bitunit Lite – Bitcoin Free WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

With stunning and well-thought Bitunit WordPress theme, running a fully-functional bitcoin buy and sell online platform is easy as pie. The template based on the latest CSS3 and HTM5 technologies allows easy and fast customization as well as convenient content management with Elementor Page builder. This product offers unlimited options for website personalization, and it can be adapted to any modern device with any screen size.

Minimalistic Monstroid 2 Lite – Free WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Monstroid 2 Lite has been crafted mainly for blogs and can be used for personal and corporate needs. The theme comes with an extremely modern design that features simplicity and outstanding interface. It includes numerous Google fonts, various color options, custom widgets and tons of handy elements needed for efficient customization.

Charming Iridescent – Wedding Album Lite Free

Details

Iridescent is a solid and powerful framework for a creative portfolio. In addition to standard features, the template boasts attractive Parallax animation, engaging commenting system and a handy drop down cart. Visitors’ attention can be grabbed by full-screen background video.

Modern Looking MalcolmY – Personal Portfolio Lite Free for Freelance Designers

Details |  Demo

MalcolmY looks fascinating yet functions great. The template is packed with a rich set of incredible features like dropdown menu, social integration, sidebar manager and more that make site maintaining convenient and pleasing. With search engine friendly code, it is possible to reach high ranking as soon as possible.

Impeccable Talking Business – Free WordPress Theme for Conference

Details |  Demo

This well-documented and efficiently supported WordPress theme will come in handy those who seek for effective ways to tell the whole world about your conference. With handy and highly usable Power Page builder, the template allows effortless modifying layouts up to your needs. Various web forms (booking, newsletter subscription, contact, search) will engage visitors and make their experience more convenient.

Impressive FreeBook – Free One-Page WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

FreeBook is another responsive, adaptive and clean WordPress theme for personal and corporate needs. The theme is extensively compatible with all modern browsers along with all mobile devices and tablets. Powered by Cherry Framework 5, the template comes with a clean and valid code, pack of easy-customizable features and demo.

Stunning Calio – Therapy & Counselling WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

Calio will help you stand out from the crowd in the medicine niche. The theme comes with impressive yet minimalistic design, a rich set of impeccable features and useful elements including slider and carousel. In addition to intuitive web forms and social media integration, Calio is equipped with multilingual support allowing to spread your business worldwide.

Colorful Mia Ittalloni – Free WordPress Restaurant Theme

Details |  Demo

With Mia Ittalloni appearance and advanced functionality, your website will stand above the rest. The template looks tasty, impeccable, eye-catching and engaging so that ordinary visitors will easily be turned into regular clients. In addition to stunning background options and multiple web forms, the template come with an Appointment booking tool, advanced restaurant menu element and user registration possibility.

Polished Looking Catwalk – Fashion Modeling Agency Responsive WordPress Theme

Details |  Demo

This fully responsive, Retina-ready and clean coded WordPress theme can become impressive and efficient online business card for your model agency. With Cherry Projects and Live Customizer you have a great chance to implement any visual element as you want with no effort. Moreover, you will get numerous colors, custom widgets, web forms and social media integration.

Gorgeous Pilates Center – Free WordPress Theme for Sports, Fitness & Yoga

Details |  Demo

This free, attractive and full-featured solution for your sports center website is a wonderful foundation to start developing online presence. Its SEO-optimized, clean and valid code alongside with Cherry Framework 5 technology allows easy and fast installation and customization. The template is equipped with the latest, coziest and easiest elements like TM drag and drop Power page builder, Parallax scrolling animation and more.

When you seek for the simplicity, when you are after a flat and smooth design, attractive typography and a robust structure – then these clean free themes are what you need. They are not overwhelmed with unnecessary, extraordinary features but stay engaging and eye-catching. Their functionality and stuffing allow grabbing visitors’ attention to the top message of your site and pushing them to action as soon as possible.

If you doubt whether it is possible to make any of these themes rich-featured and well-organized, read our free eBook “Best Plugins for a New WordPress Site.” The book shows why to use one or another plugin for certain purposes. Turns out, the right chosen plugin will significantly enrich and improve your website appearance and navigation and make users’ experience more satisfying. With this software, the customization process will get a whole new level easy and fast.

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Internet Marketing

TemplateMonster’s Marketplace Welcomes Newcomers

Those people who have something to do with a web-design field probably have already heard about TemplateMonster – a place that provides people with myriads of digital products for a wide variety of purposes. A number of pre-made designs presented on the website are extremely impressive. A number of their downloads certainly look absolutely spectacular. A number of surprises that we’ve prepared for you will definitely daze everyone’s imagination, too. Have we already made you sit up and take notice? Then let’s continue our little journey…

Our collection of premium and high-quality of responsive WordPress designs and other templates for the most popular CMS platforms includes more than 60,000 items. In addition to this, it’s constantly updated which means that there won’t be a day when you open a website and don’t find something fresh and eye-catching (for example, you can take a glance at the collection fashion themes for WordPress which is constantly enriched with various sophisticated and trendy variants). Now it’s time to revert to the point from which we started from. It’s time to get back to the promised surprises. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re glad to announce that TemplateMonster has turned into a powerful digital marketplace!

TemplateMonster’s marketplace is a perfect place for those who only start their career as a web-designer. It means that amateur designers get a chance to earn their first money for their works. Furthermore, those people who have been familiar with a web-design for a long period of time also get a wonderful opportunity to earn extra money and, what is more, become even more well-known and respectable.

As you understand, we gladly welcome talented vendors from various corners of the world. So, if you don’t want to miss the boat, get on the board right now and get up to 70% commission from each sale of your digital products. Be sure that TemplateMonster’s marketplace is the best place to show your flair for a web-design!

Reasons to Become a Part of TemplateMonster’s Marketplace

To cut a long story short, our marketplace will definitely be profit-making and profitable for both beginners and those who have a lot of experience in a web-design field. This platform is the best chance to get together gifted specialists from all over the world in one single place. This platform is the best chance to capture the attention of web-design novices who only prepare to sweep everybody off their feet with their remarkable designs. Our digital marketplace is a place where you can win the recognition and make everyone know your name.

What Are Benefits that Already Waiting for Potential Vendors?

 

  • you get the opportunity to sell both exclusive and non-exclusive products using one single account (as distinguished from ThemeForest that asks for choosing only one type of the product);
  • your digital product will be reviewed within 12 hours – yet keep in mind that it will take a little bit longer (approximately from one to three days) to assess a more complex work (in comparison to it, ThemeForest examines web-designers works more than two weeks);
  • you can upload an unlimited number of products (by contrast with ThemeForest that has restrictions in this regard – it allows uploading only one product to one category at a time);
  • a “quick start” provides vendors with the opportunity to receive an impressive commission from each sale – as it was mentioned before, up to 70% for unique items;
  • our professional Review Team answers in a flash – all you need to do is get you a ticket and ask a question that bothers you;
  • Net15 payments are available.

 

What Should You Do to Join Our Digital Marketplace and Start Making Money?

In general, there are four key steps that you need to follow in order to become a part of TemplateMonster’s marketplace and then start earning money:

1. Fill in and sign an author application. On this step, you should choose what kinds of digital products you’re going to sell in the marketplace.

2. Get in touch with your personal manager. This very person is aware of all organizational issues. A personal manager knows everything about your being part of the marketplace. Therefore, he/she will provide you with all essential information regarding the submitted files and, what is more, give you more details about the ways to earn money selling your digital products.

3. Create your own product page. You should wait until your product web-page is ready. As soon as it’s designed, you will get a notification on your email.

4. Start selling and earning money for your works. Every month you will get money for the products which were sold in our digital marketplace.

How Can You Earn Money with Our Digital Marketplace?

All in all, the quality of your digital products defines your revenue. The highest prices can be set for the most high-quality products. In addition to this, the best products give you a strong chance to become a well-loved web-designer and, in such a way, get an impressive ranking among others. By the way, every customer can express their opinion about the chosen template in the comment section. Thus and so, your products receive positive or negative ratings which makes it easier for users to decide which one they should buy. All in all, if you want to get amazing earnings, you should certainly present first-rate items that would be like by various clients.

Furthermore, TemplateMonster is famous for its seasonal promo campaigns. In such a way, we give our loyal customers a great opportunity to buy templates at a bargain price. Yet vendors can decide for themselves whether they want their digital products to be sold at the regular price or with a discount.

Without a doubt, promotion is an incredible thing to reach a target audience. TemplateMonster helps new vendors to promote their products using its own methods and approaches. Anyway, you can use your personal website, various social networks, and blog to tell others about your works.

Exclusive vs. Non-Exclusive Products

As it was mentioned before, you can sell both exclusive and non-exclusive products on TemplateMonster’s marketplace. Generally, if you decide to sell non-exclusive products, you will get not more than 40% commission for each sale. Yet if you want to sell your products only on our website (and, thus, make them exclusive), your commission will constitute up to 70%.

