Month: October 2013

How to Hustle Hard

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Hustle is a word that has a variety of meanings based on its usage. In the street vernacular, hustle is often associated with selling drugs but it can be applied to any other money making venture. Selling t-shirts is a hustle, buying a product low wholesale and then flipping it from the back of your trunk for a higher price is a hustle, etc. Hustle is also used in the world of sports, usually someone chasing down a loose ball for instance or not giving up on a play defensively. In either case, hustle is essentially buckling down and putting in work, even if you have to make something out of nothing or go a unique route to accomplish it. I want to use the term to explore some concepts that will help you not only to make money with a side hustle but that can also be applied to any other goals or ventures that you may have in your life, from picking up girls to pursuing an education. These aren’t necessarily hard and fast rules on how to hustle but if you bring them into your own life, your success rate in whatever you do will probably climb a lot.

Have a Greater Goal in Mind

If you’re a student, you may have some idea of what you want to do after you finish school. For example, if your dream is to become a doctor that might be your greater goal or it might be a step on the path. Either way, it is really easy to get bogged down and lose sight of what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. You want to be a doctor, but you forget why you want to pursue that profession while you’re sitting in the library studying for an English exam. Having a greater goal propels you forward during the dark times or simply during the times when your focus is lacking.

Wanting to be a doctor is great but that can often be too vague for your mind to be inspired by. Maybe you really want to be chief or surgery or use the skills you learn as a doctor to treat those who lack access to proper medicine. Whatever the case may be, visualize and revisit each day what that underlying motivation is and how you’re going to get there from where you are now. You won’t want to put in the extra hours that it takes or fight through the pain, if you don’t have a clear sense of where you want to end up.

Break Down that Greater Goal into Smaller Steps

Having a greater goal in mind can point you in the direction you want to head but how will you actually get there? It’s kind of like standing on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and saying Europe’s over there…great, but what steps would you need to take to make it there? Greater goals give us hope but the smaller steps are what make our dreams a reality. Having smaller goals within the framework of your larger path helps to keep the dream alive and also gives you smaller checkpoints along the way that can help to measure if you’re on the right path.

If your goal is to create a successful website, that you can make a full-time income from, that could be considered a greater goal. However, you will need to break that greater goal down into things like marketing, generating revenue, creating content, etc. Those more general ideas can be broken down further and further until you get down to something like, “I will write one new article each day this week and email 10 other websites to ask if I could do a guest post to help build traffic.” That is something more specific and measurable. You can measure whether or not you wrote one new post each day this week and that is something that can help springboard you to a higher level towards accomplishing your major goal.

Always Learn More

Learning more and more about the world around you and whatever specific topic your specific goal pertains you will help keep you grounded and open you up to new ideas. For example, when I first started to try and get dates or pick up girls I was utterly clueless towards what I should do. I started reading a lot of advice put forth by various pick up artists and other guys and this helped me a lot. However, had I just stopped there I never would have made the identity-level shift, that allowed my confidence to grow ever higher. It was only when I started reading more philosophy, that things really fell into place for me, and I never looked back.

Too often we get caught up in fantasies and then these fantasies creep in to our mind, presenting themselves as our expectations as to how things should go. By constantly learning more, you have to revise your perspective on things, which helps you to be more fluid and open to the possibility that you have been doing things wrong. Learning more also helps to see the world as it really is, which allows you to solve your problems honestly.

Reading books, articles, and the like, will lead to your experimentation and exploration of new ideas and methods. Learn to stop completely pre-judging things based on how you believe it really is and try to learn how it actually is. Experiment with the ideas you pick-up, so that you can learn first-hand whether or not they are truly valuable to your cause or if you were wrong about that idea the whole time. Try to create connections between the things you read and experience and apply these new synthesized ideas to your life and how you will operate in the future.

Solve Problems by Getting to the Root Cause

There are many variables that lie just below the surface if you are willing to dig for them. Don’t misjudge a situation or a problem by concluding that what you initially suspect is anything more than a surface problem. For instance, if you feel lonely it isn’t because you are alone. It probably has to do with your ego and fears and the loneliness is just how it manifests itself. There are always deeper reasons and meanings behind why things happen and if you’re honest with yourself you can get closer to the truth. The more often you dig to the depths of situations, the stronger your mind will become and you can keep yourself aligned with the truth and keep yourself from deceiving yourself.

Take an Indirect Route toward Your Goal

Sometimes taking something head on can be disastrous. If you are out of shape and have a poor diet, the most direct path would be to overhaul your diet and start working out more. However, this is the path that most people take and it often fails. An indirect approach in that situation might be to work on your mind first, eliminating the triggers which cause you to overeat and building discipline so that working out just becomes a habit. Know that going direct isn’t always the most effective method in every situation. There are times when something is so entrenched and has so much power the only way to defeat it is by taking an indirect route and slowly encircling it. If you are not ready to face a certain challenge head-on yet, give yourself options and ways that you can slowly erode its power until you have the means to break down that last step towards your goal.

Learn How to Be Bored

Outside of work or school we often find ourselves with idle time that usually gets eaten up by distraction. It’s easy to get done with an eight hour shift and simply turn on the TV and zone out for the rest of the night. But where is that going to get you? There are plenty of distractions
that will take away our free time, if we let them. Take this time back and turn towards fulfilling one of the steps of your goals.  Use TV and movies as a treat for a job well-done. For instance, if you’ve gotten home from your day job all week long and then put in work on your goals afterwards, take one night out of the week the reward yourself and clear your mind. Just don’t sit there like a slug every night.

