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If world domination is your goal, as it is mine, you need to be on track. You need to be a machine. You need to be a champion. Being a champion is a struggle for everyone, even champions! There is no easy victory when you’re at the top of the mount.

It’s a long way to the top, if you want to rock n roll. –Bon Scott

But is it worth it? Is success worth the effort and sacrifice? Most people decide that it is not.

If you decide not to decide, you still have made a choice. –Geddy Lee

I get points for gratuitous rock references, right? 🙂

A Word on What Success is, and What it is Not

Success is not a state, nor is it an achievement. It is not an acquisition. And it certainly is not a Ferrari or a Cribs house. It is a decision. This is what makes success deceptively simple, yet elusive. It is a decision made daily, hourly, by the minute. By the second. The perception of success, importantly, is relative.

The people we perceive to be successful are simply those people who have made the decision to succeed more often than most. We ALL have the power; some of us just choose to exercise that power more often.

A Word on Failure

Successful people fail as much or more often than anyone else. But they choose to blow right through their failures and not slow down. They succeed because they decide to do so, despite what happens. Decisions have the ability to do that. They give us focus. The decisions we make come about in an instant. And we have thousands of opportunities daily…to be a success.

Success and How it Relates to Achieving World Domination

When you make the decision to be successful…the world and any obstacle it can throw at you becomes nothing but a din…mere background noise. At that moment, everything in the world serves only to either advance your mission or your education. Every single thing that happens to you, fuels you onward. You no longer have to worry about success, because it is yours…the world works for you. In that moment, the world is officially your bitch.

That, my friends, is world domination!

A word of caution: do not mistake half-hearted wishes as decisions. If you say something like “Yeah, that would be pretty cool if I could make my blog successful” this is NOT a decision to succeed. It is merely a wish. A wish is not a decision. It is not even related. A wish is not even a distant cousin of the decision. A decision is when you say “I’m going to do this, period” End of sentence. That’s it. Notice how committed it is. There are no conditions. There are no ifs ands or buts. Say it with me now…“I’m going to do this, period.” There is power in there you cannot measure. The good news is that you don’t HAVE to measure it…all you need to do is ride the wave!

Failure is Not the Opposite of Success

Do you fear failure? You needn’t. Failure is merely a result. It is a static event. It is an outcome. Successful people are not concerned with any result or event or outcome that is not in alignment with their goals. That focus comes about as the result of a decision that is made over and over again. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Success is decision. Remember when you said “I’m going to do this, period”? You can’t just say it once…you have to KEEP saying it. And you have to mean it. You have to stay on task. Failure and success are simply not related to each other.

How to Obtain World Domination in 5 Simple Steps

5 questions, when asked of yourself consistently throughout each day, can transform your business and enable you to grow to any level!

Take your business, your blog, your sales, your income to the next level by asking yourself these 5 simple questions. Introspection, brutal honesty and follow through are required! Obviously, you cannot just ask the questions. You need to answer them and work aggressively to improve.

Running through these questions will keep you on task. Remember, success is a decision you make moment by moment. And you do not just want one moment of success! You want an uninterrupted succession of them! You want to stay on the wave. Most people have ridden the wave for a moment or two before, but they allowed themselves to get distracted, and they wiped out. They let their power get away from them. This doesn’t mean they weren’t successful. They were. They simply got off the wave…and failed to get back on.

In the moment you decide to succeed, success is yours…wholly and completely. But if in 5 minutes you steer in a different direction, you get off course. Use these questions to stay on course.

What am I doing right now?
If I do what I am doing right now repeatedly, daily, with intensity, for 5 years, what will be the net result?
Is the net result in alignment with my goals?
What can I do instead that will create a better or larger net result?
Who can do this better than me?

The Fantastically Simple Principles of Achieving World Domination

There are fantastically simple principles hidden here. The first is that in order to start accomplishing things on a larger scale, you need to make larger decisions. Base fewer of your decisions on immediate concerns and more of your decisions on long term results.

Instead of asking yourself “How can I get through this day?” or “How can I get this problem off my plate right now?” (these are decisions that get you off course), put things in a long term framework. “How is this consequential to my long term plan?” You’ll be amazed at how much time we spend on things that literally have little or no long term consequence at all!

If we spend our lives tending to details that don’t ultimately matter, what do you think the net result will be? World domination? I don’t think so!

The second principle is simple. Letting go of the details empowers you to take things to the next level. #5 speaks to this directly. As business owners, we often try to do everything because we think no one can do it as well as us. The fact is that there are likely a LOT of people who can do things as well as you, and there are likely a few people who can do things BETTER than you. An ego check is essential now and then. Letting go of the need to do everything is mandatory if you hope to be able to focus on anything of consequence.

When you tend to every single detail yourself, there is no time to step back and focus. Staying on task, staying focused is impossible, and that is when success takes a back seat to the minutia of the day. That’s when you lose your power.

Step back, focus, let go, and take over the world!

To make a blog successful, it’s important to write regularly. I’m not one of the people who will tell you that you have to write every day in order to make your blog successful. I write everyday, but I don’t post to Next Level Blogger every day. Tim Ferriss is a big advocate of not working too much, and he posts only once a week or so. Many bloggers don’t post every day, but it’s important to post regularly. At least once or twice a week is really a good standard to keep.

One of the recent commentators on my guest post over at Remarkablogger expressed some concern about running out of ideas to write about. This is a common concern. Everyone runs into a struggle now and then regarding how to keep the content coming.

I suppose there are those of us out there who are comfortable running on inspiration only. I’m not like that. I use systems. Especially when it comes to business, I want something in place to ensure I’m getting results.

There is a very simple system I use to ensure that I always have content to publish, and I hope you can use it, adapt it to your personal situation and benefit from it.

