Three Ways to Sharpen Your Abs

Do you really want the 6-pack abs that you see at TV series actors? It’s time to get off the couch and hit the gym. If you prefer to work out in the comfort of your home, there’s no problem. All you need for the following exercises is a simple abdominal bench.

It is important to add diversity to your abs training routine. Performing only one movement is the worst thing you can do. You abdomen doesn’t have only one muscle (the one with the 6-pack). You have oblique muscles too. So, let’s see how you can sharpen you abs correctly.

Decline Russian Twist

The name has probably scared you a bit and it should have. Russians don’t play around. They are tough. You should aim for a total of 20 reps. It doesn’t matter in how many sets you divide these 20 reps.

You will need a medicine ball, a weight plate or anything else you have around the house that has the approximate weight of a medicine ball. Anchor your feet properly at the top of the bench. Do a half sit-up to bring your lower back off the bench. Keep the ball in front of you and twist your trunk as far to the right as you can. Make sure to not bend your arms. Go back to the center and then twist your body to the left. This is one rep.

Decline crunches

Secure your legs like before and lie down on the bench. Place your hands on either side of the head without lacing your fingers. Roll your shoulders in while you stabilize your lower back on the bench. Contract your abs and lift your shoulders and upper back for about 4 inches.

Keep your abdomen contracted for one second and then come down slowly again. During this entire time, your lower back should lift from the bench. When you roll back down, the movement is supposed to be controlled and slow. Using momentum does you no good. There are several variations of this exercise. You could perform on top of an exercise ball, on a flat bench or with weights.

You could replace this exercise with full decline sit-ups. You like back on the bench and you hold a weight behind your head. Make sure to tuck your chin toward your chest before starting the movement. Sit all the way up by contracting your abdominal muscles and then slowly go back to the initial position.

V Crunches

This exercise trains your upper and lower abdomen. The first thing to do it lay on your back keeping your arms and feet fully extended. Contract your core muscles to stabilize your body while you perform the V crunch.

Start with an upper crunch by rolling your shoulders up from the floor then continue with a lower crunch raising your lower back too. Only your glutes must stay in touch with the floor. Your arms will rise together with your upper body.

Lift your legs straight up so that your arms touch your toes. This movement should be done at the same time with the previous one. If you find it too difficult to keep your legs straight, you can bend them. If you have neck problems, place a pillow underneath your head for more support. Hold this position by squeezing your abs as much as you can for 1 second. Slowly return your body to the initial position without using momentum to reach the floor.

All these exercises can be daunting if you don’t use to work out. Therefore, start at a comfortable pace to avoid injuries. When you feel you can do more, crank up the pace and number of reps for maximum effects.

The 5 Core Pillars Of Content Marketing

Why it is that content marketing is very important to all bloggers and writers? What makes it so important? Many bloggers know how hard it is to increase their audience or visitors from 300 organic visits to more than 10, 000 organic visits per month. Boosting up of these organic visits is surely not based on luck. It will take pure hard work and perseverance to achieve this rate or increase. Some even take them 2 years just to reach this goal. Different contents may fail, but it will never matter for those who have fixed goals in mind.

According to Eric Schmidt, “More content is being created in 48 hours than what was produced from the beginning of time until 2003.” This thought only proves that competition within the realm of content marketing is as tough as you can ever imagine. It is very unfortunate for other bloggers that most of their contents fails. They struggle so hard yet no one seems to bother or take a look at their work. Sometimes, it is just a matter of content marketing. Below are the 5 core pillars of content marketing that will definitely increase your organic visitors tremendously.

Your Audience Is Your Utmost Priority

Some bloggers fail to realize that giving importance to their audience can greatly increase their visitors. They focus more on the quality of their content, but disregard the interests and suggestions of their audience.

Before everything else, giving importance to your audience will help your content marketing. Try to ask yourself whether you want to have a customer who can relate to your interest or who is only interested with the trending topics. If you choose the first one, make sure that you look hard enough for the perfect customer of the same interest as you have. If you choose the second, see to it that you have your eyes on the trending topics that are popping out of the internet or you can just make your own viral content.