Let go of things and keep your mind clear of petty ego based problems. Emotions and negative thought patterns can wreak havoc on your life if you don’t recognize them for what they are and learn to move past them. Hanging on to these emotions and patterns will make you feel as if you need to escape from reality and hence look to distraction. For instance, if you try to get a girl’s number and she rejects you, let it go and don’t take it as a sign that you’re hopeless or no woman will ever love you. Instead, brush off the rejection but take a look at your approach, appearance, or even the words you spoke. Use what you learn for the next time you find yourself in such a situation. Don’t in that situation, fall back into drinking or entertainment to hide your wounds and never have to face rejection ever again, that’s a punk move.

Develop your focus. Focus is what will allow you to get through the boring steps necessary to reach your ultimate goal. Not everything can be fun or glorious. Goals take work and it isn’t always the most interesting thing in the world. If your focus is terrible, learn how to harness it over time. You may need to study a lot of books to accomplish your goal for example, but you can’t make yourself sit down and read. Why not start out with 15 minutes a day at first and work your way up to a heavier load? Remember, that small progressions are still progress so don’t discount these little steps along the way.

Everyone who wants to accomplish a goal needs some hustle in order to get it done. The problem is people get set on the wrong path or don’t have the clarity needed to make their hustle turn into something fruitful. By applying these principles to your own hustle you can increase your rate of success and use each victory as a stepping stone towards that ultimate goal you have.

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How to Get Your Ex-Girlfriend Back: She Moved On, Shouldn’t You?

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When a relationship ends it becomes very easy to second-guess the results, play Monday morning quarterback and convince yourself that had you only done this differently, she would have stayed. Maybe your reasoning rings true but the past has already gone and you find yourself in the position you are in now. It is a matter of fact in dating, that you will have an ex-girlfriend that you will want to get back from another guy or have her want you back when she has already moved on with her life. The situations are various i.e. she broke up with you (see: Following the No Contact Rule) or perhaps you broke up with her and now regret the decision to do so. Regardless of what the circumstances were, you now have the compulsive feeling to do something like make her jealous of you or to win her back fast and have things go back to the way they were.  When it all boils down to the base of your desires, can you honestly say that you want her to come back? Or is it really less about the actual relationship and more about your own ego clamoring to have what it has lost? For this post, I want to help you consider what it could actually mean to want to get back together with your ex-girlfriend, and that in most cases you end up chasing something that no longer exists because you feel bad or think it will make your life better.

I’m against getting back with your ex in most cases but if you still want her back, here is a program to help you with that. More information towards the bottom of this post.

When you’re in the mode of thought that you are certain that you want to rekindle a relationship with your ex, I know that those feelings can be immensely powerful and completely consume your thoughts. I’ve been in the same spot you have, as well as countless other guys, and the thing is that if you move on these thoughts tend to move on as well. It is really incredible how things completely change, if you add the ingredient of moving on and combining it with time. Girls who you convince yourself are your one and only, eventually fall from thought and you begin to question what was so special about them in the first place.

If you have recently broken up with your girlfriend, you really need to take some time to get your mind right before you make any decisions (Moving on From Your Ex-Girlfriend). A decision based on emotion is generally a poor one and can have you wondering what it is you were thinking once you’ve healed your heart. If you are a guy who still clamors for a girl he dated a long time ago, seriously move the fuck on. She wasn’t the idyllic flower you make her out to be in your mind and thinking so is going to make every other girl you meet, pale in comparison, thus screwing up your future dating prospects. You can’t be one of these guys who goes through life on some Great Gatsby type quest to get back his true love, who turns out to be a spoiled child, and not a woman worthy of loving.

See Things As They Are

Idealization and nostalgia about the past creep into your thoughts and cloud your judgment about what you truly want out of your life. It’s just like when older people think back to the ‘good old days’ when ‘things just worked better’, conveniently leaving out all of the things that sucked during that time period. Think back on your relationship with your ex-girlfriend honestly, take off the rose colored glasses, and ask yourself was it really that great? Your girlfriend might have been cool, but is there really not one more woman out of the 4 billion or so on this planet that could be an improvement? Did she cheat on you (don’t be a chump and try to get her back)? What were the honest faults of the relationship? (Signs a Relationship is Over)

Stop idealizing that things were all good, because they weren’t. If your girlfriend dumped you and you still think that things were going ‘really great’, trust me, they weren’t. She dropped you for a reason. You may just be completely oblivious. Keep in mind that nothing in life stays the same and really things aren’t supposed to. People change. You or your girlfriend changed enough for the relationship to be over. That is a major reason why reconciliation isn’t always such a good idea, as the personalities and circumstances that once had the two of you in love have shifted and aren’t going back to the way things used to be.

“Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.” –Marcus Aurelius

Break the Dependency Cycle

It’s no secret that love is like a drug. There have been published studies that show a striking similarity in the effects on the brain between someone who is in love and someone with an addiction. It feels so terrible after a break-up because you aren’t getting your fix. You have conditioned yourself while in a relationship with your girlfriend to expect certain things and when they happened you get a positive flood of emotions. Now that she is gone those stimuli aren’t being provided which makes you feel really down.