What Types of Digital Products You Can Sell on TemplateMonster’s Marketplace?

Types of Products Sold on TemplateMonster.com
All digital products submitted are given to a review team that has a keen eye for professional and modern web-designs. Don’t forget that your product should meet all of the requirements described in the “vendor agreement”.

Feel Free to Ask Your Personal Advisor

If you face some difficulties, you can easily get in touch with your personal advisor. This person will never leave you alone with any possible problem.

By the way, if you want to get a manual that consists of all necessary information about such additional aspects as reasons for your product being rejected or variants how to grow product sales with the help of multiple resources, click on the image above and download this amazing handbook.

Don’t hang around. Our digital marketplace is a perfect place to show your talent, win the recognition and, in addition to this, earn a great amount of money. Just join our marketplace family, submit your products and make money for them. Good luck and thanks for reading!

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Internet Marketing

Checklist To Help Businesses Pick The Befitting eCommerce Platform

Every business is constantly vying for the best spot in the market as competition intensifies. It is undeniable that this is a necessity for businesses to stay competitive in the market, much less survive. However, the process of identifying and implementing a suitable platform to benefit the business could prove daunting.

e-Commerce Platform
One of the dynamic marketing platforms for today is the e-Commerce platform. It is highly effective and efficient in providing the best of online shopping features for the convenience of web consumers, but the task of selecting and implementing could be challenging to many novice and inexperienced business owner or marketer.

There are many features that make up a dynamic online shopping site which a business may desire. This includes a wide spectrum of attractive and efficient options for e-Cart platforms which could be available free or paid as well as hosted or downloaded. Business owners and marketers may prefer generic e-Commerce platforms over customized for reasons of cost and speed as well as convenience. This would make the selection more challenging without the right understanding and professional assistance.

Wise business owners and marketers would indulge in expansive market research before venturing into e-Commerce and its dynamic offerings for their marketing activities which would prove worthy of their investment in the long run. It is crucial for companies to impress the market with a strong online presence that would win over targeted audiences effectively. This could boost sales and bottom lines for the business attractively to stay in pole positions in the market.

There is a checklist which business owners and marketers could tick off in selecting the best or most suitable e-Commerce platform.

1) Pricing
Every business is basically set up for profits. Hence, regardless of its size and industry, every company today whether it is an online or brick-mortar business, it is important for business owners and marketers to know what exactly they are paying for to boost business bottom lines. There are plenty of popular and flexible platforms which charge differently for their different range of services which include hosting plan, available features and back-end support with security and regular maintenance; companies need to know what services would be worth their investment where they agree to pay for the services to be rendered.

2) Integration Support
Another important consideration for a successful e-Commerce platform to benefit businesses is the proper integrations which require different plugins that provide the desired enhancements to make the store attractive and appealing. The store needs to be presented in a dynamic, multifaceted manner that would draw the preferred audiences to support its wares and services.
The wide range of potential integration tools and solutions in the market is highly useful to business owners to choose the best of plugins that would generate the ideal environment and presentation for promoting the brand or business. Hence, it is vital for business owners and webmasters to understand the concept and benefits of e-Commerce platforms to identify the right one for a successful implementation.

3) Scalability and Functionality
A business is expected to grow and expand over time; the faster the better. This is one of the objectives a business would list out to ensure that the online site created is capable of handling the expected volume of web users or customers per day. Capacity becomes a critical functionality in an e-Commerce store which must be considered purposefully by business owners and webmasters.

The market today offers many dynamic tools and platforms such as Magento, Shopify and ZenCart which are well designed to offer good scalability for any business, but functionality is another critical factor to be weighed carefully for a complete success in e-Commerce operations. It is important that the site permits an easy search according to the customers’ location.
The system should be intelligent enough to notify business operators on low stocks or prompt web users on unfinished purchases to be more efficient and effective. These features are very much part of system functionality where customers would enjoy their online experience every time.

3) SEO Friendly
Any e-Commerce business must have a dynamic SEO strategy that is effective to be productive. The business structure and functions must be properly designed and implemented professionally to capture the attention of top search engines to enjoy higher page rankings on the SERP listing.

Web consumers would find their desired information more quickly to return to the site for more in the future. Hence, every company needs a website that is SEO friendly to be an attractive marketing stop for targeted consumers. Such a platform is deemed a prerequisite for webmasters to create or edit worthy contents using optimized keywords and useful SEO friendly URLs that would captivate the attention of search algorithms. This includes the presence and proper manipulation of titles, sub-headers, image ALT tags and navigation links to position the site for higher rankings.

4) Payment Gateways
The advancement of digital technologies, today plays an instrumental role in e-Commerce marketing platforms today where business players must contemplate the precise and secure payment process for their customers. Although some platforms may not support a wide range of online payment options or even reputed third-party payment vendors such as PayPal, there would be an appropriate payment gateway which could be implemented to provide greater convenience for customers to prompt them on purchases instead of abandoning their cart.

Every online business today needs to include some form of dynamic and secure payment options that encourage more business transactions.

5) Mobile Responsiveness
The ever-increasing influence of mobiles for many online activities today is shifting the pattern of web usage where the e-Commerce platform must be mobile friendly and responsive. This has to come about to cater to the growing number of mobile users who are getting online through their mobile devices instead of desktops or laptops.

The growing group of mobile users in the market today is a high incentive for any business site to prepare its dynamic e-Commerce platform that is mobile responsive to win over more potential business leads for the company.

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Reviews

TemplateMonster vs ThemeForest

No doubt, nowadays any business cannot survive without professional representation on the web. Luckily, having a top-notch website to promote your business or ideas is getting easier on a day-to-day basis. Now there is no need to apply to a professional designer to develop a custom website, particularly taking into consideration the price of the service. You can take advantage of ready-made templates to create a site of your dream. The question is where to find the template you need.

Luckily, there are many marketplaces for templates on the web, among which there are some worthy of note, like CodesterHubSpotThemeSnapThemeForest and TemplateMonster. The last two are big rivals in on the market and win most attention. Today we are going to find out what the difference between TemplateMonster and ThemeForest is.

TemplateMonster’s merits

TemplateMonster has rocketed as the leading marketplace for all sort of templates for websites quite recently. Initially, it was known as a manufacturer of website templates, but now it has expanded to a successful selling platform. TemplateMonster’s offers exceed anyone’s expectations due to the astonishing variety of templates. They fit any platform, including WooCommerce, Joomla, PowerPoint, Keynote, Shopify, Drupal, eBay and so on. The good news is that using this splendor anyone can create their own commercial website, an online store, a blog or a portfolio with an ease.

First, let’s work out what exactly makes it easy to create a website. Everything depends on a content managing system you choose. The best system for novices is WordPress. WordPress themesprovide a wide range of possibilities, are rich in handy widgets and multiple plugins, and can be easily modified to anybody’s needs. You only need to choose from variety of designs and apply changes to the initial look to make your website more noticeable.

You can change any template beyond recognition right from admin panel. You can upload your logo, photos, videos, and texts. The things you can change include color scheme, layouts, number of pages and sections, sidebars, buttons. In a word, you apply changes until the site suits your taste and needs. However, bear in mind that certain freedom of customization might cost more. TemplateMonster gives you the choice: either to buy a template that looks pretty standard and save the money, or buy more expensive version of the template and feel free customizing it. The latter option ensures joy of creation as well as individuality of the final outcome.

 

The overwhelming majority of all the themes have professional creative design and clean code, responsive design and are compatible with major browsers. The immense custom support deserves specific mention. TemplateMonster provides the work of agile 24/7 service center in case you have any troubles dealing with the theme you bought. This support is available as long as you run the website.

Take the gage of this distinguished Multipurpose WordPress Theme Monstroid2 to make sure it has impressive features mentioned above.

The web-templates are conveniently arranged in a gallery and have a demo-version for trial. Moreover, you can download a sample website template and check it for compatibility with any html editor. The gallery has all possible filters to make your search easier but for price. Unfortunately, you will need to find the sales and discounts on your own.

As for the price, TemplateMonster has some offers: you can but a single-license template that costs from $45 to $75 on average. However, the price rises the more additional features you include. A single-license template is suitable if you use it for one site or project only. In case you have several sites or projects, you will need to buy it again. The good news is that many TemplateMonster’s themes have a GPL license, which allows use on an unlimited number of websites. It’s really alluring but still even more expensive.

There is another unique opportunity to buy the exclusive rights on definite site. It guarantees that your website will be truly unique and no one else will use a source template. However, the price will be much higher.