Creation Of The Content

 

While content marketing is very important, the gist or the over-all impact on the content you have will help. It is equally important as content marketing. It is because of the quality of your content that people will have the tendency to revisit your site and share it with other individuals.

Although quantity is not that important as the quality of your content, there is a study where the longer your content is the higher would be its rank in the Google search results.

Promotion Of Your Content

Creating high-quality content or a viral content cannot stand alone, especially when there is heavy competition. You need to remember that content marketing is primarily composed of the content, making skills and marketing skills. Thus, you need to balance these 2 in order to have a successful blog or website.

Your content can never stand alone because it has no ability to promote itself. You need to have a good marketing strategy by using all possible means such as making an account in any social media or using social sharing.

Mapping The Cycle

Since you will be undergoing a content marketing, you need to develop a content that will surely meet the interest of your audience at every stage in order to aid them in moving to the next stage of the ladder. Whether it is in the awareness stage, consideration stage, or decision stage you have to guide your audience each step of the way.

Your content must focus on how to appeal to the emotions of your audience, which are normally located at different stages. You can check out a survey made by Marketing Charts in proving this stand.

You need to create a content that will really strike the awareness of your audience. Then, if you get a hang of it, you can also result in creating content which can be of use in the consideration stage. Apply case studies, technology guides, videos, or webinars to make things easier. On the other hand, you can also result in making a content that will gear your audience to buying or purchasing your content or just simply visit your site.

Record And Analyze

Record the things you have done every single day and at the end of the month, analyze those facts and determine where you made a mistake. Your records will serve as a reminder of your mistakes and improvements. Also, you need to update yourself with new ideas and other relevant matters which can help you attain that success.

Tips for Great Voice-Over Performances

What makes a great voice-over performance? Portraying the intention of the script writer is what truly makes the performance great. You need to get inside of the script. Putting yourself in the shoes of the character of the movie or video. Every voice-over actor needs to read between the lines in order to perfectly portray the intent of the script writer. To do these, the following tips are important to help you understand the intent of the script writer. Nevertheless You want to keep some principals that will keep your voice clear and confident.

It’s All About Your Audience

Ask yourself these questions, to whom are you talking? Who are the persons that will listen to your voice? Every voice-over actor has sufficient knowledge or clear idea on the type of audience they have. It is important to know who your audience is because it will give you an idea on how to portray your character apart from putting yourself in the shoes of the character. Your audience is very important because it is through their judgment where one will know whether the movie or video has life.

Focus On The Character

You need to discover everything about your character. How he acts, talk, or express himself. In this way, you will be able to give the audience a believable performance where they can see themselves in the shoes of the character. You need to focus on the age, attitude, behavior, priorities, and other matters which make your character who he is.

You also need to be more sensitive to the context of the script. Try to take a full picture before you start. You should remember that everything is connected. Every aspect of the script is very crucial in order for every voice-over actor to deliver the intention portrayed by the script.

Visualize your surroundings, the location of the scene, and your character. Imagine the place where your character is found, what is going around his surroundings, and how the character would fit in the scene so that you will have a clearer view of the perfect scene. You can even use photographs or other visual aids to make things easier for your imagination.

Your character’s contemporaries are also very important. Whether it is real or imagined, it doesn’t matter. Full understanding of who your character decides to surround him will tell you a lot about his character as a true person. If your character lived in the old days, look into how they live during those days. Take note of the way they converse or how they express their thoughts to one another. You can also practice speaking the way your character speaks everytime you are talking with other people. It will serve as a good test of how you well you can portray your character. Although it may seem weird or funny, it will still benefit you in the end. Just give the people you are conversing with a heads up.

Environment Plays A Role

Just because you are a voice-over actor you need not give importance to your environment, you thought wrong. To make a great voice-over performance, you need to make use of the environment. You need to include accents to improve your performance. You also need the ambient sounds to make your movie or video believable and more realistic.

Listen to the music while you are in that beautiful environment. Music will help in portraying your emotions. It will be more realistic if your emotions are involved because the audience will see and feel the real thing.

