How to Start Morning Walk and Sustain the Ritual

Morning walk is quite helpful in keeping us fit and healthy. In the age where pollution is on the rise, food is contaminated and adulterated, and lifestyles are quite static and lethargic, body ailments are pretty common and on the rise.

The lack of exercise leads people to visit doctors for minor and sometime even major complaints and health issues. 

It is imperative therefore to make morning walk a part of our daily routine. It will trigger a chain of activities leading to a healthy lifestyle.

So, let's discuss what you need to do in order to start morning walk and continue with it.

A. Sleep Early

You need to sleep earlier. So, you should be in the bed maximum by 11 o'clock. It will help you to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning.

B. Charge up your mind with meditation or prayers

Meditation and Morning Prayer rituals prevalent in many religions are aimed to subconsciously charge up your mind to prepare for a hectic day ahead. 

C. Find a friend 

After doing your meditation and prayer ritual, you should set out for your morning walk. If it sounds a bit tricky and difficult, you can find a friend or partner, who can accompany you. This way it will be beneficial to both of you. It will help you beat lethargy and initial procrastination.  

D. Take some healthy and nutritious food

You should take some healthy food in the morning before going for a morning walk. It shouldn't be coffee or tea, but it can be some light healthy foods or supplements like fruits, dry fruits, dates, oats, gehun ka dliya, chhole (boiled gram/chickpeas), “til ke laddoo” (sesame balls) or even an omelet. It is necessary to maintain your energy levels and to prevent acidity, weakness, and nausea, etc.   

E. Don’t skip the routine even in the event of minor health issues

The next thing is to continually practice it even if you have minor health issues.

If you are not in a mood to go for a long morning walk, at least get out of the bed, put on your tracking suit and just walk for a mile or a half.

The idea is not to break the routine, Do not start madly doing it for more than 2-3 hours in the beginning. That will lead to exhaustion and fatigue and you will not be able to continue the practice for long. The next day, you can be too tired or have some injury or sprain.

So start in a moderate fashion and in a way that can be sustained.

So, these were the basic steps to start and include morning walk in your daily routine. If you practice it in the right way, very soon, you will see its positive results and will feel happier, healthier and fitter than ever.  

The Inspiring story of Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute

 Today I would like to narrate an inspiring story of Joe Pulizzi, the content marketing evangelist, who rose to fame because of Content Marketing Institute and CMI World, the international conference on content marketing.

He narrates in his article "A Content Marketing Love Letter" published in Content Marketing Institute magazine  in 2017. In this inspiring article, he narrates his date with destiny.

It was May 2010, when he was almost bankrupt and was failing in his dream business of content marketing which he started in 2007.

According to him, it was one of the worst days of his professional life. The business he had started a couple years back was coming to a disappointing end.

It was not that he was not making money, but he was losing more money and he started questioning his whether he would survive or even be able to pay bills for his family.

The downtrend was coming back. There was this day in 2010, when he was almost broken. In fact, one of his major clients, who were doing business with him for the past couple years and Joe had served him with all the passion, had discontinued the contract.

He said it was in spite of the fact that he was providing qualified leads for content agencies and was producing top-notch content for them.

Hence, when the end of the contract was confirmed on the phone, he felt like a destroyed person. He narrates that he walked out of his home office and started wandering into his yard in disappointment and dismay. 

He was clueless as what will happen next. He says that it was a strange feeling and he was feeling sorry for himself. Failure is crushing and it sweeps you like the ocean waves. It can overtake you. It can even kill you if you do not have the extraordinary willpower and determination to rise up.

He says when he looks back at that incident, it seems silly now. Because in the first world, according to him, such disasters are not the end of the world. But the feeling he was experiencing at the time was almost like that.

He also started thinking of going back to a full time job even though it was not meant for him. He admits that he was working as an executive a couple years prior to the incident and he was so frustrated that he decided never do a job again.

But the failure was so traumatic that he was now considering going back to the corporate world. Then things started to normalize at least the way he started feeling after couple days of this incident. He promised to himself that he would never make any decision in an most emotional state. The rest was history. 

That week, he received an email from one of his subscribers. The lady said that she absolutely loved his blog and she decided to start content marketing for her company and that too with Joe Pulizzi.