In essence, you may have relied on her to provide you with feelings of happiness, ignoring the fact that happiness (if such a term is valid) must come from within. Any time you rely solely on external influences whether they be people, drugs, food, or whatever to fuel your positive emotions you are going to experience a severe crash when they are suddenly taken away. If you are still hurting after a break-up, you should strongly consider a no-contact or if you can’t totally avoid her, an extremely limited contact policy with this girl. In order to start to let go of the past you have to let fresh wounds heal a bit, which is hard to do if you constantly talk to the person you desire most.

“…look to your own means, leave everything that isn’t yours alone. Make use of what material advantages you have, don’t regret the ones you were not allowed. If any of them is recalled, let go of them willingly, grateful for the time you had to enjoy them—unless you want to be like a child crying for her nurse or mother. After all, what difference does it make what a person is enslaved to, and cannot live without? You’re no different from a teenager mooning over a girl when you ache for your familiar haunts, your club, your old gang of friends and former way of life.”- Epictetus

Stop Being Afraid

Yes, underneath all of this longing for your ex-girlfriend lies a great deal of fear. If you are in a state of loneliness right now (How to Stop Feeling Lonely), your fear may be that you will end up alone or not find a girl as good as your ex. Both fears are unfounded. At some point in time, we all end up alone, but your life doesn’t have to be resigned to dating failures and pangs for the one who ‘got away’. You have to decide that you’re going to live the life that you want, you will improve yourself, and find other women who will fit with who you are and who you want to be in the future.

If you are trying to get your ex-girlfriend back from another guy, your ego is once again rearing its ugly head. Your deep seated fear may be that he is better than you and thus your value is lowered. You may want some revenge on your ex, which is your ego showing itself in the form of pride. This type of fear also shows up in guys who want to make their exes jealous of them post-break up. There is this bizarre idea of one person winning after a break up, based on whether they have upgraded or downgraded in terms of their next partners or current lifestyles. It is really just shallow nonsense and you do not have to and should not play these games. (Lucid Dreaming for life improvement)

You can’t hide from these fears by masking over them. If you’re in pain, let yourself feel it, don’t overreact to it but definitely don’t cover it up either. It’s okay to be hurt after a relationship. You can feel betrayed, disappointed, jealous, or any other feeling but the key is to not get bogged down in them for too long. Ultimately, you are responsible for letting things continue to bother and hurt you. There needs to come a time where you let go these negative feelings and focus on the life you still have to lead. (Shift towards something more constructive like a new workout or creating art).

“The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material. But this is going to take some sweat to accomplish.”-Epictetus

What has Really Changed?

Some thing or many things caused an end to your relationship. Let’s say that you do get back together with your ex-girlfriend, what has changed for the better? Did the time apart fix your issues? Doubtful. Are you both on the same page as to what those issues were? If not it’s going to be a really tough go. The simple truth may be that the two of you drifted too far from the original path you met on and now are heading in diverging directions. Don’t go back to an ex-girlfriend simply because you thought she was the best girl you’ve dated and now your options seem limited. That’s just lazy and quite frankly unfair to the both of you. Most relationships you have aren’t going to work out, learn from the mistakes and apply them with your future girls. Repeating a past mistake isn’t going to correct it, so be completely honest and clear-headed with your decision.

If You Really Still Want Her Back…

Some guys find that even after they’ve prepared themselves emotionally to move on and had other women in their lives, they still believe that she was the right fit for them.

If it’s the case that you’re in a good spot emotionally, and you still feel like she is the one, perhaps you consider a program to help rekindle things between the two of you. The Magic of Making Up is a full ebook program designed to assist in mending broken relationships. Over 50,000 people have given it a try, visit here to read successful user testimonials and further information about making up with your ex. Here is a brief  video presentation from the book’s author:

 

The Magic of Making Up, comes with a full 60-day money back guarantee. So, if you are so inclined to try it out, there’s nothing to lose!

Conclusion

If you’re reading this post, I know that you may be really gung-ho at the moment to get your ex back. Yes, you might call her or send her a text and then she comes over and things seem really great….but then what? Chances are she has moved on, either emotionally or physically with another guy. Accept it. It’ll hurt like hell but just get through the pain. I’ve had girls that I’ve wanted back too and girls who wanted me back, in neither case was it really a good option for both parties and if it’s not good for the both of you then it simply won’t work. It’s difficult at times to get through that emotional hailstorm but it does eventually pass and you meet new girls who take the place of old memories. If you think you want to pursue your ex-girlfriend, ask yourself do I really want to or am I just being emotional?

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How to Get Ripped Abs

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There are not only an untold number of methodologies but also an untold number of reasons for guys to exercise. Honestly, isn’t one of the biggest one to get the chicks? Even if that is your surface level goal, getting into shape has profound effects on your confidence, discipline, outlook on life, and that’s not even to mention all of the long term health benefits. Guys who are athletes obviously train to optimize their sport specific results, even if that isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing form their bodies could take. Many other guys go for the traditional bodybuilding training, however, to transform themselves closer to that ‘Greek Ideal’. This body comes with a solid muscle base and lower body fat percentage, highlighted of course by those six pack abs. Some guys see pictures of Arnold or Frank Zane and think that this is their ideal to have that insane size that is symmetrical and also tapered. Other guys see themselves in the aesthetic construct of guys like Zyzz (RIP), Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or Zac Efron in Neighbors and get the motivation to train based off of that. Whatever your case or motivation may be I don’t think there are many guys who would dislike having a set of ripped abs proudly displayed on their midsections. The question is how does one go about getting this ripped look? What kind of diet and exercise program should one follow? In this post, I want to lay out my own current strategy to get in fantastic shape and have a great six pack to go with it.