End Of The Story

Having a full knowledge on how the story ends will help your performance. By knowing the end of the story, you will be able to know the overall performance whether it be better or not. You can also improve your performance when you know that the end will not be good enough to reach your audience’s expectations. Comprehension of the whole story or script is a crucial matter wherein every voice-over actor must have a good grasp. Lastly, you can also hire other professional producers or editors to make your voice-over performance unique and extraordinary. You will have someone to help you track and ensure the high-quality of your recordings. Bear in mind to seek for more suggestions and guides from other individuals. Advice from other people will greatly help improve voice-over performance.

3 Reasons Your Link Building Strategies won’t help your Search Engine Ranking

If you are trying to rank your website in the search engines chances are you’re doing some serious link building. You are probably putting hyperlinks in your texts and going on other blogs for guest post. You are probably commenting on blogs and working really hard to get links back to your site. The question is why isn’t your page rank climbing? If you are building links correctly then you should be placed up pretty high on the search engines, so you need to figure out what you are doing wrong. Here are three reasons your link building isn’t doing squat for our page ranking.

You Are Picking Links Willy Nilly

Sure you are linking to lots of things on the internet and even some of your links are high ranking in search engines yourself, but why are you linking to them? If you are linking to things that don’t make any sense at all to your website or the thing you are trying to get people to then it is just confusing. You are going to gain people’s trust if you are writing about gardening and you link them to an article about coffee cake because it’s on a popular website. Make sure whatever links you are using are directly related to your product or content.

Going a step further when you are picking relevant links, make sure to actually read what you are linking to. If the title is related great, but go ahead and read through the article. There are a lot of sites out there full of gibberish and linking to one of these is not good for your credibility at all.

Maybe You Are Linking to the Wrong Things

If you are using links from a place that simply doesn’t get that much traffic then it isn’t going to help your ranking. Links that aren’t seen by enough people do not help you get in good with the search engines. Find links that have posts and articles with lots of engagement. When people are commenting you know they are visiting the site regularly.

You Are Linking to Similar or the Same Content

If you are simply linking to content all on the same website then you are not building a link circle for people to keep coming back to your site. You need to be sourcing back-links from lots of different relevant places. This is the only way you will make sure your link building is beneficial. If you are linking to the same article over and over on different sites, that’s not a great strategy. If you are linking all your content to the same website, that is also not a good idea. Remember to spread it out everywhere and make sure it’s relevant.

These three things are a great place to start when trying to repair your link building strategies. When done correctly it can be great for your search engine rank and you will get seen by a lot more people. Think smarter and don’t work harder when building your links and you will be sure to make every one of them count.

3 Simple Ways to Manage Your Freelance Workload

Freelancing career is a real charm. Working for yourself, being your own boss and the unique opportunity to mould your work with life are some of the most inspiring reasons that people adopt this career. However, with these blessings, there are some constraints and problems in this career choice too.

Freelancing career is predominantly a home-based career. With the comfort of home, freelancers also get the laziness and distraction of home. New entrants in this career path often complain about disrupted work, divided attention and losing the track of progress. Most of these problems are either caused by improper workload management or are actually workload management problems.

Here, we will discuss three of the most common freelance workload management problems and suggest solution for these problems.

Communication with Client

In freelancing career, you have many potential clients from whom you expect work. Most of the freelancers spend a chunk of their time in communication with clients. However, you can cut this time by managing communication properly.

There are communication rules that will make you communication less time consuming and more effective. Convey your message in a clear way and do not leave any ambiguity. Make sure that you understand client’s needs and client understands your limits. Being open about money will also save you from potential problems as you can escape potential financial conflict at the time of payment. For not missing any messages from clients, use desktop or mobile apps from leading freelancing forums or ask your clients to communicate via skype. Skype will help you manage all communication in one place. You can also use one of these apps for communication if you work in a team.

Keep Track of Your Offers and Work

Keeping track of your application for work and the offers made to you will help you gain better understanding of your work matrix. Moreover, you can avoid the freelancer’s dilemma of getting lost in offers and work as you can track each application and offer from beginning.

For keeping a track of your offers, applications and work, put all you data in a spreadsheet file. Note down information for client name and project title, dates for first communication for a project, estimation of the end date and total time needed for processing. Moreover, prioritize your work with respect to their importance in your short-run and long-run career growth. Keep in mind all these factors and only make a promise if you know you will be able to fit the project in your spreadsheet work log. Read more about how to prepare a work record spreadsheet.