She was doing content marketing for a long time, but she referred to it as article marketing or digital marketing, etc. She was happy that the practice has a name at the moment. And she wanted to implement a content marketing strategy and process for this in her company.

She wanted to know if Joe Pulizzi could help. That was basically a consulting gig. And Pulizzi was quite ecstatic over it.

This led him to fetch other emails he had received from subscribers during all those years. The content marketing blog actually started way back in April 2007, and people were not very candid and vocal. at the time.

During this activity of digging into old emails, he found out what the audience was really interested, at least in terms of the services they wanted to buy.

He was trying to bring his failing business back on track and he had the answers right in front of him. The answers were in the form of what the crowd was actually looking for. Someone was looking for training in content marketing, whereas someone was looking for a conference on it.

As there were many people who wanted to meet people, who were going through the same challenges that they were facing. It was possible only in a conference like situation. There was a need for benchmark research in content marketing and what practices marketers were resorting to and the strategies that were succeeding.

Some people also were in a kind of introduction stage and they wanted someone to help them with content creation and distribution. And this led to the proverbial "lightbulb" being switched on in his mind.

Content Marketing Institute
Content Marketing Institute was born as a result of a decision, which Joe took instantly and wrote on a cocktail napkin lying near his desktop. He scribbled something like...In three years, we will run a leading online destination for content marketing, the leading content marketing magazine and the host largest content marketing event on the planet.

These lines became historical in just six months. In May 2010, Content Marketing Institute was created. The concept was tremendously successful. People started visiting the site in huge numbers. Pulizzi was surprised as to what was happening.   

.........To be continued. 

13 Rare Tips to Write Better and Faster

How to Feed the Content Beast?

7 Rare Tips That Will Help You Become A Successful Writer

My biggest problem as a writer was that I was not capable of organized work. There were some other factors as well, that were dragging me backwards. I spent many sleepless nights, because I was struggling as a writer and despite my potential, I was earning shameful wages as remuneration. Soon, I did some introspection and tried learning from my mistakes. Here are a few tips you can use to become a successful writer and earn decent income through writing.  

1. Don’t choose wrong projects
I made big mistakes while choosing projects. I sometimes picked the projects, which I should not have chosen in the first place. Remember, clients don’t respect you for delivering high value content at low price. They won’t even remember you after some time. So, choose your projects wisely and quote the rates accordingly. They will try to take advantage of you, but steer yourself clear from their traps. They will say, “Just try this topic, it’s simple. Try writing a simple SEO article.” But, when you start writing that article, you find that you were asked to write a highly research based technical article at the price of a normal SEO article.

2. Stay away from wrong partners and friends
I also faced issues while dealing with friends and finding buddy writers, which were often the source of anxiety and lots of frustration. I felt that people who I thought could have been my writer buddies were far behind me not only in terms of quality and expertise, but also in terms of character and mental strength.

They were a lot selfish that I learnt later and they never wanted to move out of their comfort zone. They had a frame of mind that was focused around low quality content. This was exactly the case with my friend and writer buddy Mr Kapoor (name changed).

I wondered why I could not associate with the writers, who matched my temperament. Soon I found that it was one of the biggest reasons I was not succeeding as a writer. Mediocrity is contagious and it spreads even through frequent interaction. Choose your friends wisely.

3. Don’t ignore the way neural networks work
I also experienced frustration with my approach to writing, which was not scientific until I learnt how neural networks work and then suddenly my entire strategy went through a change.

I started taking things with a different perspective and it revolutionized my writing and improved my productivity. I learnt the secrets of sentence construction moving ahead in entirely unknown territories exploring new things.

I never ceased to find ways to improve my writing speed and at the same time I tried weaving thoughts and creating thought loops in the empty space to polish my skills to create content with a flow state of mind. Luckily, everything was in my favor and I received a lot of support from divinity, universe and God whatever you call it.

4. Develop mind maps
In order to succeed as a writer, you must have a blueprint of what you are going to write. You must see everything as a cosmonaut sees the blue planet; a pilot sees his dashboard or as Tom Cruise saw on his projectors in the movie “Minority Report”.  For that you need to develop mind maps. To know how mind maps work, you can read How to Mind Map: The Ultimate Thinking Tool That Will Change Your Life, by Tony Buzan.