Here is the short outcome of mentioned above:

Advantages Disadvantages
  • Appealing price;
  • Wide variety of templates designs for different platforms;
  • TemplateMonster is the developer and vendor;
  • Different kinds of license;
  • Available trial version of a template;
  • 24/7 support center (life-long support);
  • Extra charge for additional customization features;
  • Lack of price-filter and inconvenient search of special offers;

ThemeForest’s benefits

ThemeForest is a grand marketplace designed for ready-made templates. It boasts more than 37,000 designs of all kinds of web-templates for MagentoVirtueMartWordPress and other various platforms. However, they are not developed by a single manufacturer. Anyone can sell their templates at this marketplace, and this is the point where you should scratch head over viability of purchasing a template there.

You have to browse through the works of thousands of different web developers. It’s the case when quantity doesn’t guarantee quality and too big choice becomes frustrating. Definitely, there are many great-quality sites on ThemeForest, but you will have to make some effort to find them. Luckily, a sortable gallery allows finding the cheapest offers and sales. You can sort the templates by popularity, features, categories and styles, which is extremely convenient. It’s possible to preview demo version of any theme before purchasing it, read the reviews, testaments and see the rates.

Another question is the lack of all-round support at ThemeForest market. The thing is, when the developer produces and sells a template, you have a duty holder to apply to in emergency.

Why is support so important?

Definitely, after purchasing a template you need to install and adjust it. In case you meet some troubles, you have to get in touch with developers. Unfortunately, ThemeForest only sells templates and isn’t helpful in that case. You need to find website developers yourself and contact them directly.

However, some templates at ThemeForest come with a fixed period (e.g. 6-month) of technical support from the developer. You have to pay extra money to extend the period of technical support. Like the templates created by TemplateMonster, the flat price of most themes doesn’t cover professional installation, hosting, speed optimization, etc. These services and extended licenses are subject to additional charge. Most templates at ThemeForest go with a single-use license.

The most attractive thing about ThemeForest is the price. You can find many templates for only $2. However, it looks like a gamble and if you don’t want to be deeply disappointed, we would recommend you to search among templates whose price vary between $28-65. And this is the point where ThemeForest wins a score.

Here is the outlet of mentioned above:

Advantages Disadvantages
  • Competitive price;
  • Big variety of themes;
  • User-friendly search;
  • Community’s forums, blogs, FAQs
  • Absence of all-round support service;
  • Varying quality;
  • Extra pay for extended technical support, additional licensing and features;
  • Need to contact developers directly.

As you see, both marketplaces offer a great variety of web-templates. ThemeForest wins when budget is a factor. But TemplateMonster wins when it comes to immaculate quality and life-long support. Anyway, it’s up to you to decide what to hit for and we hope this comparison of characteristics of both marketplaces will be useful for you!

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Reviews

Fast hosting for WordPress with malware scan included

Cloud hosting with daily malware scan included for shared and reseller accounts:
NameHero

Managed WordPress hosting including:
free & automatic SSL certificates
solid state storage drives – SSD Hosting protected by Raid 10
PHP 7
LiteSpeed web server – meaning .htaccess files will work
One Click Installation Through cPanel
Nightly Backups With Point And Click Restore
Daily Malware Scanning With Automatic Removal
Hardened Operating System Specifically For WordPress (Security)
LiteSpeed WordPress Cache

Main LiteSpeed Benefits
Double the maximum capacity of Apache – The majority of “shared” web hosts still use Apache web server. LiteSpeed Web Server’s streamlined event-driven architecture, capable of handling thousands of concurrent clients with minimal memory consumption and CPU usage.
Added security – Continue using already familiar mod_security rules while also taking advantage of a host of built-in anti-DDoS features, such as bandwidth and connection throttling.
Reduce complexity – By eliminating the need for an HTTPS reverse proxy or additional 3rd party caching layers.

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Internet Marketing

Dropified for dropshipping with more options

Key advantage over oberlo:
Easy Product Variant Setup

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Internet Marketing

Overcome excuses

Table of contents
Introduction
Step 1: First Understand Procrastination Makes You Work Slower
Step 2: Understand Procrastination Can Also Make You Work Harder
Step 3: Stop Doubting Your Abilities – Here’s How To Work Faster
Step 4: Take Regular Breaks – Why Taking Regular Breaks Is Key To Doing Your Best Work
Step 5: It Starts With You – Taking Care Of Yourself Is Key To Doing Your Best Work
Step 6: How Making A Game Out Of Getting Things Done Promptly Can Help You Work More Efficiently
Step 7: How To Overcome Distractions That You CAN Control
Step 8: How To Overcome Distractions You CAN’T Control
Step 9: How To Stay On Time or Ahead of Your Project
Step 10: Reward Yourself When a Project is Completed
Conclusion

Introduction
In any occupation, there are elements that are not as “fun” as other elements of that occupation. As a result, many people will often procrastinate and slow themselves down in an effort to “avoid” those boring or tedious elements that they don’t like doing as much as the fun aspects of their job or occupation.
In truth, those efforts to procrastinate, make excuses, and just avoid certain aspects of an occupation or task just lead to people taking longer to complete work they could do much quicker, leading to them getting less done than they could within a set amount of time. Additionally, it forces them to work harder, take more time away from other activities they’d rather be doing, and can lead them to doing poorer-quality work because they have to work faster to make up for the time they lost by procrastinating and making excuses. Due to the fact they are working faster, they’re more prone to making mistakes and not thinking clearly when doing important tasks.
Procrastination is just one excuse people make when they want to avoid a more unpleasant part of their occupation or a project or task they are not particularly fond of doing. However, procrastination isn’t the only challenge people face when people try to get high-quality work completed in a set period of time.

Often, people will question If they can work fast and still deliver high-quality work. They will often doubt themselves over whether they are doing something properly or if it’s what their target market, boss, or customer is looking for in the completed work. As a result, they slow down and take longer to complete the work when it’s usually not necessary.
Time management is key for everyone, but especially for entrepreneurs who are their own bosses. Entrepreneurs must motivate themselves to stay on or ahead of schedule; there is no boss who will get on them to stay on or ahead of schedule. If an entrepreneur falls behind an intended schedule, only he/she can motivate himself/herself to pick up the pace and get back on track. He/She won’t lose his/her job, but also won’t get as much to any profit because he/she is failing to do the work expected of him/her in a set period of time.
Entrepreneurs in particular have to learn to not let distractions take away from their focus when doing work for clients and/or for their businesses. Time is the one commodity you cannot get back, and each distraction that takes work time away from the entrepreneur costs him/her money, reputation, and time doing other things, both within the business and away from the business.

Some distractions are the type that can be controlled by the entrepreneur, such as being logged into his/her social media accounts. Other distractions are the type that can’t be easily controlled by the entrepreneur, such as kids running around the house, etc. Both types need to be managed if an entrepreneur is going to overcome the excuse of not getting as much done as he/she can within a specific period of time.
Another important aspect of time management entrepreneurs must learn is being efficient in their work time so that they can take breaks, enjoy themselves, and not burn themselves out trying to complete projects and other tasks necessary to have a thriving business. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs will want to work every waking minute of every waking hour, sacrificing their health, well-being, and social life just to improve their businesses. Yet, taking this approach can actually hinder an entrepreneur from improving his/her business.
Therefore, dealing with procrastination, self-doubt, and distractions is key to overcoming excuses and getting the most high-quality work done in the least amount of time possible. In order for entrepreneurs and others to do this successfully, they need to learn techniques and ways to counter the procrastination, self-doubt, and distractions they will experience as they attempt to complete projects and tasks that will boost their businesses, reputations, and profit. They also need to learn how to manage their time so that they are efficient, do the best-quality work in the least amount of time possible, and not ignore other areas of their life that would endanger their health, well-being, and their businesses.
In the coming chapters of this book, you will learn why procrastination is a major enemy to doing your best work and why it is in your best interest to overcome it. You will learn how self-doubt leads to slower work, which can negatively impact the quality of your work. You will learn how to handle both the distractions you can and cannot control so that they do not impact the quality or your work nor the time it takes you to complete them. You will learn why staying on or ahead of schedule is key to doing your best work. You will learn how to “make a game” out of getting things done promptly so you can work more efficiently. You will learn why focusing on the benefits and rewards you’ll get after completing a project is key to completing that project efficiently and doing your best work. You will learn why taking regular breaks during your project and taking care of your health and well-being are also key to doing your best work.

