In this blog post, I’ll be presenting you the summary of this book and also I’ve embedded a mindmap explainer video for visual learners.

I hope you’ll love this.

The fundamentals

The power of atomic habits

Aggregation of marginal gains: If you get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up 37 times better at the end of the year (also inverse is true).

Habits are the compound interest of self-development.

Your outcome is a lagging measure of your habits.

You need to break through the plateau of latent Potential or the valley of disappointment.

Focus on systems:

• Goals are about the results you want to achieve, systems are the processes that lead to those results.
• Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress
• When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.

How habits shape your identity?

Behind every system of actions is a system of beliefs. Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.

True behavioral change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.

With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you believe is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are. There is an internal pressure to maintain your self-image and behave in a certain way that is consistent with your beliefs.

If habits contradict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs and to upgrade or expand your identity.

The two-step process to change your identity

The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior.

New identities require new evidence.

A 2-step process for identity shift:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be
   • What do you stand for?
   • Who do you wish to become?
   • What are your principles and values?
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins
   • Once you decide you want to be a type of person, perform small actions congruent with it
   • If your desired identity is a “healthy individual”. For every action you perform ask yourself “Would a healthy individual performs this?”
   • Does this behavior help me to become the person I wish to be?
   • Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?
   • Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good

How to build better habits?

Why does your brain build habits?

A habit is a behavior, that’s been repeated enough times to become automatic.

Habits are mental shortcuts learned from the experience of solving problems. It is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.

The science of how habits work

It’s a 4-step process:

1. Cue: The mind is analyzing your internal and external environment for hints where the rewards are located. Cue is the first indication that we are close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
2. Craving: Motivational force or desire behind every habit. Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state
3. Response: The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it. It also depends upon your ability. The response delivers a reward.
4. Reward: The purpose of rewards is to satisfy the cravings and become associated with the cue. Rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward-detector.

How to create good habits?

• Cue – Make it obvious
• Craving – Make it attractive
• Response – Make it easy
• Reward – Make it satisfying

How to break bad habits?

• Cue – Make it invisible
• Craving – Make it unattractive
• Response – Make it difficult
• Reward – Make it unsatisfying

1st law: Make it obvious

If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. Carl Jung says – “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you call it fate”.

Two most common cues are time and location.

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Habit stacking

Tie your desired behavior to something you already do each day.

This allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next.

Here are some examples:

• After I take my bath, I will meditate for 10 minutes
• After I meditate for 10 minutes, I will write my to-do list for the day
• After writing my to-do list, I’ll immediately start working on my first task

Motivation is overrated; Environment often matters more

People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.

The context is the cue: The cues that trigger a habit can start out very specific, but over time your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding that behavior.

One space one use. Whenever possible avoid mixing the context of one habit with another.

The secret to self-control

Disciplined people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. They spend less time in tempting situations.

The most effective way to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

Make the cues to your good habits, visible and cues to your bad habits invisible.

2nd law: Make it attractive

How to make a habit irresistible?

If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive.

Dopamine is not only released when you experience pleasure but also when you anticipate it.

Temptation Bundling: Create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want.

You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.

Examples

• After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need)
• After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want)

The role of family and friends

1. The close
   • We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
   • The closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits
2. The many
   • Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself, you’ll rise together.
   • Growth and change are no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers, we are musicians, we are cyclists.
   • The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual
   • When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
3. The powerful are those whom you admire and respect

How to find and fix bad habits?

Understand the underlying motives of human beings

• Conserve energy
• Obtain food and water
• Find love and reproduce
• Connect and bond with each other
• Win social acceptance and approval
• Reduce uncertainty
• Achieve status and pride

A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.

Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.

• Win social acceptance and approval = Posting on Instagram
• Reduce uncertainty = Searching on Google
• Achieve status or pride = Playing video games

Habits are all associations. These associations determine whether the habits are worth repeating or not.

Whenever a habit successfully addresses a motive, you develop a craving to do it again. Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings.

You simply practice associating your habits with something you enjoy.

The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them.

3rd law: Make it easy

How long to form a new habit?

Long-term potentiation: Strengthening of connection between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activities.

In learning a brand new skill, great difficulty in felt, because the channels through which each sensation has to pass have not become established.

Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step. This comes in when the non-conscious mind takes over after effortful conscious practice.