5. Connect with people by addressing their pain points
You must also have the list of problems faced by your audiences and you should have the ability to smartly associate those problems with your content. Writing is all about research, exploring new things and moving ahead on the learning curve. Connect with people and address their pain points. Only then you can claim to be a good writer.

6. Focus on earnings
There are many distractions that come in the way of becoming a productive writer. You must brush up your writing skills consistently in order to increase your earnings and getting the required satisfaction from this profession.

7. Experiment with writing the “next paragraph”
As some of the top writers suggest that to improve your thought process and increase writing speed, try short writing sprints. You should practice writing the next paragraph yourself, when you see a piece of content anywhere including the Internet.

When you read something online or offline, just take a pause and ask your brain to explore the empty space and try churning out next few paragraphs on the basis of the content that you have just read. It will improve your writing skills dramatically.

Content Writing Price War– The Rise of “Made In China” Culture

In India, you need to write around 10, 000 words daily in order to survive as a freelance writer, given the extremely low rates that the industry offers here. In this article, you'll discover the ways you can achieve this monstrous target.

In the West, there is no concept of mass production of “quality” without maintaining the price they charge that is justified by the R&D, branding, marketing, and value of the product as against China that first copies the technology, adopts a system, and then starts mass producing products and services.

Our Mantra is ---  Get almost the same quality as iPhone at 25% price - Go for Redmi!

Get almost the same quality as Danielle Steele, Stephen King or JK Rowling at less than 2% of what they charge.... :)  This is the marketing tagline of Indian freelance writers.

Quality vs. price

This is a disturbing situation for people who work hard to manufacturer products and services. When market requires them to produce it at cheaper prices than the competition, it could be a nightmare for many and extremely difficult for others. To achieve this, you need to employ a strategy that works and adopt a specific system and procedures to produce volumes that too, on a consistent basis.                   

Content writing concentration camps
I found the same issue with content writing. In India you are asked to mass produce content, however you need to maintain high quality because these are the third party vendors that get projects from Western clients and then they ask you to do it at lowest possible rates. However, as a writer you are supposed to maintain top quality so that they can make maximum money. But, when you work at lowest prices, you subconsciously tend to product poor quality content. The vice versa is also true.

Imagine, they need the same quality as James Patterson or Stephen King, but they are ready to offer just $4 for a 500 word article, sometimes even less than that. No wonder writers from Bangladesh or Vietnam can only do it in that price range.   

Situation in India
In India, neither there is any legal framework to question such malpractices, nor are the citizens conscious enough to unite against such industrial exploitation. On the other hand people are extremely selfish and eager to go to lowest levels of cut throat competition.

They snatch projects from others so that they can do it cheaper than others. No hue and cry is made in the market for this because this satisfies the market equations of demand and supply. Indian marketplace is a lethal two edged sword, which not only forces you to do things cheaply but on the other hand makes you incapable of even raising your voice. 

The way China does it
China has mastered this art they have somehow blended technology with low cost. However, it comes with its own side effects. For example, Chinese products/technology aren’t so reliable even though they work fine normally and that is what the market needs and that is how China is winning everywhere.

Similar to Chinese strategy, content writers in India should also start producing high quality content with certain benchmarks being strictly followed and then mass produced it.

Western writers will not understand it
Most of the Westerners would not be able to understand me because they are never used to such kind of practices but the Chinese and Indians will definitely understand me better. I mean I need to produce bench-marked quality content without investing too much of thought into it and then produce it at mass level. This is the only way to survive in India in China. 

If you study any of these marketplaces deeply you will find how accurate I am in my claim. It includes the following points:

·  Read the best quality articles on the web. Benchmark some of their features such as openings, quotes, data, examples, flow and information.  
· Write articles following these patterns and do it quickly to produce massive content

You are now a successful writer in India and China and you can support your family with a decent income. All you need to do is to produce 10,000 words (yes, you read it right 10, 000 words) of “quality content” daily and you’ll never complain that writers in India are paid poorly or that they can’t support their families.    

How to Write More Than 11,000 Words per Day?

When I started writing using Dragon Dictation software early in 2012, I was a complete novice and not very smart at using a dictation software program. That was probably the reason I was never as productive as I wanted to be. But, now that I have come a long way, dictation software programs have become some of the best tools in my writing armory.