Step 1: First Understand Procrastination Makes You Work Slower

In virtually every occupation, there are certain aspects to a job or task that people don’t like doing. In the business or financial world, it could be that you have to work with mathematics or mathematical computer programs in order to determine what actions to take to create the best products for your business or pick the best stocks for your investment firm. In teaching, it could be writing or typing out the lesson plans you have to create for each day and week you teach. For entrepreneurs, it could be creating the sales letters you need to sell your online products.
In essence, it’s the tedious tasks that every occupation has that most people try to avoid, even though in truth, there is no real way to avoid these tasks. They just “come with the territory,” as many people like to say. Yet, many people will try to avoid these tasks by procrastinating, taking longer to complete other tasks they like doing better in order to “avoid” doing the tasks that they don’t.
For instance, in the business and financial worlds, much research has to be done in order to learn what is the next best move for one’s business or investment firm. Thus, people may like to access and read the various stories and reports online detailing what is going on in the world in order to know what is the next best move for one’s business or financial firm. They’ll spend more time doing the research than is necessary to do it well in order to avoid using the mathematical programs to analyze that research and determine what truly is the next best move for their business or financial firm.
Similarly, there are those in the education field who prefer interacting with their students and giving them hands-on learning. As a result, some may try to avoid outlining their lesson plans by providing more hands-on learning and even spending time after school to provide tutoring for those who need additional hands-on learning.
Some entrepreneurs may want to add more content to their products in an effort to make their products better and enable them to charge higher prices for them. As a result, these entrepreneurs will avoid creating their sales letters and focus more on making their products better.
As you can see in the examples above, procrastination can sometimes be difficult to spot because one will think he/she is doing a good thing by focusing on a specific task that is needed for his/her business to do well. While all necessary tasks are important and need to have the appropriate amount of time spent on them in order for them to be done well, spending too much time on one area to cut back on time spent in another area because that first area is more enjoyable will likely lead to the business not performing as well as it should because not enough time and focus is placed on that second, less enjoyable area.
What you need to realize when it comes to procrastination is that doing this will cause you to work slower than is necessary in order to achieve your best work. When you focus on a more enjoyable area of your occupation and spend more time doing that work, you are still only completing a part of the project or overall task you need to complete for your business to be doing as well as you expect it to. This takes more time away from the area of the business or occupation you are not as fond of, which will either lead to you not putting as much time on that area, leading to poorer-quality work that negatively impacts the whole project, or it will cause you to put in the necessary time and delay the completion of the entire project.
In either case, you are slowing yourself down to avoid doing the work that is needed in that less-desirable area of your business or occupation. This is doing a disservice to yourself and to the business at large because you could be doing more in the same amount of time it is taking you to complete the necessary work. As a result, you could be getting projects done quicker if you were not procrastinating and avoiding the area of the business or occupation you are not as fond of. Your business could be doing much better as a result of you working more efficiently. Additionally, you could have more free time to work on other areas of your business or even to take time away to enjoy leisurely activities.
Therefore, realize that procrastination does not help you or your business in any way. The work you keep “avoiding” will still have to be done in order for your business to function and succeed as you expect it to. All you’re doing by procrastinating is allowing yourself less time to complete that less desirable work you don’t like doing, likely leading to poorer quality that could harm your business. Or, you’ll give yourself more time to complete that less desirable work, which will lead to you missing deadlines and goals you’ve set to make up for your procrastination, which will also damage your business and keep it from thriving as you expect it to.
Referring to the aforementioned examples, a business or financial person still has to use the mathematical programs to analyze gathered research in order to make the best use of it to benefit one’s business or financial firm. A teacher still has to make out lesson plans in order to best educate his/her students so that they progress and become contributing members of society. An entrepreneur still has to create sales letters to sell his/her own products. These tasks can’t be avoided to be a successful business/financial person, teacher, or entrepreneur. Procrastination of certain tasks will only lead to you doing slower work and doing less work in a set amount of time. Chances are high that you will also do poorer-quality work as a result.
In the next chapter, you’ll learn that procrastination also makes you work harder to complete the tasks you need to complete in order to be successful.

Step 2: Understand Procrastination Can Also Make You Work Harder

In the last chapter, you learned that procrastination makes you work slower, leading to you getting less done than you could in a set amount of time. You also learned that procrastination will likely lead to lower-quality work being done. However, procrastination doesn’t just make you work slower; it also makes you work harder as well.
Procrastination will make you work harder because procrastinating means taking longer than is necessary with a set task in order to avoid doing another required task to achieve the main goal you want to achieve. You procrastinate in order to avoid something that you perceive to be unpleasant and that you want to avoid.
As discussed in the last chapter, you’ll spend more time on an enjoyable task because you want to avoid a less enjoyable task as much as possible. The problem with this approach is, the more time you spend on the enjoyable task, the less time you have to work on the less enjoyable task you’re trying to avoid.
To compensate for the lost time, you will have to do one of two things:
– You’ll have to work faster (and harder) on the less enjoyable task to stay on schedule.
– You’ll have to give yourself more time to complete the less enjoyable task to put the required amount of effort and work in to do the task well, leading to a delay in the overall project.
If you choose option two, you’ll delay the overall project, which can impact your profits, your reputation, and more. Thus, option two is an option you really cannot afford to make, leaving you with option one: Working faster and harder to make up for your procrastination.
We discussed in the last chapter why working slower can have detrimental effects on your work. It can cause you to have to speed up the rest of your work, which can lead to producing lower-quality work. This is especially true since you will be doing faster work on a task or part of a project you were trying to avoid in the first place through procrastination.
In addition, you will have to work harder in order to complete the project you are working on in the allotted time for the project. That is because you will have to extensively focus on completing the task you were avoiding because you have a very strict time limit to complete it in or suffer damage to your credibility, reputation, and profitability. There is no margin for error now- any mistake or slip-up by you now will lead to lost credibility, a damaged reputation, and a reduction in profits because you will not hold true to your word when you would have a project completed.
If you’re an Internet marketer and announced that you would release your next product on a certain date, but don’t, the damage to your credibility will last for a very long time. The consequences would likely include other Internet marketers not wanting to work with you on joint ventures because they’ll see you as unreliable. You’ll also lose credibility with customers and potential customers because they will see you as untrustworthy because you said your new product would be on a specific date, then wasn’t. They’ll always have doubt in their minds when it comes to you telling them something, questioning whether they can believe you or not. That is certainly not good to building up a relationship with them and having them purchase your products and/or services.
Therefore, you have to do everything you can to stay on the planned or announced schedule you have and finish your project in time so you can stay on that schedule. This means that you have to make up for the time you lost procrastinating, which means you’ll have to work harder to make up for that lost time.
Working harder means you won’t be able to take regular breaks throughout the rest of the time you work on your task or project, which can hamper your focus and cause you to make more errors, something you really can’t afford to do because you’re not on a very strict time limit. Additionally, the work will be more draining to you because you really can’t take any meaningful breaks because of the limited time that remains to complete the work.
This is why procrastination is something you have to avoid at virtually all costs; it will only cause you to work harder and produce lower-quality work. Therefore, procrastination doesn’t allow you to escape or avoid the work you want to avoid; on the contrary, you’ll have to focus even harder and do even more challenging work to complete it.
In the next chapter, you will learn why doubting your own abilities is a reason why many people procrastinate and cause them to work at a slower pace, which makes them less efficient and productive than they can be.