Habits form on frequency, not time. It’s not “How long it takes to build a new habit?” but “How many it takes to build a new habit?”

The law of least effort

The brain is hardwired to conserve energy whenever possible. When presented with two options, people will naturally gravitate towards the option that requires the least amount of work.

One of the most effective ways to reduce friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.

Prime your environment by setting up the essential things you need for executing the habit ahead of time. It reduces friction.

If you see most of the habit-forming products, they are good at reducing friction from your life.

It is also remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behaviors. Like app uninstalling, math problems instead of snooze, etc.

2-minute rule

Habits can be completed in just a few seconds, but they can shape the actions you take for minutes or hours afterward. These little choices stack up setting the trajectory for how you spend the rest of the time.

Scale every difficult habit to their 2-minute versions and be consistent.

Even if it’s two minutes, you’re casting votes to your new identity.

How to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible?

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way of locking in future behavior to encourage good habits and restrict you from bad ones.

Examples of commitment devices:

• Outlet timer that plugs off the router when it’s 10p.m
• Blackout curtains for bedroom
• Getting a week’s worth of veggies ahead of time

The best way to break bad habits is to make it impractical to do it by adding frictions to a point where you don’t even have the option to act.

4th law: Make it satisfying

Immediate and delayed rewards

We now live in the delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoffs.

The human brain was evolved in an instant-gratification era – the Paleolithic age.

The consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate. The costs of your good habits are in the present, and the cost of your bad habits is in the future.

The road less-traveled is the road of delayed-gratification.

Reinforcement refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of that behavior. It ties your habit to an immediate reward.

They labeled their savings account as “Trip to Europe” when they skipped eating outside, they saved that money in their account this reinforcing their behavior of not eating outside.

How to stick with good habits?

Track your habits, cross off each day as you perform the habits. With habit tracking, you’ll be focused on the process rather than the result.

Recording your last action creates a trigger that can initiate your next one.

It is not the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Don’t miss executing your habits twice in a row. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits.

Charlie Munger says – “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily”.

Don’t be driven by the numbers while tracking the habits, forgetting the purpose.

How an accountability partner can change everything?

Adding an instant cost to action is a great way to reduce their odds.

Consider creating a habit contract.

Advanced tactics

The truth about talent

Habits are easier to practice and stick with when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.

5 spectrums of behavior:

1. Openness to experience
2. Conscientiousness: Organized and easy going
3. Extroversion
4. Agreeableness
5. Neuroticism: Anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable

Questions to ask to find a game where odds are in your favor:

• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
• What makes me lose track of time?
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me?

Once you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.

Goldilocks rule

Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard, Not too easy. Just right.

To achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4% beyond our current ability.

How to stay focused when you get bored with your habits?

The greatest threat to success to not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits when they stop delighting us (the novelty factor).

As soon we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we seek out new diets, workouts, business ideas – even if the old one was still working.

Machiavelli – “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well, wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

Some pitfalls to consider

Habits + Deliberate practice = MASTERY

Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized that skill, and then using this new habit as a foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.

When a skill is mastered there’s usually a slight decline in performance over time

Improvement is not just about learning new skills, it’s also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and reviewing enable the long-term improvement of all habits.

Your identity creates a kind of “pride” that encourage you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing.

The solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of how you are. You need to adapt as life throws new challenges at you.

Constantly check if the old habits and beliefs are still serving you.

The post Atomic Habits by James Clear: Summary + Study Notes appeared first on Akshay Hallur.

Have you ever feel like no matter how many hours you are working, the things you intuitively planned are not getting done?

Then this blog post will be a solution for you.

No matter what profession you are in, task batching helps you be super productive and as-well preserve your mental sanity.

Ever since I adopted task-batching in my workflow, things started to fall in line, and life became simple.

I was quite late to realize that batching is a great way to create order out of chaos.

Task batching: What and why?

What is task batching?

Task batching refers to the grouping of similar tasks and executing them in bulk. It takes advantage of a psychological state of “flow”, eliminates context-switching involved in multitasking, and helps you be super-productive.

Why does task batching simply work?

It works because of the way our brains are hardwired.

Our brains are not meant for multi-tasking (computers are good at it).

Human multitasking as you know is just rapid task-switching that gives an illusion of multitasking. Many pieces of research have proved it.