A Couple Important Points

Before I describe the content system I use, I want to preface this with a couple important points. You really have to be running a blog about a subject you love. You need to have a strong intrinsic interest in what you’re doing. You can apply this very simply content system to any subject, but if you don’t love what you’re doing, it’s still going to be plain drudgery, and that is going to show up in your writing. You can’t sell something you’re not sold on yourself.

With as simple and quick as it can be to get a new business fired up online these days, you really shouldn’t ever think of yourself as locked into something. If you hate what you’re doing, just do something else, or take your current project in a new direction. Seriously.

Second, it’s essential to have faith in yourself. As silly as that may sound, it really is important. Experts in any field routinely underestimate what they know. They think everyone knows what they know.

Why would anyone be interested in reading something that you consider to be very remedial? Because they’re not the expert! YOU are the expert. The reason you consider some things to be very simple and boring is because this is what you do; this is what you work on every day, so of course YOU think it’s simple! Your readers want more of that expertise. Share it with them.

You know more than you think you do. You have a lot more to share than you think. When you have faith in yourself, and you’re confident in your expertise, the more you share, the more you’ll want to share. 5 years from now, you’ll have published hundreds of posts, and you will still have only just begun.

The idea that there really is only so much to say about a subject is just plain wrong.

There is No Limit to How Much Content You Can Produce

Think about nearly any subject that exists, and there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of people writing about it for generations. And if it’s a brand new subject, then the ball is just getting started.
For example there have been innumerable reports written about the digestive processes in fruit flies, and right now as we speak…there is surely a scientist busy writing the next one… and he absolutely cannot wait to release it, because it’s going to ROCK! Point: you can go as deep as you want into any subject, there is no limit to how much content that can be produced!

The more you dive into a subject, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more there is to learn. Not enough to write about? Seriously, you’re just not looking hard enough. I don’t mean this to criticize you if you’re having trouble writing right now; I mean it to empower you. Trust me, you have plenty to share. The challenge is not that there isn’t enough to write about. The challenge is that there just simply is not enough time to share everything you have to share. Once you learn to tap into your expertise and have faith in yourself, you will be unstoppable.

My Blog Content System

Here’s what I do to ensure I always have a large amount of content and ideas to write about.

Step one:

In the morning, when I’m most creative and uninhibited, I sit down and brainstorm article ideas. I do this by just writing titles. I don’t expand on them at all; I just write titles. Not all of them are great of course, but my goal is to simply take a few minutes and write 20-30 titles or so. In a short amount of time, this has produced a very sizeable list of article ideas.

This may sound intimidating up front, but it’s really a lot easier than you might think. Coming up with titles is fun, creative and simple, because you don’t have to concern yourself with research, what exactly you’re going to say or anything. Just write titles that you’d like to read yourself. Don’t worry about whether it’s good or not. Just crank em out.

After you have this list, it’s easy to revisit it, and after just a few seconds of scanning, you will get more ideas for new posts. Write them down. Again, don’t write anything but titles.

Step two:

When it’s time to get a post together, simply visit your list. There’s something magical about a good title. When you have a title, the post often writes itself. Getting inspired is often the trouble, and this way you have a tool to stimulate that inspiration any time you need it.

That’s why it’s been so beneficial to me to separate the thought process from the writing process.

When I sit down with your list of hundreds of article ideas, all I have to do is scan that sucker and look for something that excites me. Many, many ideas may not be doing anything for me at the moment, but then I’ll see a title that grabs me, and bam…20 minutes later I have an article to post.

Results

Admittedly this is a very simple system, but if you’ve had trouble coming up with content, I encourage you to try it out. There really is no magic out there, but simple systems in my experience are the ones you can understand and implement immediately, and that’s why they work. Just doing something with a little structure can free up your mind to produce good content whenever you need.

It’s very intimidating to look at a blank page with the need to produce an article. But when you have pages of ideas to look through, it’s easy to simply scan it and look for something that’s interesting. It’s a great way to get the ball rolling and the writing process started.

After doing content this way for a few weeks, I found that I have more ideas than I can reasonably produce for Next Level Blogger. So what’s happened is that the ideas have spilled out into other products. I created Professional Blogging Roadmap that way. A free ebook you can download here. It’s essentially a collection of about 30-40 different article ideas that I put together and organized into an ebook. I have another ebook coming up that was produced this way as well, and a paid information product I hope to release near the end of the year or early in 2010. And Next Level Blogger has only been up for a couple months or so. The way I see it, if it’s produced this type of results for me, it’s worth sharing, and I bet it can help you as well 🙂

Other Sources for Ideas

• You’re subscribed to all the top blogs in your space, correct? If not, you definitely should be. Writers read. And bloggers…read blogs. If you’ve not yet developed a strong voice and an ability to crank out quality content at will, make sure you’re reading other writers in your niche. Being regularly exposed to quality ideas is a great way to develop your senses for great article ideas. Just scanning your rss reader can be a great way to get inspired as well.
• Ask your readers! I did this recently with my email subscribers…I really like to converse with my subscribers as much as possible. I simply said “Hey I’m writing an ebook…” And I described the topic I’m covering, and I asked, “…anything you want to see covered?” I got a ton of great ideas in response. I really appreciate that feedback! A lot of that feedback is going to end up being in the new ebook, and a lot of it will turn into future posts on Next Level Blogger. Don’t overlook your subscribers; believe me, they’ll tell you what they think if you just ask!

Not only is the prospect of continuously producing new content an occasion hurdle for bloggers, but it’s also something that intimidates would-be bloggers. It can keep some people from getting started blogging, when in fact, setting up a new blog just might be the most powerful and smart thing they can do to promote their business. Hopefully this post can show how simple it can be to crank out an unbelievable amount of quality content for your readers. There really are no limits beyond your personal energy.