Step 3: Stop Doubting Your Abilities – Here’s How To Work Faster

When many people face tasks or projects that are considered large or challenging, they will often question their abilities to complete the work, knowing they have to do their very best work to complete the project or task at the level it is expected to be completed. As a result, they tend to slow down the pace of their work, believing that if they do it slower, they will do the work better.
While rushing through a project or task is never considered a good idea, especially when the work involved is complex or challenging, many people will go at a slower level than they need to complete the work at a high level because they doubt their abilities to work quickly and effectively.
Most people will naturally question their abilities to do quality work quickly because, as a society, we’ve often been trained that it takes considerable time to do quality work. We’ve learned this in school, when we’ve had our first job, and even in the corporate world. This is why large projects are given time frames of weeks or even months to complete- it implies that you need that much time to do high-quality work to complete that project.
Most people get the idea that if they do the work quicker than the time they’re allotted, their superiors, customers, or target markets will look upon their work as if it was done haphazardly and carelessly. In other words, they will see the work as lower quality, which will lead to a negative impression of you as an employee, as a business owner, as an entrepreneur.
This is why many people slow their work down; they think that if they utilize all the time that they have, people will look upon their work as being the best it could possibly be. If they utilize all the time that they have, no one can accuse them of rushing through the work and doing it haphazardly or carelessly; people will look upon their work as being the very possible best it can be because all of the time allotted for the project was used to complete the project.
The main problem with this viewpoint is that people use this as a crutch or as an excuse to take all of the allotted time given to complete a project when it’s not necessary to do so. Sure, some projects may be so challenging that if you are efficient and productive in your work habits, you will still take all of the time allotted to finish the project.
That is perfectly fine, but what you must realize is that most project deadlines are given with some leeway thrown in in the event you mess up a task or don’t understand part of the assignment and need to have more clarification before you continue work, etc. Therefore, when most project deadlines are given, it is not always expected you take the full amount of time to complete the project. In fact, if you provide high-quality work to the superior, customer, target market before it is expected, your reputation and credibility will get a major boost, and people in your industry will want to work with you.
Therefore, you have to adopt the mindset that project time frames are not intended to be fully completed for every project. Some projects will require you to work very diligently throughout the whole project in order for the project to be completed at a high level and be done within that time frame, but many project time frames give you some flexibility in case a problem or issue occurs.
If no problem or issue occurs, then it is quite possible and even desirable to finish the project before the deadline. Finishing ahead of time will benefit you and your business, as you will be seen as productive, efficient, and even as a “miracle worker.” Finishing ahead of time can be done if you are focused throughout and don’t procrastinate on any section of the project, even parts of the project involving tasks that you aren’t particularly fond of doing.
This also means that you need to be confident in your ability to work at a high level at a faster pace of speed. Think about the world we live in today. Information is everywhere thanks to the Internet and mobile devices being virtually everywhere we go. Think of all the content that is available and that continues to come to our smartphones and other mobile devices. If people weren’t working at a higher rate of speed (either via their own efforts and/or through technology), there wouldn’t be the same amount of content coming to our mobile devices.
Additionally, think about how fast the world is changing in terms of business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) models. Just ten years ago, people weren’t buying that much on websites, and mobile devices really didn’t exist back then. Nowadays, people buy as often or more on the Internet (and especially on mobile devices) than they do in stores, a key reason why many retailers are closing their doors, while others are trying to reformulate their business models to include and even highlight ecommerce and mcommerce.
The main point is that, now, speed matters as much as high-level work. You essentially have to be able to do both in order to really survive and thrive in this content-driven, fast-paced world we live in. Doing high-level work and taking forever to do it will no longer suffice, but doing poor-quality work quickly won’t suffice either.
Therefore, you have to adopt the mindset that you have the capability to do high-level work quickly. You have to be confident in your skills and rely on the experience you have gained so far in order to know how to best approach projects, avoid most setbacks, overcome setbacks that do happen, and put out a quality product or project in as little time as possible.
The other main reason you must learn to be confident in your own abilities to do high-quality work quickly is because, other people are learning to do the same thing! The ones who learn to trust themselves to do high-level work quickly are the ones that will survive and thrive in this content-driven, fast-paced economy. Those that can’t convince themselves that they can do high-level work quickly will not last long in business. The only choice they will have is to go back to a typical 9-5 cubicle working for someone else, thereby ending their dreams of owning their own business and working the hours they choose to work.
Therefore, you now know why you must learn to trust your own abilities to do high-level work quickly and why you must adapt the mindset that not all project time frames are intended to be used entirely on all projects. You must learn to not procrastinate and avoid tasks you are not fond of doing, as this will only slow you down, cause you to work harder, and keep you from being as productive and as profitable as you can be.
You will learn in the next two chapters why it is vital that you take care of yourself during a long project and why it is critical to doing your best work. You’ll also learn why procrastination can hinder your ability to take care of yourself during such long projects and another key reason why you must avoid procrastination and making excuses of why you don’t get more things done in a set amount of time.

Step 4: Take Regular Breaks – Why Taking Regular Breaks Is Key To Doing Your Best Work

You learned in the last two chapters why procrastination leads to you working slower and working harder than is necessary to complete high-quality work. Working harder than is necessary is going to drain you in many ways, not only physically, but mentally, emotionally, and socially as well.
During any long-term project that spans the course of days, weeks, or even months, you are going to have periods where you will not be as focused as you normally would be. You’re going to have periods where your mind wanders, thinking about other things and not the task you are currently working on, whether that’s other aspects of the project you’re working on or topics that are not related to the project in any way, such as family, friends, leisurely activities, personal interests, etc.
It’s virtually impossible to go through an entire long-term project without letting your mind wander at some point. It’s also impossible to put in great work effort and intensity continuously for hours on end to complete a project in the highest quality possible. This is why taking regular breaks is key to ensuring your mind remains focused and your work quality remains high.
Many experts suggest that most humans can only stay focused on a task for around 45 minutes out of a one-hour period. This means that for 15 minutes of every hour, their attention spans aren’t at their optimum levels, which means that focus and concentration wane, which can lead to slower, lower-quality work.
Therefore, it is recommended that you take at least a 15-minute break every hour that you put in work in order to keep your attention span at its optimum level. Taking a 15-minute break every hour will allow you to stretch, give your mind a rest, and allow you to refocus on the task at hand when you return. This is especially true if your job or task requires you to do the same actions over and over again over that 45-minute period. Human brains can get bored easily when they are required to do the same tasks repeatedly; they lose interest. To stimulate the brain and get it to focus all of its energies on the same tasks, it needs a regular break, which is suggested to be 15 minutes for every 45 minutes of work put in.
Therefore, you should be taking regular breaks throughout any projects you are doing; you should NOT be trying to do them all in one sitting, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week, only taking breaks to eat, shower, and sleep. Doing that will lead to your brain losing focus, you getting bored, your work quality suffering, and you taking longer to complete the work than is necessary for it to be completed, either because your mind will wander and/or you will make a critical error and have to redo the work again.
This is another reason why you cannot afford to procrastinate; if you procrastinate, you will be less able to take the regular breaks you need to stay mentally sharp and engaged in the work you are doing, which will cause your work quality to suffer over the long term. Procrastinating will force you to have to work longer periods in an effort to make up for the time you lost by procrastinating, or lead to you being late for completing your project, which can damage your credibility, reputation, and profitability.
Taking regular breaks every hour, including getting up, stretching, using the restroom, getting a snack, talking to a friend or colleague, checking social media, playing a mobile game, etc. can help your mind to rest and recharge for the future work you need to complete at a high-quality level.
Note, though, that you should be spending no more than 15 minutes per hour on your break; if you start to go beyond that, you’ll start to lose some momentum and find excuses to stay away from work. Therefore, if you think or know that spending time on social media or playing a mobile game will take longer than the time left in your break, don’t do it. Only do activities you know you can keep to within the 15-minute time span so that you don’t go over the time allotted for your break, don’t ruin your momentum, and not cause you to look for ways to keep from returning to your work.
In this chapter, you’ve learned that taking regular breaks (15 minutes out of every 60 minutes) will enable you to do your best work. You’ve also learned that being able to do this is virtually impossible if you procrastinate, all the more reason not to do so. In the next chapter, you’ll also learn why you must take care of yourself physically, emotionally, and socially so you can do your best work.

Step 5: It Starts With You – Taking Care Of Yourself Is Key To Doing Your Best Work

In the last chapter, you learned why taking regular breaks is key to doing your best work. The human brain becomes disinterested and even bored in doing repetitive tasks over and over again for long periods of time; that is why many experts suggest taking 15-minute breaks every hour (i.e. 60 minutes) in order to keep your brain engaged and enable you to do your best work possible.
However, it’s not only mentally that you need to take care of yourself in order to do your best work, but physically, emotionally, and socially as well. If you allow other elements of your life to be negatively impacted by your work, you won’t be as mentally sharp and focused to do your best work, and you won’t even be eager to return to the work you need to complete.
For instance, if you are an entrepreneur who works on your computer and mobile devices to create products to sell people online, if you are constantly working at your computer and/or mobile devices and never take breaks away from them to do other things, there are several aspects of your life that are going to suffer.
For one thing, your weight is probably going to increase, causing a detrimental effect on your health. That is because you are constantly sitting, looking at a screen, typing away with your fingers, but that is about the only physical activity you’ll be getting. If you do this hour-for-hour, day-by-day, week-by-week, over time, the food you are eating is likely going to go onto your frame as fat because you aren’t doing enough physical activity to burn it off.
As a result, your weight is going to increase, and you will likely have a negative view of yourself, especially when you look in the mirror or are around family and/or friends who may look at you differently because of your changed appearance. This is not going to help your mindset and your mood when it comes to your work, which will negatively impact the quality of it and might even lead you to avoid the work altogether, which will negatively impact your reputation, credibility, and business profitability.
Therefore, you need to take time out for yourself to work off the food you eat and stay in good, physical shape. Not only will this keep you in good physical health, but it will put you in a good mental state of mind too to where you can stay mentally focused and engaged on your work and do higher-quality work.
It’s not just your weight that will be negatively impacted if you constantly are at your computer or mobile devices creating products and content. Your social life will be negatively impacted as well. If you have a family – spouse or even spouse and kids – they will not like the fact that they don’t see you that often because you are constantly working. Chances are, you will drift farther apart from your spouse because you spend no quality time together. This will also happen with your kids as well, which could cause them to resent you because you spend no quality time with them. This can occur with young kids (from 1-12 years old) or even with teenagers (13-19 years old). They may not grasp that you are working that hard to aid them, leading to them resenting you not being there for them and with them in their lives.
If your family starts to resent you not being there constantly, chances are high that the environment will be strained and you will constantly have that resentment and strain in the back of your mind, which will lead to you losing focus on your work, negatively impacting the quality of it. This is why it is critical that you set enough time in your schedule so that you can spend time with your family and loved ones so that they know you still make time for them even when you are busy with work. In addition, the break away from work will do you good as well, as your mind will get that much-needed time away from work so that you can be more mentally focused and engaged on the tasks you need to do to complete your project.
Even if you are unmarried and don’t have a family, it still will negatively impact you if you don’t take breaks away from your work and head outside from time to time. If you cut yourself off from your friends, family members, and/or boyfriend/girlfriend, your mind will start to lose focus, and you will forget what it means to do anything other than work, which will negatively impact your social life and skills. Having a dull social life is not going to enrich your life any, especially since constantly working can cause your mind to become disinterested in your work and even cause you to resent your work, which will negatively impact your credibility, reputation, and profitability because your work will be of lower quality.
If you’re thinking that you can reduce the amount of food you eat to avoid exercising and put more time into your work, that’s not a good strategy either. Again, your physical health is going to be impacted because you are not eating regularly and not getting the required nutrients, vitamins, and minerals your body needs to perform at its very best. This includes your mind as well; you’ll constantly be hearing reminders from your stomach about how little food you’ve eaten, which will take your focus away from your work and more towards what food you can eat.
Therefore, you need to eat regular meals throughout all projects you are working on; skipping meals to give yourself more time to work on projects is not going to benefit your health, your work quality, or your business in the long run. This is all the more reason why you cannot afford to procrastinate and make excuses in why you are not getting tasks completed as quickly as you should; it’s more than just actually completing the project, but managing the aspects of your life away from the projects you’re working on – including family, friends/social life, diet, exercise, and more – to ensure you are in the best condition possible to do the best work possible for your clients and your business. All of the aspects of your life go into this to make it possible to do your best work; cutting back on any aspect in order to give yourself more time to do your work will have negative impacts on your life and your work quality at some point in time.
Therefore, in this chapter, you have learned that you not only need to take regular breaks away from your projects in order to do your best work, but you also have to take care of other aspects in your life – including diet, exercise, and social life/family life – to ensure you remain mentally engaged and focused on your work. Failure to tend to all other aspects of your life can lead to you becoming bored or even resentful of your work, which can have negative impacts on your credibility, reputation, and profitability. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how making a “game” out of getting things done promptly can help you to work more efficiently and produce high-quality work.