Frequent multitaskers have low energy throughout the day, get tired, and they may even get their brains hardwired in different ways.

In the mind-opening book by Nicholas Carr – The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain, she explained:

“The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”

The more and more you train your brain to multitask, even while doing single-tasking, you feel restless. This explains the reason why you may find it hard to read a book nowadays.

The information (required for working) is stored in your brain semantically. It means the relevant pieces of information are stored close to each other.

Think of your brain as a giant mind map.

Due to this semantic structure of your memory storage, flow is possible when you are doing similar tasks. Or else, you’ll not be able to take advantage of your brain’s natural memory structure. You end up wasting most of your time and energy in deliberate context-switching.

Why are you finding batch execution hard?

Let’s face it.

If you are an internet user from the last few years, mindlessly opening tabs, you find it uncomfortable to not multitask. You’re used to the repeated quick spurts of dopamine that multitasking offers you.

Now, if I suddenly ask you to let-go of your novelty-seeking tendencies, your online life feels so empty. You feel like a drunkard struggling to quit drinking.

You are not alone. Almost everyone faces this.

In order to combat this, being mindful of this is the first step.

How to batch process your tasks?

In this section, I’ll help you set up your system, environment, and also give you some examples to enable you to easily implement batch processing.

Setup your task management system

People can’t focus enough on their work, because they are always worried about their next tasks, and afraid they’ll forget them. They can’t put an end to their mental reminders, which wreaks havoc for their ability to focus.

Having a task management system in place is crucial, no matter what business you are in. You need to dump all the todos out of your brain to help you focus.

In the GTD system, they call this brain dumping.

You don’t need to geek out on what system to use.

Here are some of my recommendations, you can’t go wrong with any of these:

• Todoist: This is the most famous task management system. If you are very new to task management, this is a good app to start with (no-frills).
• ClickUp: This is the most advanced project and task management system with lots of advanced features. If you have really complex projects to work on with a team, you can’t go wrong with this.
• Notion: This is an all-in-one workspace app. I have my entire business setup under Notion. It has quite a steep learning curve as it can do many things. But for a systems thinker like me, it’s straight out of heaven. As it’s a modular app, it’s the most powerful of the three.

Here are the 3 features that are most essential especially for implementing task batching:

1. Ability to add tags in the tasks – especially for categorizing and prioritizing, etc
2. Ability to add subtasks for a task (to help you focus on the depth of the tasks than the number of tasks)
3. Ability to add due dates for deadlines (to beat the Parkinson’s law)

Along with these, of course, you need to have other essential features like search features, folders, reminders, etc.

Group your tasks and set deadlines

Apart from organizing your tasks on a project-level, you need to consider reordering tasks inside your project so that relevant tasks are together. With this, you should be able to filter only the similar tasks.

Now, you need to set due-dates for these tasks, so that it forces you to stick to the schedule and implement batch processing.

Before doing these things, you need to have your ideal week’s work agenda in place.

If you are a content creator, it may look like:

• Monday: Draft 2 blog posts (morning) and edit them (afternoon)
• Tuesday: Record 2 YouTube videos
• Wednesday: Edit 2 videos
• Thursday: Schedule 2 blog posts and 2 videos for publishing (morning) and promote them (afternoon)
• Friday: Research blog posts and videos for the next week
• Saturday: Weekend errands, family time, and fun
• Sunday: Read a book and plan for the week ahead

Although the above schedule seems quite a no-brainer, many people still don’t do it.

Rather than researching their content well ahead of time, many people scratch their heads prior to writing a blog post. They try to figure out their video topic when lights and cameras are on. They waste their time setting up lights, mics, cameras, makeups, and create only one video.

Setting different days of the week for different types of tasks is very important.

Because over time your brain will associate a particular day of the week with a particular type of task. With this, you’ll be leveraging the natural momentum it results in.

Examples of task batching in our workflow

Here are some of the tasks we execute in bulk to save a lot of time.

• Blog keyword and topic research
• Creation of blog post outlines
• Blog post writing (we tend to write similar kind of blog posts back-to-back too)
• Video topic research
• Video recording
• Video editing
• WordPress comment moderation (we don’t moderate comments until there are 100 unapproved comments)
• Outsource the articles to freelancers in bulk
• Blog post publishing in bulk (we use the scheduling feature in WordPress)
• Video publishing in bulk (scheduling)
• Social media promotion in bulk and automation
• Community management (schedule bulk content in my FB and Telegram groups)
• Inbox checking late in the evening. It’s a good energy management hack and also essential to make sure some others’ priorities won’t creep up your priorities set for the day.