Diet

The diet is the most important aspect of undergoing a body transformation. You can train all you want but if you aren’t eating right, you will never maximize your muscle gain or your fat loss, in essence you will stagnate for long periods of time.

My diet to start off with is pretty basic. I am not following a strictly low carb diet that would induce ketosis and lead to extreme fat loss because I want to keep up my training schedule, which requires carbohydrates to be able to get through. I want to lose fat at a slow pace (0.5-1.5 lbs per week) so that I can retain as much of my muscle mass as possible and potentially gain some. Losing fat while gaining muscle is a very difficult thing to do but it can be done, you simply won’t be doing either at the most optimal level and since I haven’t trained very much in a while I can expect gains simply by starting back up.

In order to accomplish this, I am taking a carb cycling approach to my diet. This means on days that I work out my diet will be higher in carbohydrates and on my two off days I will keep it under 100g of carbohydrates per day and possibly under 75g. My schedule looks like this:

Sunday- Off Day (Low Carb)

Monday- Weights & Cardio (Higher Carb)

Tuesday- Weights & Cardio (Higher Carb)

Wednesday- Weights & Cardio (Higher Carb)

Thursday- Cardio (Moderate Carb)

Friday- Off Day (Low Carb)

Saturday- Weights (Moderate Carb but with extra carbs post-workout)

This is the diet I have followed for the first week and so far it seems to meet my goals of not losing muscle, losing fat slowly, and not hindering my energy levels especially during workouts. I have been working out for over a week and a half but didn’t start concentrating on diet for the first 3-4 days. I am still 2-3 lbs lighter and have a noticeably leaner look than I did when I started the workout plan.

I have yet to count calories and I don’t plan on doing so for a while. My initial focus is to ‘eat clean’ and to keep my macronutrients within an acceptable range. Most meals are kept quite simple with a protein source, a good carbohydrate, and a green vegetable (spinach, broccoli). If I can keep a majority of my meals this basic, I can avoid eating junk food, easily cycle my carbohydrates, and plan my meals in advance.

My definition of eating clean is as follows:

-No Fast food or sweets

– Low Sugar

– On low carb days substitute grains for greens. Also, bump up the protein and fat intake.

-Stay away from liquid calories. Water and skim milk (on high carb days for protein shakes) are what I will be drinking.

-Stay away from heavily processed foods

 

Protein

My protein sources are pretty consistent each day and I simply up my portions on days when I need more. Chicken, tilapia, tuna, salmon, eggs, whey protein, skim milk, beans, and nuts. Those foods make up the majority of my protein intake. The chicken and fish is either steamed or grilled, never fried. Also, lean red meat is acceptable but it’s probably one meal out of the week if that.

Obviously, protein is going to be the key factor to preserving and growing muscle mass while changing my diet and training program. Again, I haven’t counted calories or nutrients beyond my low carb days, just a rough estimation of how much I should eat per meal. I generally keep my meat portions between 8-12 ounces which ensures that I’m getting more than enough protein without going overboard with the calories. I supplement with whey protein powder which I mix with skim milk or add two scoops to water on my low carb days. I want to keep my muscles fed throughout the day and the whey helps me accomplish that.

Carbohydrates

Low carb diets are great for losing a maximum amount of fat in a minimal amount of time. While I am including carb cycling in my diet, I am not going low carb because it would be detrimental to my muscle gains and I am under no deadline to lose fat. Slow and steady is my plan. Since the body can break down carbohydrates quickly and use them for energy, especially during times of stress (workouts), I definitely want them around so my body doesn’t decide to break down muscle in order to fuel me through the day. Also, as soon as I got off a strictly low carbohydrate diet I would probably gain a bunch of weight back, which would suck.

Carbohydrates also help the body to recover and allow me to have much more energy in order to train both harder and longer. For the purposes of my diet, my carbohydrate sources come from the following foods: potatoes, brown rice, wheat bread, oats, veggies, beans, nuts. On the low carb days, I definitely bump up the amount of veggies I eat, replacing potatoes or brown rice with spinach, broccoli, romaine lettuce.

Fats

In order to lose fat, I am NOT going on a low fat diet. My fat intake will stay between 15-25% (estimates) of my total calories each day. The reasoning behind this is that low fat diets can inhibit testosterone function which is a no-no for my purposes because I want my muscle and my hormones in optimal range. Honestly, the biggest thing for me is to get my fats from sources that aren’t fast food or other fried disasters. My fat comes mainly from these foods: eggs, nuts, fish, olive oil, peanut butter, and some from chicken (skinless).

 

Sample Diet (High Carb Day)

Meal 1: 4 Scrambled Eggs with salsa (add black beans for more calories plus protein and carbs) and 1 cup of oats

Meal 2: 1 scoop of whey protein powder mixed with 1 cup of skim milk

Meal 3: Chicken with broccoli and brown rice

Meal 4: 1 scoop of whey protein powder mixed with 1 cup of skim milk

Meal 5: Peanut Butter Sandwich on whole wheat bread (This definitely adds calories and fat but should work nicely for my purposes of not dropping weight too fast).

Meal 6 (Post-workout): Chicken or fish with 3 small russet potatoes and spinach or salad.