Step 6: How Making A Game Out Of Getting Things Done Promptly Can Help You Work More Efficiently

In the last two chapters, you’ve learned why you must take regular breaks from your work and focus on other aspects of your life while working on projects to ensure you stay mentally engaged and focused on your work to produce the best-quality work possible. In order to stay mentally engaged and focused to ensure you have time for breaks and focusing on other aspects of your life, it helps to make a “game” out of getting things done promptly.
You may be wondering, “How do I make a ‘game’ out of getting things done promptly?” Well, one way you can do this is to keep track of how quickly you get things done. In other words, you should track how long it takes you to accomplish various tasks associated with a project and even how much time it takes you to complete overall projects, then compare them with other tasks and projects to see if you are improving your efficiency or not.
If you are an entrepreneur or any employee who uses a computer and/or mobile devices regularly, you should be able to easily monitor your time by utilizing the computer or mobile device’s clock that is usually present on the screen. You can just open a Notepad (.txt) file, record the start time of when you begin a project or task, then note the time that you stop. It can also be a good idea to make a separate notation of how long each break is that you take and compare it to the recommended 15 minutes of every 60 minutes you should be taking breaks. You should also give a brief description of each task, as well as what the overall project entails, to give you an idea of the work you need to do and to evaluate how effectively and efficiently you are doing that work.
Over time, you could transfer that information from the .txt file and put it into an Excel (.xls or .xlsm) spreadsheet file (or equivalent spreadsheet program file) and see how well you are managing your time and how efficiently you are working over the course of days, weeks, and months to see if you are improving or declining in terms of your productivity.
Granted, not every project will be the same, and there will be varying tasks from project to project, but you can at least get a general idea of how efficiently and effectively you are working, as well as seeing what tasks and parts of a project you are really efficient and effective in and what tasks and parts of a project slow you down and where you need to improve your efficiency and focus.
As mentioned above, you can do this by hand (i.e. typing it out in .txt and .xls or .xlsm files) and track everything yourself, including how much time is spent on each task and part of a project. Alternatively, you could use an online timer; there are many to choose from if you input “free timers” into your favorite search engine or your app store (including the App Store, Google Play, or Amazon AppStore).
Whichever one you choose, learn how it works, then activate it when you start a task. If you take a break, pause that timer (most timers have a pause button), then resume it when you come back and begin work again. You can use your computer or mobile device’s clock to record how much time you were on break if the timer doesn’t record how long it was paused. Again, input that information into a .txt file and/or a .xls or .xlsm file as described above to keep track of how effective and efficiently you are working.
As mentioned above, see how efficiently and effectively you are working via the data you collect. Before each project or task, estimate how long you think it will take you to complete that project or task; consider even writing it down somewhere so that you don’t change your initial estimation later.
Then, when you have the task or project completed, check to see how long it actually took you versus the initial estimation. If you beat that estimation, consider rewarding yourself – you could choose to do some leisurely activity you’ve been wanting to do, spend more time with family/friends, purchase something you’ve been wanting to buy, etc. In essence, treat yourself to doing better than you expected when it comes to being efficient and effective in your work.
Note that you should NOT inflate your initial estimation just to ensure you finish ahead of it; be honest with yourself when you make that initial estimation so that you get the most benefit from this “game.” If you wind up missing your initial estimation, you don’t have to punish yourself for missing it, but don’t reward yourself for it either. Instead, look back through your log of the times you recorded for each step of the project and see where you fell behind so that you can learn what is hindering your efficiency and effectiveness and learn where you need to improve so you can beat your estimation the next time.
Note that you want to try to avoid inflating your next estimation after you miss an estimation just because you think you need more time to complete a project. This is why it’s imperative you provide an honest estimation of the time you think it will take to complete each step of a project and the overall project itself. If you don’t provide an honest estimation at each step, this “game” will not help you to improve your efficiency and effectiveness at working, which is the main point of this “game.”
Therefore, you have learned how you can turn your work efficiency and effectiveness into a “game” where you can improve that efficiency and effectiveness and even reward yourself when you “beat” your estimation of when you finish a task or project. In the next two chapters, you will learn how to overcome distractions that can hinder your work efficiency and effectiveness.

Step 7: How To Overcome Distractions That You CAN Control

In a perfect world, we would be able to work on our projects and not have to deal with any distractions whatsoever. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and distractions are all around us. Some of them we can control, while others we cannot control. In this chapter, we’ll focus on the ones we can control, while the next chapter will deal with the ones that we cannot control.
Controllable distractions are those that we can directly control and prevent from impacting our focus and affecting our work quality. There are many distractions that we can directly control to keep them from distracting us and taking our attention and focus away from our work.
For example, a common distraction that is easily controllable is our social media accounts. Many people, including entrepreneurs, like to have multiple browser windows open, one of which at least is a social media account (often one’s personal Facebook account). As you likely know, Facebook provides a notification error and sound any time you get a new message, a new friend request, or other activity on the social media site. In fact, Facebook has enabled auto-play for videos on one’s newsfeed; thus, video and audio will play from those videos, creating yet another distraction for us to contend with.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: Don’t log onto your social media accounts while you are working. That may not sound pleasant to your ears or to your eyes, but it is vital if you really want to be productive and efficient in your work. Let your social media friends, including your own family and personal friends, that you are working in one of your breaks or in your off-time to let them know that you will not be responding to every video or photo they post. You’ll get in touch with them again either during those 15-minute breaks we discussed earlier or when you are not working and have leisure time.
Keeping your social media accounts open while you are working is not required to get your work done. In fact, it will hinder your work and lower your work quality because you will be distracted by the notifications of someone posting to your newsfeed or profile page or by a new friend request. Then, you will likely want to check out what this new content or who this new person is, etc.
All of that takes time away from your project and lowers your work quality. In other words, it’s procrastination, exactly what you need to avoid for the many reasons we’ve already discussed in this book. This is why you MUST not log into your social media accounts while you are working.
As mentioned above, you CAN log into your social media accounts during your 15-minute breaks so long as you keep the break to 15 minutes and no longer. Failure to stay to that 15-minute time frame will lead to you wanting to stay on the social media site, converse with family/friends/fans, and not return to your work, leading to you falling behind on your schedule and having to play “catch-up,” a process we’ve already discussed in this book that will make you work harder and can lead to lower-quality work and even resentment of your work.
If you are afraid you won’t stick to that 15-minute break time frame, then don’t log onto your social media accounts during those breaks. Instead, only log on when you are done working for the day and have leisure time. Alert people on these social networks that that is the only time you will converse with them, not while you are working on projects or other aspects of your business. If these people truly care about your success and well-being, they will likely be impressed by your self-discipline and may even consider adopting a similar policy for themselves.
Note that social media accounts are not the only distraction you need to be aware of and that you can control. This also includes email inboxes, such as Gmail or Hotmail. The notifications from receiving email into these inboxes have sound effects that can distract you from your work, negatively impacting your work quality. In addition, you can “chat” with other users of these services and can get notifications when they wish to chat with you. Again, you want to stay away from doing this while you are working, and you need to decide if you want to do this within the 15-minute breaks we’ve discussed before or if you want to only use these chat services when you are totally done working for the day.
You can either not log onto these sites during the times you work on projects or other aspects of your business, or you can log onto these email sites and set the notifications for incoming email and chat requests to “mute” and/or “away,” respectively. This way, you can still be on the sites and check out email and chat requests during your 15-minute breaks if you wish, but not be interrupted each time you receive an email or chat request while you are working. Of course, it’s advised that you keep the email service in a browser window either behind the project you are working on or have it in the background on your taskbar (provided you are working on a computer) so that you are not distracted by the messages that come into your inbox or the graphics that alert you to an incoming email or chat request.
Even browser windows open to your favorite sites, such as sports or entertainment sites, can be distractions if you allow them to be. You should either keep such windows behind the project you are working on, minimize them to be on the taskbar, or close those browser windows while you are working.