When executing the tasks in batches like this, it’s very important to make use of editorial calendars or what we call content trackers. These help us to effectively keep track of content, their statuses, and get rid of the guesswork.

How to make batch task execution fun?

Batch execution can take a lot of will-power and can be frustrating at first.

So you need to adopt some principles and environmental tweaks I suggest you in this section.

Because it’ll be new to your brain if you’ve never done that before.

Set goals backed with a single powerful why

You need to set SMART goals first, and that is backed by a single powerful WHY (that is your purpose of why you are doing what you are doing).

Simen Sinek in his best-seller book Start with Why, explains that the power of your limbic brain (responsible for purpose-setting) is very powerful in driving actions.

Instead of making use of will-power to force you to do tasks, setting purpose should come first.

When you have a purpose in hand and have set goals, novelty-seeking with multi-tasking will be of less priority for you. You’ll automatically choose the tasks that will help you accomplish your goals as efficiently as possible.

And also, you need to have a system to easily visualize how your goals connect to projects, and projects connect to the individual tasks.

You need to also have the ability to track your progress towards the project milestones and eventually to the goals as you complete the tasks.

If you are using apps like Notion or ClickUp setting up this is possible. You can also incorporate your team in this system.

Start small

You can go easy on your brain when it comes to task batching.

If you were previously outlining only one piece of content at once, make it 2-3 at once. Don’t beat yourself up in the beginning.

Because, when you force yourself, it’ll be like quantity > quality philosophy. Your creativity and quality of work will suffer.

Neither aim perfection, nor accept the mediocrity.

Anything, just above your comfort level, where you still have control, is good enough.

Slowly, down the lane, the increased productivity should motivate you to take batch execution to the next level.

Do environmental design for focus

Listen.

Batch task execution is not as easy as it seems.

You can’t purely depend on your limited reservoir of willpower.

The people who accomplish seemingly astonishing feats, don’t use will power. They design their environment so that will power is not all required. Environmental design is crucial if you want to manage your energy efficiently throughout the day without getting burned out.

Here are some of my tips that are working wonders for me:

1. Keep your smartphone out of your office cabin or your creative space. Although you may not use it while executing tasks, every time you resist the urge to check the screen, it drains your willpower and energy.
2. Always do the work in full-screen mode so that you don’t have any visual cues to drive you off course.
3. Make use of one-tab policy or atleast a Tab Limiter extension to put a limit on how many tabs you can open.
4. Make use of apps like StayFocusd, News Feed Eradicator, etc to put an end to mindless consumption of social media content.
5. Make use of timer apps like BeFocused Pro or any other Pomodoro apps to help you focus deliberately for chunks of time. If you’ve used the Pomodoro technique before, it didn’t impress you because you were a multi-tasker.

Automate stuff

I’m a big fan of automation. I like to automate the boring stuff.

Here are some of the things I can suggest you:

• Use text expanders like aText for Mac or PhraseExpress for Windows
• Use macro applications like Keyboard Maestro for Mac or AutoHotKey for Windows
• Use a good custom search engine like Alfred for Mac or Wox for Windows
• Use a good clipboard manager like Copy ‘em Paste for Mac or Ditto for Windows
• Learn the basics of regex for productivity. It helps you do search and replaces easily matching patterns. Even learning the basics can save yours and team members’ hours of time.
• Make use of tools like Zapier, IFTTT, or Integromat to put your apps on autopilot or do marketing automation.
• Learn some basic Spreadsheet features, especially the functions like pivot tables.
• To take your automation to the next level, you can learn the basics of Python for automation. Learn about web scraping to help you effectively curate the content for planning and research.
• Make use of Chrome extensions like Pushbullet, Video Speed Controller, Scraper, Ratings Preview for YouTube, and Extensity to tame it all.

Automation adds some novelty to your batch execution process which may be boring at times (doing the same type of work). It helps you get more stuff done faster, without getting stuck in menial work.

Wrapping it up

Execution of tasks in batches need not be boring if you have the right systems, environments, goals, progress tracker, and small rewards set in front of you.