This sample day works out well because all of the parts are in place to make adjustments easily. If I lose weight too fast I can easily up my calories by eating a bit more but not including junk food. If I find that after a while of losing fat I am gaining some back then I can easily cut by replacing with one more low carb day or making some minor adjustment.

 

Sample Low Carb Day

Meal 1: 2 scoops of whey protein in water

Meal 2: 5-6 scrambled eggs cooked in olive oil with cheese and salsa added. (Remember, I bump up fat intake on these days).

Meal 3: Chicken with Romaine Lettuce salad (mostly use fat free Italian dressing but may use ranch if I need the calories)

Meal 4: 2 scoops of whey protein in water

Meal 5: Fish (salmon most likely for the fats) with lots of broccoli or spinach.

Meal 6 (if necessary): 1 scoop of whey in water with a slice of whole wheat bread –OR- cook up a can of tuna with seasoned with lemon and pepper and add some onion and cheese.

Cheat Meals

I haven’t done a cheat meal yet but it can be beneficial to have one cheat meal a week where you don’t go crazy but eat something that is outside of the normal diet. Most likely, I’ll do one day where I simply go pretty high on the carbs just to re-feed my muscles but that might only occur once every two weeks or so.

Vitamins

You may have noticed that I did not include fruits with this diet. I am not opposed to fruits completely, I will have a banana a few times per week. However, I tend to stay away from too many fruits and will drink no fruit juices because the sugar gets easily stored as fat. Green vegetables such as spinach and broccoli are rich in either Vitamins A and C. Romaine lettuce is high in Vitamin K. Potatoes have lots of potassium. So my dietary needs are being met and I supplement with a good multi-vitamin each day. I do eat fruit, simply not every single day.

Supplements

I take the following supplements:

-Multi-vitamin

-Whey Protein

-Creatine

-Fish Oil

That’s it for right now and probably for the rest of the process. You don’t need as many supplements as some companies will try to claim, most of your results come from four factors (weights, cardio, rest, diet). Supplements are there to do just that supplement your routine. Some can make you marginally better but they aren’t going to do squat if the rest of your plan is screwed up.

 

The Workout

For the time being, I will be working out at home (Updated: Back in the Gym using Visual Impact Cardio instead of Insanity and lifting barbells also). For my resistance training, I will be using dumbbells and an Iron Gym pull up bar. This limits me to the type of training I could be doing (i.e. heavier lifts) but it should work just fine as there are plenty of dumbbell exercises for each muscle group and I can always add more weight as I progress. Also, I won’t be doing any leg specific days with weights but I will get work on my legs by using the Insanity/Insanity: The Asylum hybrid workout as my cardio.

My schedule looks like this:

Sunday– Off (maybe a walk around the neighborhood)

Monday- Arms/Shoulders (morning), Insanity (night)

Tuesday- Chest/Back/Abs (morning), Insanity (night)

Wednesday- Arms/Shoulders (morning), Insanity (night)

Thursday- Insanity

Friday- Off

Saturday- Chest/Back/Abs

What I like about this schedule is that I get 4 weight lifting workouts per week as well as 4 cardio workouts per week by using Insanity. Monday-Wednesday, I separate the two types of workouts to ensure some recovery occurs and a maximal effort is given (got this idea from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding).

I usually substitute the upper body exercises that are in Insanity by doing other cardio movements since I have already lifted weights during that morning. I scheduled Friday and Sunday as off days and designated them as low carb days because it works best with my schedule. Also, the Thursday-Sunday portion allows for plenty of recovery from those first three days where I double up the workouts and may workout 1.5-2 hours total.

The importance of rest and recovery cannot be understated. Getting enough sleep each night will allow my body to grow and recover. Also, the body releases a majority of hormones through certain sleep cycles, meaning if you don’t get the sleep you won’t get as much of the necessary hormones. Rest isn’t being lazy, it lets your body hit an optimal state to maximize the results.

Consistency really is a key component in getting in great shape, both in terms of diet and exercise. Even really disorganized routines can produce some results if done consistently but they won’t be maximum gains and people will eventually stagnate. Having an exact plan laid out with the ability to adjust it to your own personal needs is essential and can save a lot of unnecessary guess work. It is easier to stick to a well-thought out plan than trying to figure things out for yourself and cobbling something together..

Rusty Moore is a fitness trainer who has two awesome workout programs for men called, Visual Impact Cardio and Visual Impact Muscle Building. Both of these workout ebooks have been created to get guys the lean and muscular look.. I have the cardio program myself and let me tell you, it is definitely a challenge. I’ve also read the Muscle Building program (which includes a fat loss portion), so that might be what most guys would want to go with. Especially, those who need to pack on the lean muscle mass like Achilles. Plus, the whole 60 day money back guarantee is  a pretty sweet deal.

It is a downloadable program and is not available in stores, so it can be started right away. Visual Impact Muscle Building comes in three phases which lasts for two months a piece. The first phase pretty much helps to build a muscular foundation which is then further refined by the next two phases of the workout. In order to get an Achilles-like body, it would probably be a good idea to repeat Phase 1 of Visual Impact twice, in order to build up mass within four months time and then use the other two phases to start to chisel out a ripped body. This way, the full program is spread out more and it would give someone more time to have their bulking diet to take effect and get serious muscle gains.

Here to Check Out Visual Impact Muscle Risk Free for 60 Days!