Another common distraction in this day and age that can affect your focus and your work quality is your smartphone (or other mobile device, such as a tablet). Just as with your computer, be sure the notifications on your smartphone are muted or show you are “away”; this way, you won’t be distracted by the notifications of when you receive a new phone call or text message. If you are the type who just can’t go for a long period of time without picking up your smartphone and doing something with it, don’t keep it next to you. Put it elsewhere (such as in another room) where you can’t see it; this way, there is no way you can be distracted by it. If you do choose to keep your smartphone nearby, be sure to only turn it on and use it during breaks or when you are done for the day.
These distractions that have been described in this chapter are the ones you can control, including social media accounts, email accounts, browser windows with favorite sites and content, and smartphones/tablets. In the next chapter, you will learn how to overcome distractions you can’t control.

Step 8: How To Overcome Distractions You CAN’T Control

In the last chapter, you learned about overcoming distractions that you can control, including social media accounts, email accounts, favorite sites, and smartphones/tablets. In this chapter, you will learn how to overcome distractions you can’t control.
What are some distractions you can’t control? Well, for instance, if you have a family, you may have children running your house doing whatever they please, which can include making a lot of noise or playing loud music, etc. This is especially true in the summer when they are out of school or on the weekends when they are not in school, etc. Obviously, you can’t control exactly what they do or how they behave, although you can try to set up rules in how they behave and act, but only to a point. Yet, their actions and noise can disrupt your rhythm and ruin your focus and work quality if you allow them to.
A similar instance can occur if your spouse is cleaning the house and running a vacuum cleaner or other loud machine in an effort to clean the house. Again, you can’t directly control what he/she is doing; thus, you will have to deal with the noise in some fashion. The actions and noise from such activity can also disrupt your rhythm and ruin your focus and work quality if you allow them to.
How do you handle and overcome such distractions? One way is to discuss your work schedule and your need for a quiet environment with your spouse and/or children. If they are understanding, they will likely try to accommodate you if possible. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be absolutely quiet – after all, the house still needs to be cleaned, and children will still be children – but they may make some effort to accommodate you if they can. With that said, though, you still will have to make a determined effort to ignore or block out any noise or actions that are not eliminated.
How can you do this? Consider earplugs of some sort and wear them when noise is prevalent in your work area. Even cotton balls could be helpful in blocking out some of the noise, which can help to improve your focus and your work quality.
Note that it’s not just your spouse and children that can cause distractions in your work area. If you have pets, they can also cause distractions, whether it’s your dog barking or your cats and/or dogs wanting attention from you, etc. If it’s your dog barking, you can use the earplugs/cotton balls tip to help you remain focused on your work; if your cats and/or dogs want attention from you, try to prevent them from entering your work area if possible. Shut the door at all times while you are in your work area, and even when you leave to use the restroom or head elsewhere in your home- this way, they can’t get in when you leave.
If your pet(s) try scratching at the door while you are in there, either ignore them or shout “no” to them. This may help to deter them from continuing to do so. You may want to consider talking to them and giving them a little bit of attention during those 15-minute breaks we’ve discussed before, as this can help to alleviate their distress during the times you are not with them, plus it can be therapeutic for you as well.
Other distractions that can occur in your home include a neighbor mowing his/her lawn or doing other noisy yardwork. Again, the earbud/cotton ball technique can help to block out the noise and keep you focused on your work. Another distraction can be your landline phone ringing; you can either choose to ignore the phone ringing (possibly with help from earbuds/cotton balls) or even choose to turn the ringer off. If you have an answering machine, you can either choose to block out the noise with earbuds/cotton balls or turn the volume down to zero so you can’t hear what is being said by anyone who leaves a message.
All of these distractions – loud noises from spouses/kids, loud noises and distractions from pets, noisy yardwork by neighbors, landline phone calls and answering machine messages – are ones you cannot directly control, but can learn to block them out via talking with spouses and/or children, ignoring your pets and/or training them to not make noise, muting the volume on phones and answering machines, and using earbuds or cotton balls to block out noises you can’t control so that you can stay more focused on your work and ensure you provide high work quality. In the next chapter, you will learn why staying on time or ahead of your project is essentially to producing your best work.

Step 9: How To Stay On Time or Ahead of Your Project

In the last two chapters, you learned about the distractions you can and cannot control and how to overcome them. It is critical that you overcome any distractions you face, as your work efficiency and quality will be negatively impacted if you don’t. Procrastination can occur when you give into distractions and self-doubt, which can negatively impact your work efficiency and quality, as well as negatively impact your own health and well-being, as we discussed in the first two chapters of this book.
As you recall from the first two chapters of this book, procrastination leads to you working slower and working harder. You also have an idea of why staying on time or ahead of your project is key to you producing your best work. By staying on or ahead of schedule in completing your project, you will be able to utilize the information in this book to enable you to produce your best work quality.
One instance is where you will be able to take the 15-minute breaks that many experts suggest you take every hour. Thus, you should be working for 45 minutes and resting for 15 minutes. However, if you allow distractions to affect your focus, procrastination will set in, which will cause you to do less work in a set amount of time. This will result in you falling behind on your project, which will force you to work faster and harder in order to catch up, likely leading to a decline in work quality, which can negatively impact your credibility, reputation, and profitability. The alternative is taking longer to complete the project than you either planned or announced, which will again negatively impact your credibility, reputation, and profitability.
Therefore, it is vital that you stay on time or even ahead of schedule in your projects to keep you from having to work harder and faster in order to catch up from procrastination and making excuses due to distractions. Note that if you do fall behind and want to stay on the schedule you intended, you are going to have work longer on the same project, which means that you will either not be able to take 15-minute breaks every hour as recommended by most experts or you will have to take away leisure time and work extra hours in order to catch up from procrastination and being slowed by distractions.
Remember, it’s your credibility, reputation, and profitability that is at stake when you miss deadlines for superiors, customers, peers in your field, and target markets. If you miss deadlines, people will question your commitment and your ability to perform quality work in a reasonable period of time, even if you do provide high-quality work. Similarly, if you make deadlines but produce low-quality work, people will question whether you have the skill set and the ability to produce the quality of work they are looking for.
This is why you must do everything possible to stay on time and even ahead of schedule when working on projects; your credibility, reputation, and profitability depend on it. This is why it’s vital you avoid procrastination and you avoid making excuses due to distractions so that you can perform your best-quality work in the shortest amount of time possible. This is why you must take steps to overcome the distractions you can and cannot control to ensure distractions don’t cause you to make excuses and procrastinate, as this will only cause you to work less efficiently and produce lower-quality work than is expected from you.
Giving people reasons to doubt your ability to produce high-quality work in a set time frame will lead to other people or competitors overtaking you, either leading to them getting promotions over you or having their businesses take your potential customers away from you. This is why the information in this book is so vital to you overcoming procrastination and excuses; you need to be efficient and effective in your work in order to have the most success possible.
You’ll learn about how focusing on the rewards and benefits you will receive after you complete a project can help to motivate you to stay on time and even ahead of schedule in the next chapter.