Don’t mix tasks that require different states of mind, vibes, or contexts together.

These are some of the task batching strategies that I implement in my workflow.

What about you?

Let me know.

The post How to Do Task Batching for Skyrocketing Productivity Instantly? appeared first on Akshay Hallur.

The single line answer I would give you is – “Both are important, it’s all about leveraging the right thing at the right time”.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer for this as everyone and their goals are different.

Let me present you some arguments, to unwind you from this dilemma.

Personal branding

Why personal branding?

Personal branding gained its popularity because it’s based on the notion – ““People buy people, not products,”

Marketing is all about trust.

People buy from someone whom they trust and connect with at an emotional level. It’s all hardwired in their brain from an evolutionary standpoint.

In the online world, personal branding is by far the most effective way to build rapport and trust with your audience – especially with the rise in video and visual marketing.

If you are a trainer, coach, consultant, freelancer or an agency owner, personal branding is very crucial for you. Because in these businesses, people need to know who you are and what value you can deliver them before throwing money at you.

You can’t simply expect people to open up their wallets by seeing your new flashy logo.

Personal branding is crucial if your ongoing client value-delivery is directly/closely dependant on you as a person.

Why not personal branding?

Personal branding may not suit you if you are an introvert with little/no people skills.

Because your success here depends upon how well you communicate online with your audience.

It also requires you to be transparent and authentic. You also need to be a strong fellow and not take those keyboard warriors and troll-makers personally. If you are ultra-paranoid about this, you may give it a second thought.

However, with personal branding, the business becomes so empty without you.

That’s where company branding comes into play.

You see Apple as a brand, continued to grow even after Steve Jobs passed away.

Added to that, like that of a company brand, you can’t sell off your personal brand in the future!

So, eventually, you may need to start a company leveraging your personal brand.

Company branding

Why company branding?

I recommend people to build a company brand after having a good personal brand. Because, when you have a solid personal brand, you can easily attract right team members, partners, and investors to your company.

Without a good personal brand, people find it hard to trust and buy into you especially if you don’t have a prior business experience.

On the contrary, if you are into SaaS business model, you need to focus on building a company brand. Because, in SaaS business models it’s not uncommon to see the companies being acquired.

In this case, if you have your personal brand closely attached to your product, it may be harder to sell your business at a higher multiple.

Flipping SaaS businesses has become one of the hottest trends in the tech space. This may partly explain the reason, why you most likely don’t remember the names of the people behind successful SaaS products like Trello, Slack, Zapier, etc.

However, still personal branding boosts the effectiveness of your company brand – as it attaches a human emotion to it.

On the other hand, if we talk about agencies, there are 7-8 figure agencies successfully run by people, by just being operators – with zero personal branding.

Why not company branding?

With company branding, it’s harder to pivot or rebrand. It’s harder to change your field of interest. You’ll be stuck with it.

While under a personal brand you hardly need to rebrand yourself. As a person, you can be open to any number of opportunities.

If you are in training, freelancing, and agency models under only a company brand, you’ll be missing out on the huge advantages that personal branding offers when it comes to client attraction.

The bottomline

If you are a creator, trainer, or consultant, I would recommend you go with personal branding in the beginning. You can eventually think of going with a business brand.

Once you have a solid personal brand, it’s ridiculously easy to build company brand(s) – with some managerial skills.

On the other hand, if you are in a business where the ongoing value-delivery is not people-centric (for example a SaaS business); you can skip personal branding.

If it’s not clear to you as of now, find an interest and start building your personal brand today.

Down the lane, you need to position your personal brand and company’s brand in such a way that they feed each other.

If your company goes bankrupt tomorrow, you don’t have to start all way from scratch if you have personal branding – and vice versa.

The post Personal Brand vs Company Brand: Which Way to Go? appeared first on Akshay Hallur.

In this post, I’ll help you know what are all the skills it takes to be a successful digital marketer.

#1. Learning

I can see that many of the aspiring digital marketers have a limiting mindset when it comes to investing in training courses. They spend tons of money in graduating from so-called prestigious universities but are hesitant to spend some money in learning the skills they need to succeed in their career.

You cannot grow until you invest in yourself and in upgrading your skill sets.