How to Keep Yourself on the Right Track

Too often people solely focus on diet and exercise in order to achieve some physical change. That’s great and also wildly important but they also tend to completely ignore the psychological aspects of changing parts of their lives drastically. Think about how many times you ate junk food or sat on the couch merely out of habit. You could have worked out or eaten better and you logically knew you should have but you just didn’t ‘feel’ like it. The problem is that if you decide to undertake a new workout and diet without addressing your bad habits and mind states, you will most likely fail in your pursuit once the initial motivation wears off or you become busier than you had anticipated. I am going to lay out some ideas and helpful tips that can help to stay committed to undergoing a body transformation to get those ripped abs.

Change Your Environment

One way to avoid eating junk food is to not keep any in your house. If you can’t see it, then you probably won’t eat it. This also applies to other daily distractions that may keep you mindlessly occupied instead of hitting your workout goals for the day. For example, consider deactivating Facebook if you spend a lot of time on that. Think about the things in your life that can hinder your progress or derail you totally and figure out how you can remove or lessen that negative influence.

Have a Plan

All the words I wrote up above? That is a plan. Well, more of an outline for the purposes of this post but I do have a more detailed plan for how I want to achieve my ripped look and for what changes I need to make in my lifestyle in order to achieve that goal. A basic plan can start small, maybe, simply a workout plan that you do for a month or so to install it as a habit in your life. After, you’ve got the workout part down pay, then maybe you address your eating habits in a more serious way. If you aren’t good a sticking to plans then maybe a complete lifestyle overhaul all at once isn’t a good plan for you. Maybe you need to break down your negative patterns step by step. (See: Exercising but Not Losing Weight, Spring Break Workout Plan)

Meditation

Meditation is a great habit to pick up. It is simply focusing your mind for 20 minutes or so and clearing out all of the thoughts that are racing through your head. Doing this really helps me to relax and focus on what I truly want to do instead of whatever my mind is worried about at that particular time.

Motivation

Motivation comes and goes, however, you can find sources of inspiration each day to help keep you on track. I like to download motivational podcasts and speeches and listen to them during the day. You might find some cool motivation videos on YouTube that can get you psyched up before your workout. Maybe you have someone who’s physique you admire and you can read an interview with them about how they achieved their goals. Whatever it is, make sure you have a steady stream of positive energy coming into your life, it really does make a difference.

Consistent Not Perfect

Understand that you will make mistakes and occasionally miss workouts. That’s okay. The biggest factor in affecting a positive change is being consistent, not being perfect. If you want to get in shape then you need to stick with it, so don’t let one bad day ruin your whole week, or a week ruin a whole month. If you fall off the wagon, get back on.

Conclusion

Okay, there is my post on getting ripped abs. I plan on updating and revising it as I see fit and as time goes along. I will take the above information and utilize it for the time being but I definitely will make adjustments if my fat loss is too slow or if I drop weight at a pace faster than I’d like to. I’m really like the process so far, I have tons of energy and I’m really focused on giving it my all so that I can transform my body. It’s hard work but it is definitely worth it.

 

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How to Find Niche Website Ideas

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Making money online can seem like a daunting process to those who have never built a website before in their lives. Don’t worry yourself too much, because I am going to walk you through this adventure step by step and try to help you avoid the pitfalls of this passive income game that I’ve learned through first-hand experience. The singular most important part of this whole process however, is to make sure that you choose the correct niche market to enter and to choose a proper domain name. Choosing the wrong niche or not having a clear idea on where to take an idea to will yield you little to no results and leave you frustrated. So, with that in mind, this next post in our series is going to explore the idea of how to get ideas for a niche website and start the planning process. Read here on How to Set Up a Niche Website Step by Step

A great idea for a niche website should be one with few competitors, one that has the potential for lots of traffic, and finally one that has a chance to be built upon further.

Create a List of Ideas

Grab a sheet of paper or open up a word processor and start listing any idea you have for a potential website or a potential topic to blog about. You don’t need to be specific at this time, just build this list until you have 20 or so potential targets. Examples could include: Fashion, sports, cell phones, running shoes, tablet computers, etc.

Now, those ideas on the list are probably very general broad terms searches. On this large scale let’s see who dominates these sorts of general categories:

Sports- ESPN

Fashion- Vogue, other major fashion magazines

Cell phones- Sprint, Best Buy, AT&T

You get the idea. We aren’t going to try and compete on these major broad term search terms but we are going to use them as an example of how you can dig deeper and shift your focus to something more competitive.

Write About What You Enjoy

On that list, if you wrote it out, how many of those ideas about things you enjoy personally? A niche website doesn’t have to be about something that you enjoy but it helps the process a lot. I’ve built other sites and have written articles for other people on topics that I honestly had little interest in and getting the work done was like a chore for me. While this website isn’t a niche website, I really enjoy writing and creating new ideas to share for it and because I haven’t limited myself in the topics I can choose from I can write for as long as I feel like. If this is your first rodeo, then it might be a good idea to get the hang of the process by finding an idea that interests you and that you wouldn’t mind writing about in the future.

Solve a Problem, Offer a Solution or Aid

People are constantly searching for ways to solve their everyday problems. What a good niche site does is inform them on how they can go about solving a problem (free blog posts) and then offers a way to help aid them or outright solve the problem (product or service). Some things will naturally get a lot of traffic but make no money. You can have a funny meme picture on your website that gets 100,000 views in a day but you probably won’t make very much money or none at all off of it. You have all of these people coming to your site in order to alleviate boredom NOT to solve a problem. You need to really think about and research different problems that people face from each of your niche ideas and determine if there is a way to ultimately monetize that. If not, then the niche isn’t the one for you.