Keep Record of Your Progress

When you have a document stating all your projects, their starting and ending dates, it will become easier to track your progress.

Tracking progress helps in honoring agreements and streamlines your work but you need to it in a day to day manner. For this purpose, most useful tools are daily to-do list and work log. In the morning, list down all your to-dos for the day and match them with your work log. Make sure that your to-dos support your workload management. This work tracking will save you from the most common pitfalls on freelancing career.

These suggestions are produced for the most common problems freelancers face. However, acting upon these suggestions will give you time to handle other problems with enough time and attention. Here is a list of apps that will assist you in freelance workload management.

How Almonds Help Support Your Body When You Go Dairy-Free

The use of dairy products is not only good for our mother earth; it can also offer your body a wide array of benefits especially when it is coupled with almonds. With this combination, you are more likely to prevent your body from developing your body diseases or disorders such as cancer and other heart diseases. The almonds can help support your body when you go dairy-free because it does not only possess high-quality calcium, it also has proteins.

High-Quality Calcium

Almonds are good sources of calcium. It will not cause your body to encounter bone loss or develop any signs of osteoporosis. A person can get about 75 mg of calcium in just a single ounce. Aside from consuming plain almonds, you can also try fortified almond milk. This can give about 50% calcium that dairy milk can offer. Unsweetened varieties possess lower calorie content.

Protein Rich

This little nut offers around 6-7 grams of protein to your body. Experts on Veganism even stated that almonds are considered to be one of the best and most loved vegan protein foods to consume. Although it may not be advisable to consume almonds in huge amounts per day because of the dense fat contents, it should be considered to become part of your healthy diet.

How Can It Support

Consumption of almonds can create several health benefits that can give your body the support it wants. With the above-mentioned nutrients, there are other nutrients that almonds can offer to help support the body. It can help reduce high-risk heart attacks by just consuming almonds 4-5 times a week.

It can also lower the bad cholesterol contents in the body. According to the study of Dr. Gene Spiller, when almonds are being added to the diet of a person, it will more likely have a favorable effect when it comes to his blood cholesterol levels.

Including almonds in your diet will also protect your artery falls from detrimental damages because of the presence of flavonoids in the skins of the almonds. It will also help in the bone and teeth building because of the phosphorus contents in the almonds. Although almonds possess high-dense fat, it can still provide the body with healthy fat and can also help with weight loss. It can also help in the lowering of the blood sugar and insulin. This nut can also provide and help aid the brain in functioning because of the presence of L-carnitine and riboflavin. Aside from boosting your brain activity, it can help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

It can also aid in the nourishment of your nervous system. According to Ayurveda, consumption of almonds will definitely help increase the longevity and intellectual level. Also, according to some researchers, the only nut that can alkalize the body is the almond. Your body needs to be alkalize in order to reduce risk when it comes to poor immune function, weight gains, osteoporosis, and low energy.

Almonds possess a lot of health benefits. Although it may be small, it can surely help your body to avoid diseases and other disorders.

The Workout to Add Inches to Your Chest

One of the desires of all men who are undergoing any type of workout is the development of a good and perfect looking chest muscles. Nothing can be hotter than having a perfectly-shaped and good chest muscle. Just like the other muscles in your body, the development of your chest muscles can only be made possible if you put in the right effort and the right exercise to your training methods.

You should focus on putting more effort into doing your exercises, especially when it comes to the clavicular and sternal pectoral muscles. It only shows that routine exercises which involve incline and decline press and dumbbell press are a good way to start in order to develop your chest muscles. Your primary objective should be to get stronger and increase your chest muscles.

There are numerous exercises that will help in the development of chest muscles, but only a few may be applicable to the type of muscles you have. In doing a routine workout, it is crucial that you should know the type of muscle you have. Take a closer look at it and determine the different ways or exercises that will be applicable to your body. In this way, you are able to know the capacity or limit of your body and to avoid muscle strain, fracture or fatigue.

Tips On How To Grow Fast

There are numerous studies that would show that doing a 6-12 repetition will give your body the best result. Executing more than 12 repetitions will only ruin the good form and would lead to fatigue and strain as what was said earlier.