As Michael Shreeve puts it in his article, “How To Write 10,000 Words Per Day: “The software itself doesn’t help me get words on the screen faster. I type almost as fast as I speak. What DNS does is free my mind, to be honest. It removes one more layer of tension between thought and ink-on-the-screen.”

I didn’t realize it at that time but now I know what needs to be done in order to take things further and use your dictation software for maximum productivity. You need to become a chatterbox and a speaking machine, so whatever thoughts randomly flow through your mind can be transcribed using the dictation software.

However, to become so spontaneous, you must have a plan and a blueprint ready in your mind for your topic. The rest of the things become a game. As a famous writer Rachel Aaron, discloses her secrets to writing 10,000 words daily, in her guest post, “How I Went from Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day” — Vicky Teinaki made a graphic of the writing metric, which is in the form of a triangle and its three elements are:

A. Knowledge
 B. Time
 C. Enthusiasm

In order to increase your speed of writing, you can proportionately amplify the above elements.

According to her, knowledge is the weapon. You should know what you are going to write. So, a general plot outline and a little bit of research will always help in writing an article with the lightning’s speed.

Hoard Your Ideas

Keep a journal and hoard ideas. The more ideas you have, the faster you’ll be as a writer. Note down everything you observe or read in your journal.

You can produce huge content using this technique as it takes the burden off your mind and makes the process autopilot.

Which dictation software to use

Let’s discuss which dictation software to use.

I researched and found three software programs that fit the bill.

1. Dragon Naturally Speaking
2. Google Docs Voice to Text
3. Dictation.io
4. Windows Speech Recognition Program

Each of these three dictation software programs has its own merits and drawbacks.

Let’s discuss these one-by-one.

1. Dragon Naturally Speaking

The program created by Nuance comes as the most advanced, accurate and user-friendly dictation software. No pause is needed while speaking in order to keep it working. You can keep on speaking spontaneously and it will keep on transcribing long after you are finished speaking. DNS 13 Premium (available at $199)comes with the feature of recorded voice to text, which means that you can record your voice using a recording device such as Philips Voice Recorder while on the go and once you are back to your office or home, you can plug it into your laptop and allow DNS 13 to transcribe. You can create a lot of content this way.

Dragon Dictation App is also available for Android and iOS, where you can pay a small monthly fee and use it whenever you need it. DNS 13.0 Premium is available at $85 at Amazon (shipping is extra).

2. Dictation.io

If you need some free software, https://dictation.io/ can be the best online dictation software. Over the past couple years its accuracy has improved a ton, maybe because the developers are working hard to make it popular. As far as the accuracy is concerned I am sure that dictation.io is way ahead of Windows Speech Recognition Program. It’s even better than “Google Docs Voice to Text”. I am very happy that I have found this online dictation software which works smoothly and helps me in maximizing my productivity. Furthermore, it comes free of cost. All you need is Internet connectivity to run it. It runs only on Google Chrome.

The results it produced were largely satisfactory for me but its only drawback comes from the fact that “dictation.io” takes a pause after four or five lines and it almost freezes, so we have no option but to click the stop button and hit the “start dictation” button again.

The best part is you will soon get used to this problem of freezing and you can use it to put your mind to work in the meantime. So, the mind gets a break and you get time to collect and organize your thoughts and start all over again. It also gives you the opportunity to check whether your content is flowing in the right direction or not.

It’s an intelligent software program as compared to other online dictation software programs available the market. When you use it frequently, you become even more efficient using it. It’s quite accurate but not as accurate as Dragon Dictate. However, it offers an accuracy of more than 80% in the beginning, which is quite a big deal.

3. Google Docs Voice to Text

The best part of Google Docs Voice to Text Program is its intuitive approach. It auto corrects the sentences according to the context, which makes it much faster and accurate. However, it’s not as fast as Dragon Dictate. Its accuracy levels also vary frequently. One more glitch in the program is the voice recognition button, which stops working all of a sudden and it takes a little while before you can start dictating again.

As a free software program, it may be a good option for writers.

4. Windows Speech Recognition Program

It comes inbuilt with Windows. The program is free and can be used offline, but the major cons include speed and accuracy. The text created using Windows speech recognition program needs a lot of editing and proofreading.

So, choose the right dictation software, spend some time thinking and planning and put in lots of enthusiasm and you will be able to write more than 9, 000 words that too in just eight or nine hours.