Build Around a Proven Product

In the internet marketing world, niche websites are generally built around a product or type of product. In the case of our cell phone idea, this would be a review site of the best smart phones or something like that. When people buy products online they are looking for information about those products including the features and what sets them apart from their competitors. If you can find a niche, around a specific type of product and get some good traffic going, you can then make a good deal of money through affiliate links that link to that product.

How this works in practice with our cell phone idea. Topics to write about could include:

Smart Phone Reviews (Individual phone model reviews)

Best Smart Phones Under $200

Best Smart Phones for Teens

Best New Apps

For each of those posts you would write a full article and include a link to those particular cell phone’s product page on Amazon (if you’re enrolled in their affiliate program)

You continue to write these blog posts that target smaller questions and searches within that larger niche. (Note: Don’t actually do a cell phone website unless you’ve got a really unique idea, it’s a really crowded field with fierce competition.) Also, you cannot buy a domain name and use a company’s name for instance, ‘buyapplecellphonesforreallycheap’, is copyright infringement because it uses the Apple name without permission.

You can gather further ideas for your niche by heading over to Amazon or going on forums about your topic to look for ideas about what people are buying and what they are talking about. Using those two sources you can get a good idea of what kind of product you can link to from your site and plenty of ideas in regards to what you should write about.

Go for the Low Hanging Fruit

This means that you should try to find and explore a niche which has little competition and thus is ripe for the taking. I know of many marketers that go after something in the fitness niche but too often it’s in regards to how to lose fat or put on muscle fast. Both of which have plenty of traffic but lots of competition. Meanwhile, I’ve seen other fitness orientated site which were built around specific types of sports supplements which probably averaged around 1,000 searches per month but were easy to rank for and found an eager buyer looking for information. Try to find a small segment of the market that isn’t being paid very much attention to and you can be become the person who addresses every single aspect of that niche and get all the customers for yourself.

There are some terms that you should be familiar with if you are going to run your own niche website and they are short-tail and long-tail keywords. Search engine searches are based on the keywords that users type in when they are looking for something. A search term such as ‘best diet’ is considered a short-tail keyword, it is both a compact and highly competitive keyword. However, most search terms are long-tail keywords in which the user is getting more specific with the results they desire. An example of a long-tail keyword would be ‘best diet to lose fat in three months’.

Long-tail keywords are the key to finding a way to be profitable in niches. While you may not be competitive for a really high search volume keyword like fat loss, you certainly write blog posts that target the long-tail keywords such as ‘fat loss diet plan for men vegetarians’. Having 50 or so of these smaller target blog posts allows you to encircle the more competitive keywords and syphon some of the search traffic they never think to reach. A good way to find long-tail keywords is to start typing phrases that relate to your niche in Google and start writing down what the keyword suggestion menu is telling you. Sometimes, you really hit a home run.

Don’t Paint Yourself into a Corner

I like to choose niches that have plenty of topics to write about or that I can easily expand into other related topics once I’ve built some traffic and morph it into a larger authority site. Having a niche site about windshield wiper blades might be able to make a bit of money but it would be pretty tedious and how much can you really write about them?

Picking a narrow niche might work well to get some search engine traffic but will it make you that much money? It could if it’s the right niche, however, you might have nowhere to expand the site after that and you’ve pretty much reached the limit for that site. I like to have the goal of at least writing 50 blog posts over time for my initial niche idea and then writing related topics to expand my reach and potential profit.

These are just some of the ways you can come up with an idea for your first niche website. Take your time with this part because it can mean all of the difference between having a steady passive income each month or having your affiliate account sit at zero each and every day.

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How to Make Money with a Niche Website

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In my last post about creating passive income, I gave a general overview of how you could start to make money online, mostly through working for other people. However, I also mentioned the creation of your own ‘niche’ website as a great way to make cash. Building your own website is probably the best way to either start your journey towards entrepreneurship or simply pay off the bills every month by having some amount of money deposited into your bank account each month. Believe me, it’s a great feeling when you know each month you’re going to receive some amount of money from work you did three or four years ago! This process is not always the easiest and usually success doesn’t come overnight, however, if you dedicate yourself towards learning what to do and sticking to it you can begin to generate substantial passive income for yourself. It may be a small amount at first but remember that the sky is the limit in terms of earning potential. With this post, I want to lay out the basics of building a niche site from scratch to set the stage for future articles that will delve deeper into the information you need to know to hit the ground running.

What is a niche website?

A niche market[1] is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. (Source: Wikipedia)

So a niche website is that definition in website form. For example, if you build a website about dogs, you are in the ‘dog niche’. Meaning, your website will be exclusively about dogs and dog related products.

Niche vs. Authority Websites

Ok, sticking with our example about starting a website about dogs, an authority site would be a website that encompasses multiple aspects about dogs from how to adopt dogs to dog training.

A niche website about dogs could be about simply dog training and nothing else. See the difference?

Micro vs. Macro Niche Sites

A niche website can be broken down further into smaller niches within the more general niches, this is referred to as a ‘micro niche’. So, a micro niche site for dog training could be something along the lines of ‘dog training for ugly dogs with low self esteem’….haha that’s a really micro site and would be worthless, but you get the idea.