Step 10: Reward Yourself When a Project is Completed

You’ve learned about the importance of why you must not procrastinate and make excuses due to distractions in order to achieve the best success for yourself and/or your business. Failure to product high-quality work in a set amount of time will cause people to doubt your abilities and have them turn elsewhere for what they need.
You’ve also learned how you have to take regular breaks in order to keep your mind focused in order to be able to do your best work. Many experts recommend taking 15-minute breaks every hour in order to give your brain the rest time it needs to stay focused, especially when it comes to doing repetitive tasks over and over again, as the human brain can become disinterested and even bored when facing the same or similar tasks over and over again.
In the case of entrepreneurs, you have to motivate yourself to do the work that is required; there is no boss that will put pressure on you to speed up your work and get back on track if you fall behind. Yet, you know what will happen if you do fall behind because of procrastination and making excuses from distractions- you’ll have to work faster and harder to catch up or risk missing the deadlines you set to meet the goals and achieve the success you want to achieve.
You may be wondering how you can continuously meet so many deadlines for many different tasks and projects you have to complete in order to have success in your business. A good way for entrepreneurs (and anyone, actually) to maintain the focus and drive that is needed to meet deadlines consistently is to focus on the rewards and benefits you will receive once the project is complete.
Think about what you will achieve once your current project is complete. It’s likely you will make money, whether it’s from a product launch, doing work for another entrepreneur, doing work for a boss, etc. The actions you take to complete a project by the deadline will result in profit for you, which will benefit you (and your family), thereby making your financial future more secure.
However, it’s not just financial benefit you will receive by continuously meeting deadlines. You’ll also get a good reputation and have high credibility of being a worker who is efficient and can meet deadlines, essential in just about any industry. This will make you more desirable for employers, peers (such as other entrepreneurs/Internet marketers), and customers/target markets. People will seek you out and want to work with you to achieve more success for both you and them.
Having a good reputation of getting things done on time can lead to greater success and profitability. If you’re working in the corporate world, chances are high you will get promoted to higher positions, leading to a greater salary, a greater reputation, and greater respect by your peers. If you are an entrepreneur, other entrepreneurs will take note and want to include you in joint ventures because you have demonstrated an ability to meet deadlines, produce quality products repeatedly, and be a positive force in the business world. In addition, your customers and prospects will see you as something they can depend on to provide quality products they are looking for and that they can always depend on to deliver quality consistently.
Therefore, you should also focus on the increased reputation and credibility you will receive when meeting deadlines to create the quality products your business needs to deliver consistently. Other people and companies will take notice, and greater avenues of profitability and reputation will open to you once you show a track record and reputation of delivering consistently. This is why meeting deadlines, staying on track or ahead of schedule with projects, and not allowing procrastination and excuses from distractions stand in your way of being efficient and effective in your work.
Also consider how you will feel when you have completed your project and have some leisure time to relax. This is especially true if you are an entrepreneur and have a successful product launch. This means you will have made considerable profit from that launch, enabling you to take some time off and enjoy some of the leisurely activities you enjoy with family/friends/loved ones. You could decide to go on a vacation or purchase an item you’ve always wanted with some of the profits you’ve made.
Think about how you will feel when you have the weight of the project off your shoulders and seeing that it was a major success. It will feel as if you just won the lottery or that your favorite sports team just won the championship. You will feel a sense of elation and joy from having completed the project and it turning out well, not just financially, but also in terms of the boost you will get in terms of reputation and credibility in your industry, leading to even greater profit opportunities in the future.
These are the thoughts you need to have whenever you feel self-doubt or distractions causing you to slow your work speed. Keep your focus on how you will feel after the project has been completed by the deadline and it turns out to be a major success for you and your business. Think of all of the benefits you will gain when you have completed the project successfully. Think of how you are capable of achieving this success and that you can achieve it without having to do that much if you stay on-time and on-course with your schedule. Think of how you don’t have to do anything extraordinary; all you have to do is to do the work you are fully capable of doing within the given timeline. You do that, and you can have great success and all of the benefits that go along with it.
Therefore, you have learned how focusing on the end result is key to keeping self-doubt and distractions from negatively impacting your work speed and quality. You have learned that focusing on the benefits you will gain from successfully completing a project on time or earlier can aid you in staying on-time or ahead of schedule when you face challenging or less-desirable parts of your project. You have learned that focusing on the feelings you will experience when you have completed a successful project can aid you in keeping focused on the task at hand and ensuring that you complete your project on time or ahead of schedule so you can experience those benefits and feelings as expected.
You have learned much information in this book about working efficiently and effectively and ensuring that procrastination and distractions don’t affect your work quality and speed. In the conclusion of this book, we will summarize much of what you have learned to ensure you keep it in mind and utilize it so that you will improve your work speed and quality so that you can experience the benefits and feelings of completing successful projects on time or earlier.

Conclusion
In this guide, you have learned that procrastination makes you work both slower and harder than you need to to create high-quality work. Whereas many people think that procrastination can help them to avoid parts of their job or their occupation they aren’t really fond of, it actually forces them to have to work harder and faster in order to make up for the time they lost by procrastinating. Working harder with fewer to no breaks and working faster to complete a project because you’re on a very strict time limit will likely lead to more mistakes and lower-quality work, which can damage your reputation, credibility, and profitability.
You’ve also learned that doubting your own abilities can lead to slower work. Many people want to take their time when working on projects that have a time frame of days, weeks, or even months to complete. While one should never rush to finish a project when it’s necessary to take your time to do high-quality work on it, many people use the longer time frame as an excuse to work at a slower pace than they actually need to in order to complete the work at a high level. They don’t want to appear as if they are doing sloppy work or don’t really care about the work they are doing by finishing before the allotted deadline. However, in today’s content-driven, fast-paced world, people are looking for quality work to be done as quickly as possible; it is no longer enough to take forever on a project to do quality work- one must be able to do high-quality work as quickly as possible to succeed.
You’ve learned that taking regular breaks and taking care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially are key to doing your best work. It is recommended by many experts to take 15-minute breaks every hour, meaning you should work 45 minutes per hour and rest 15 minutes per hour. Some people believe that you need to work nonstop on a project to do their best work, even if that means they neglect other areas of their life, such as their diet, their sleep, their exercise, their family/social life, and more. Neglecting other areas of your life to help you complete a project faster is not healthy for you, as it can cause your health to suffer. In addition, your mind will begin to wander during a project because of a lack of sleep, a lack of eating, and/or a lack of breaks away from the project. You could even start to resent the work you are doing because you are always working and doing nothing else, including being with loved ones and doing leisurely activities you enjoy doing.
You’ve learned that you can make a “game” out of getting things done promptly to help improve your work efficiency. You can track your start times, the time periods you take breaks, the times you resume a project, and the times you finish both tasks of a project and the project itself. You can track these times yourself via the clocks on your computer and/or mobile devices and recording them in a .txt or .xls/.xlsm file, or you can use an online timer to help you record the exact times you work and break from a project.
You’ve learned to estimate how quickly you think you will complete a task and an overall project before you begin, then see how close you come when you finish. If you beat your estimation, you can reward yourself by spending more time with loved ones, doing a leisurely activity, purchasing an item you’ve wanted, etc. If you missed your estimation, determine at what point or points in the project you were delayed and learn what caused the delay(s) so that you can take steps to improve your work efficiency in the future.
You’ve learned how to overcome distractions, both those you can and cannot control. Distractions such as social media accounts, email accounts, and mobile devices can be controlled via not logging onto such accounts or by muting the notifications you get each time you get a friend request, chat request, or email notification. You can mute the ringer on your mobile phone, as well as the notification of new text messages that come through.
Other distractions, such as those made by your spouse, your children, your pets, and/or your neighbors cannot be as easily controlled. You can talk with your spouse and children in an effort to help them realize why you need a quiet environment to do your best work; additionally, you can use earbuds or even cotton balls to block out some to most of the noise that they make if needed. As for your pets, you can attempt to keep them out of your work space, then choose to spend some time with them during your breaks. You can help to drown out noise from neighbors doing yard work or when your landline phone rings by using earbuds or cotton balls.
You’ve learned why staying on time or ahead of your project is essential to doing your best work. This will enable you to take those 15-minute breaks you’ve learned are essential to keeping your mind focused on your work and reducing the chances of making critical errors in your work. This will also enable you to not neglect other areas of your life as you work on tasks and projects so you can stay healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
You’ve also learned why focusing on the rewards and benefits you’ll receive after completing a project is key to helping you stay on or ahead of schedule and doing your best work. By focusing on the rewards, both monetary and non-monetary, you will receive after you complete a successful project and the feelings of joy and relief you will gain after you have completed a successful project will drive you to stay focused on your work and finishing your work as efficiently as possible. Doing this will improve your reputation and credibility with your boss, your peers, your customers, and/or your target market, no matter what industry you work in.

After reading this book, you should have a very clear idea of how to prevent procrastination from slowing down and negatively impacting your work. You should also know how to overcome various distractions that can lead to excuses of why you don’t complete more work in a set period of time. By following the information in this book, you should become more productive than you’ve ever been before and really get noticed as a person who produces high-quality work efficiently and effectively.

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