Another thing you should remember is to consider the style of fly’s and bench-press you are going to perform. Do not perform a lock-out because it will only work your triceps instead of your chest and it will only cause tension that can lead you to shift your focus. Also, do not perform a chest muscle exercise in several consecutive days because it will only cause the overall decline of your body’s performance and strength.

The right choice of food will also affect your workout and its results. You should choose the right amount carb combination and protein that is compatible with the type of body you have. Deficiency of overdoes of carb combination and protein intakes can be detrimental to your health. The right kind of fuel will lead to your advantage in achieving that perfect chest muscle.

That Perfect Chest Workout

In developing your chest muscles, you already know that consecutive workout will cause you negative effects. Thus, it is best to do this workout routine only twice or thrice a week. At least you won’t have to overdo yourself and you still going to have more time doing things which are more important.

You can perform a barbell bench press (8 sets of 3 repetitions), dumbbell floor press (4 sets of 8 repetitions), child’s pose breathing (10 sets of 3 repetitions), Ring pushups (4 sets of 8 repetitions), Facepulls (4 sets of 8 repetitions), bear crawls (3 sets of 30 yards), and single arm waiters walk (3 sets of 15 yards).

With this routine, you will be able to achieve that perfect chest muscle. But, it is important that you should do your work not only with the use of your heart for the determination and perseverance, it should be coupled with your brain because knowledge on the right type of workout will make things easier. Also, doing heavy sets coupled with a short rest period will boost your testosterone level as well as your growth hormone. This is according to the study made by the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Teach Your Team to Make Fearless Decisions

Every decision we take brings about a change, so the fear factor linked with the change is always there. In the business world however, the fear of boss can be erased by the boss.

Let’s see how a boss or CEO can do this?

The best way of teaching is empowering. So, empower you team. For this, you need to know the every member of your team as much as possible. You must be able to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your employees. When you know the strengths of your team members, you will be able to entrust them the powers of decision making based on their individual strengths.

Leaders do not manage things, they manage people. To manage people you will require some skills and personality attributes. You must have the ability to make your followers believe in you. You must always remain honest, sincere and connected with your team members. You must have trust in their abilities. You must be passionate about your common goals and objectives.

If you want your team members to make fearless decisions, empower them. Allow them to freedom to apply their own vision and thinking within their specified limits. Don’t ask them about the actions, ask them about results. Make them fully responsible and resourceful for the assigned task giving clear guidelines.

You can also do this in the bossy style by ordering (because you are a boss) them to take ten decisions each week with 3% margin of error. This method is stated in Entrepreneur by Stephen Belomy. But, we cannot ignore Bill Gates who said, “In 21^st century leaders will be those who empower others”.

Having faith in you and having the freedom to perform, they will start making decisions (fearful or fearless). This fearless and responsible decision making will enable them to produce the required results for the organization. If you succeed to incorporate this culture in your team, you have provided solid basis for your organization. By doing this, you have diversified the process of decision making. This hierarchy in decision making is very much important in modern organizations.

Most of the modern organizations have adopted decentralized decision making.  Some of the examples are eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, skype and Toyota.

When you have empowered the managers at their levels, you have given them the confidence and sense of ownership. They take responsibility of every decision they make. This sense of ownership is the greatest strength of any leader or any company.

Just imagine the head of every department in your team is taking the same sense of responsibility as you have. How much relieved will you feel?

Relieved from micro-managing, you will have more time to focus on planning and development. You will have time to plan the growth of the company. You will have more time to manage the external links of the company. You will have more time to refine the vision of the company.

You have refined and clear vision and your faithful vibrant team is fully synchronized with your vision and strategy. What can be the better recipe for success.

How Loading Time Affects Your Blogs

You can make money online and blogging is quite a lucrative option. Unfortunately the speed of your website will have an effect on your visitors and an effect on your sales. Many web users expect a site to load in the space of a few seconds and if it doesn’t, they will click off the site without bothering with it any further. This means you are losing conversions from visitors who are attempting to visit your blog.

Say what you like, loading time and speed do play an important role, and even if you optimize you site with images and awesome text, the loading time and speed of your website are more important. Loading time is the most critical factor with regards to the rankings in the search engine. Any person with a blog needs to be concerned with the speed and time of the loading process of their blog.