Now that those kinds of questions are out of the way….

How do you Make Money from a Website?

There is a multitude of ways that one could monetize a website and if you can generate traffic (more on this later) you surely make a little something, even if you have yet to optimize you site. Let’s take a look at some of the most common ways you can make money from your website.

Advertising

The most popular and probably the most lucrative options for websites (at least initially) is by signing up for Google Adsense. Google Adsense is an advertising system that I’m sure you’re aware of, and as a website owner you can places ads on your website that earn you money each time someone clicks on an ad.  Adsense is the first way I started to make money when I launched my first website a few years back and it continues to bring in revenue to this day. Some websites have higher click through rates than others so niche selection can be important if this is going to be a main source of getting paid.

Beyond Adsense, there are other services that offer advertisements, especially in-textual advertisements. I’ve used these types of ads and honestly they don’t generate very much income, even when you have heavy traffic, as the amount per click is usually pennies.

Another option for advertising is selling advertising space on your website to companies who are relevant to your niche. You can work it out so that they pay you a lump sum each month for the privilege of advertising on your website. This will only become an option once you have some serious traffic built up but can be a great source of revenue.

Affiliate Sales

Before the internet, if you wanted to sell products you had to come up with one on your own or at least have some start-up capital to become a wholesaler. Nowadays, if you have a website you can sell other peoples products either directly on your site or in the form of an affiliate link. Affiliate links take the traffic that your website generates and sends it to someone else’s product or sales page, so that the traffic can hopefully make a purchase.

The great thing about being an affiliate is that your only job is to promote the product and you can sit back and collect the revenue. For each sale you generate, you will receive a portion of the profit, while the creator of that product deals with the customer service and shipment.

There are many sites which offer signups to become affiliates. Clickbank is a popular website that deals mostly in the realm of digital product sales like ebooks on how to lose weight for example. There are also places like Linkshare and Pepperjam who handle the affiliate programs for major corporations such as Apple.

Amazon.com has a very popular affiliate program called Amazon Associates. It offers associates a certain percentage of the sales (usually 6.5% to start, I think) for any item a person from your website buys in their entire store. So for example, if you have a website about dog training and you link to a book on Amazon about training dogs and a person clicks your link and ends up buying a watch instead, you still get paid! Many niche sites are built strictly around promoting products on Amazon and letting the profits roll in. Unfortunately, some states are no longer allowed in the Amazon Associates program (including mine L ), which sucks because it leaves a lot of potential money on the table, so check to see if yours is included in the ban (a majority aren’t). You can still find other affiliate programs that will work even if Amazon is not an option, you just have to look for them.

Selling Your Own Product/Service

There are many niche sites that end up going the advertising and affiliate routes but find that often what brings in the big bucks is selling their own product or service directly. For instance, if you decide to build a fitness website you might consider your own ebook training program about ‘how to lose fat fast’ or if you’re a personal trainer you might consider selling your own coaching services by the hour or something like that. This can be a goldmine and the start to your own business if you play your cards right.

Donations

Yep, you can even monetize your site by having a button for people to donate through PayPal or some other service. This is really only an effective strategy if you provide people with lots of free value and they truly appreciate the effort or advice you have given them. So if you create a site about iPhone cases, then it probably won’t be a very profitable option for you, so I’d stick with the affiliates and ads in that scenario.

Where do I Create a Niche Website?

There is a difference between a free site and a hosted domain that you paid for beyond just the fact that you paid for one and not the other. That difference is the fact that with free blogs you are limited as to what you can do by that services terms and conditions as well as their customization options.

Free Blogs

You can go to WordPress.org right now and start a blog for free. However, you cannot put up Adsense ads directly on your free blog (maybe you can now but it used to take some coding skills to make it happen and it was against the rules). I think you’re allowed affiliate links as well but overall your options are limited.

Google’s blogger features the implementation of Adsense so if you can build the traffic to your free blog you might make a bit of money off of the advertisements.

Your free blog will also have the address bar issue which doesn’t look all that attractive if you are trying to build an actual business or long-term revenure….’yoursitename’.wordpress.com or ‘yoursitename’.blogger.com looks a whole lot less proper than ‘yoursitename’.com. Plus, the self-hosted websites seem to do better in search engine rankings which means more traffic for you and potentially a whole lot of money.

Hosted Websites

In order to have your own personal website you must register a domain name and buy a hosting plan from a service provider. A domain name will run you about 15-20 bucks a year to register but you can usually find some really good deals for your hosting plan that will save you a bunch of money. I use Hostgator to register and host all of my websites. I bought a hosting plan from them that allows me to create as many websites as I want. If you want to run a website, you will have to spend money to register the domain and for the hosting plan (hint: most hosting plans are under $10 a month, mine was like 5 or something ridiculous like that. Seriously, it’s like buying a drive-thru meal each month, without getting fat). Treat is like an investment and recoup your initial outlay as soon as it’s feasible; my hosting plan has paid for itself and then some within a short amount of time.

Final Thoughts

This has been a very basic overview of what niche websites are and how you can utilize them to make passive income. Later posts in this series will cover specifics on how to choose a niche, domain names, how to set up a website, free plugins, how to build traffic, etc. I’m going to try to break all of this stuff down for you guys to the best of my ability. This is a personal development blog, so I figure that I should kick some of my knowledge about making money online in between my other topics. So stay tuned.