Here are the three areas you need to invest in training courses:

1. Communication – both verbal and written
2. Marketing
3. Psychology – It is very important as you start growing as a Digital Marketer. Without understanding the basics of psychology, persuasion, and also behavioral psychology your success will be severely constrained.

Lots of information is available online. Why bother to pay for training courses? The problem is information overload and unstructured information.

Free content is scattered all over the web, and produced by various people with their own perspective of thinking. You need to have a structured course, or a training program to help you guide your journey contextually and in a structured way.

If you have mentor or a coach to guide you, it’ll save you lots of time and money down the lane that doing mistakes would have costed you. You’ll have a proper blueprint or you can model your mentor for your way to success beating the exponential technological growth.

#2. Research

Marketing and research goes hand in hand. You need to research internet for relevant information, do the essential research and keep updated regarding the niche that you are working in.

You also need to research about the interests of your customers. The moment you get a crystal-clear idea about who your target audience are, you can market the relevant products to them effortlessly.

For creating content online, you also need to research about the topics. There are various tools like SEMrush (for keyword research), BuzzSumo (for viral content research), and much more.

Doing content research, and creating content for which there is high demand but low supply is very essential to make sure that more and more people consume your content.

#3. Content creation

Content creation is the part of every Digital Marketing strategy. There are four forms of content mainly:

1. Text content
2. Graphics content
3. Video content
4. Audio content

The blog articles that you come across everyday involves text and graphics content (like infographics). For any content marketing, the copywriting skill is very essential.

Copywriting is the most important skill you need to master when it comes to writing content online that sells. Your ability to write content using strategic words that evoke specific emotions to increase the likelihood of your readers converting to customers is very important.

Audio content is great as it involves a humanistic touch in it- the voice. It’ll be in the form of audio courses, podcasts (you can create free podcasts on platforms like Anchor.fm), and so on. It helps you build personal brand effectively.

Video marketing is huge. It involves various mediums like YouTube, FB live, Webinars, etc. The sad thing is that the majority of the people are afraid to face the camera. But believe me, as a digital marketer if people need to trust you, they need to create a humanly connect with you.

Building trust and transfer of feelings is called marketing.

These are best done when you talk to your prospects by looking in their eyes. No one would buy a product from a person they barely know. As videos involve both auditory and visual sensors of your audience, it’s easy to sell.

#4. Marketing

Being a digital marketer, you need to master marketing.

Marketing when it comes to Digital Marketing includes,

• Understanding influence and persuasion
• Traffic generation
• SEO, Social Media, Ads, Email Marketing, etc
• Selling
• So on…

Marketing is all about psychology. You need to be eager to learn about how human mind works, how we make decisions, how to gain influence, the art of persuasion, pre-framing in order to succeed as a digital marketer.

You need to also master the art of traffic generation. Getting eyeballs on the content you generate is quintessential for any online business, leave alone the conversions. You can get traffic from SEO, Social Media, running various forms of advertisements, also drive internal traffic from email marketing, chatbot marketing, and the list goes on.

After getting the traffic you want, you need to do something called as conversion rate optimization to increase the likelihood of people buying your products or services. It involves doing things like AB split testing, color psychology, playing with CTA texts, social proofs, etc.

Again, you need to understand the fundamentals of behavioral psychology to truly master the CRO game.

So.

What’s the point in getting traffic if you don’t know how to sell?

You need to master the art of selling in various forms like copywriting, video marketing, webinar marketing, email marketing, so on. This is when most of the psychological concepts you learn come into play.

You need to learn the art of evoking the right set of emotions in the minds of the audience to make them buy the product you are promoting.

#5. Technical

20% of your success as a digital marketer depends on how technically sound you are.

Buying a domain, hosting, installing WordPress, setting up autoresponder, building landing pages, setting up link and customer tracking/analytics mechanisms, these are all some of the technical skills you need to learn for becoming a successful digital marketer.

This is the only skillset you can focus less on, as there’s no shortage of freelancers who can setup these technical stuff for you at a cheaper rate. But at least, you need to have a basic understanding of how these tools and systems work and communicate with each other.

Wrapping up

These are some of the skills you need to learn for becoming a successful digital marketer. Learning and mastering all these skills takes time and patience.

You need to always consider learning these skills from top 4% quality sources, as it’s the question of your career.

Hope you found this blog post helpful.

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