Slow Loading will get you Penalised
The loading time of your blog really does matter if you want your website to be accessible in the online community. Loading time will affect your website revenue. How many times haven’t you waited for a website to open to purchase a product, and with impatience, clicked off it and bought the product elsewhere. Of course slow loading times will also affects your websites ranking in the search engine.

For instance Google considers a page to be  slow if it takes longer than a mere 1.5 seconds to load. Slow site speed negatively impacts the user experience, but worse, it results in your site being penalised by Google in search results.  It relegates it in the search rankings and a serious and negative  impact on site traffic will result. Too slow and your website won’t be found in the top ranked pages in the search engine. Web users won’t be clicking on your website and you will be losing customers.

There ARE ways to Speed things Up

All is not lost however if you have a slow blog. There are one or two steps that can certainly work to improve loading times. Huge high-res images may look alluring, but their very size can slow down web pages and you should rather remove them and make use of smaller dimensions. Another tip is to use browser caching which is useful for remembering static files that were previously downloaded. If a visitor returns to the site, these elements can be accessed from the cache as opposed to be downloaded from the server.

Speed is a huge bonus, and conversion rates increase hugely when page load time improves from 10 seconds to two. The truth is that nobody  in this hectic world, wants to wait for web pages to load, more so when it is far easier to just navigate to the competitor’s website. Page speed is huge issue, and you do stand to lose significant amounts of revenue as a result.

How to Use Google’s Keyword Planner to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

SEO optimization is necessary to make sure your website is returned by search engines when people search for information or products they are interested in.  Whether you own a small online shop or something completely different like a photography website or a health blog, finding the right keywords is essential to ensure that you get traffic.

Google’s Keyword Planner puts at your disposal the right tools to do effective keyword research, enabling you to find the most popular and relevant keywords for your business.  Basically you have a bunch of features that provide you with numerous unique keyword combinations and give you accurate data on how much traffic a keyword receives within a specific period of time.

We all know how high the costs of marketing and SEO campaigns can go up to. Unlike other similar tools, taking advantage of Google’s renewed version of Google Keyword Tool is completely free, so do not be worried that expenses will go higher than they already are.

Below we will present an in-depth analysis of how you can benefit from this keyword research platform.

Combine keyword lists

Maximum 3 keyword lists can be mashed.  Google Keyword planner will mix them and will come up with hundreds of possible variations. Obviously, many of them won’t make any sense, but there might be some useful phrases you can use in your SEO campaign. This feature can be extremely beneficial for ecommerce websites because you will be provided with any imaginable combo of words.

On the other hand, blogs and similar sites won’t profit too much from this component of Google Keyword Planner.  Some keywords will not even come close to how people normally search on the web.

Search for keywords

Producing keywords on your own is overwhelming. It is very easy to miss some. GKP returns new keywords based on what information you fill in.  In order to make good use of this feature and to get the best suggestions, you should be very specific when you fill in those fields.

For instance, “Your product or service” field should contain numerous main keywords, not only one.   The suggestions will be given based on these main keywords. Pay attention to what phrases you insert because if they are too general (for example “photography” or “sports”), the keywords supplied will be ones that there is a lot of competition for. It is way easier to rank for low competition keywords than otherwise.

There are extra options to make the search closely related to what you are looking for (“Country”, “Language” and “Search engine”).

Check the search volume for particular keyword lists

This characteristic permits you to get the search volume for a list of keywords you already have. You either upload a CSV file containing the list or you copy & paste it directly in the place especially designed for this task.  Hit the “get search volume” button after you enter all the necessary targeting data and check how many times people have searched for the keywords in question.

One of the biggest perks of this feature is that you receive search volume information from small areas, not only from large regions or countries. This is highly effective for local businesses because it allows them to keep a sharp eye on their competitors from a specific area.

Examining results

Results are displayed in two different tabs – “Ad Group ideas” and “Keyword ideas”- which are next to each other.  The average monthly searches indicator is one of the most important aspects you should pay attention to.  For each keyword you can view a detailed histogram about the fluctuations in terms of numbers of searches during the last year.