March 2022 - Page 3 of 11

Weight Loss: This Oil Reduces Belly Fat

The oil that targets abdominal fat, trimming the belly in only one month.

High-oleic acid canola oil can help cut down belly fat in four weeks, research finds.

Canola oil-based diets have also been shown to lower cholesterol levels and provide health benefits in obese people.

Canola oil is low in saturated fat but high in monounsaturated fatty acids and mainly used in cooking and salad dressing.

Excess belly fat, which is located in the abdominal area, is a risk factor for metabolic syndrome.

This medical condition is a combination of high blood pressure, obesity, and type 2 diabetes which puts a person at greater risk of coronary heart disease and stroke.

Almost one in three US adults, one in four adults in the UK, and one in five Canadian adults have metabolic syndrome.

But a study has found that canola oil can reduce abdominal obesity in people who are at higher risk for metabolic syndrome and cardiometabolic disease.

Professor Penny Kris-Etherton explained:

“Visceral, or abdominal, fat increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, and is also associated with increased risk for conditions such as metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

Monounsaturated fats in canola oil decrease this fat that has adverse health effects.”

Participants in this study had abdominal obesity and either had metabolic syndrome or were at risk for it.

Participants followed five diets to test different five oils, but only the canola oil diet led to abdominal fat loss.

Based on participants’ daily calorie needs, the quantity of treatment oil was calculated.

For instance, a person on a 3,000-calorie diet would have 60 grams of canola oil a day to make up 18 percent of this calorie intake.

They drank two smoothies every day and each smoothie contained 30 grams of canola oil (two tablespoons) with 100 grams of non-fat milk, 100 grams of orange sherbet, and 100 grams of frozen unsweetened strawberries.

The results showed a reduction of 1.6 percent in belly fat after four weeks consumption of high-oleic acid canola oil a day.

Professor Kris-Etherton said:

“As a general rule, you can’t target weight loss to specific body regions.

But monounsaturated fatty acids seem to specifically target abdominal fat.”

Canola oil is extracted from rapeseed and there is a concern about rapeseed oil.

Rapeseed contains erucic acid which is toxic to humans when consumed in large amounts.

However, if canola oil contains less than 2 percent erucic acid, it is generally recognized as safe.

The study was published in the journal Obesity (Liu et al., 2016).

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The Difference Between Inbound And Outbound Traffic

You’ve probably heard the terms, inbound traffic and outbound traffic. This is an important concept to understand because it applies to everything you do with paid marketing. In our Paid Traffic Mastery course, we teach the core concepts you need to win with paid traffic. And understanding what inbound vs outbound traffic is, is a core concept of paid traffic marketing.

Inbound Traffic Is Traffic That Is Actively Seeking A Solution

Potential customers are considered inbound when they come to your website or the network you’re advertising on. In digital marketing, you can achieve this through great content marketing, search engine optimization, or paid advertising.

The best example of this is Google search. Let’s say somebody goes to Google and says, “I need a new garden hose.” If you sell garden hoses, that’s inbound traffic.

Outbound Traffic Is Traffic You Push Your Message In Front Of

Outbound traffic is interrupter marketing. Potential customers aren’t looking for you. They’re not looking for a solution.

The best example of this is social media ads, or more generally, paid traffic. These ads show up inside the newsfeed or inside the Google display network or wherever you’re advertising.

If you’ve done your research and completed a Customer Avatar Canvas, you know who you can successfully advertise to. You target these potential customers because you think they might be interested in your product. So you push your message in front of them.

Is Inbound Or Outbound Traffic Better?

I could spark a nerd war if I tried to tell you that inbound was better than outbound or vice versa. So, here’s the truth…you need both inbound marketing and outbound marketing. But each tool needs to be used when it’s applicable.

My dad says, “if you’re good with a hammer, you think everything’s a nail.” If you’re really good with inbound marketing, you’ll often find yourself trying to use inbound traffic when you might need to be using outbound traffic, and vice versa.

When To Use Outbound Traffic

Say you invented a new whiz bang gizmo that nobody’s ever heard about. There’s no inbound traffic for that, right? Nobody is searching for your product because it’s brand new. At this point, you don’t have a list, so email marketing won’t work. What can you do?

In this case, you have to use outbound traffic to raise awareness.

When To Use Inbound Traffic

Now flipping that coin, let’s say you solve a serious problem. Let’s say you’re an emergency plumber. The second my toilet is clogged, I’m going to be desperate to find you. Where do people go when they need something? They head to the search engines, of course. Remember, social media platforms act as search engines, too.

In this case, the incoming traffic from search is extremely valuable. This is the reason you should pay to put yourself and your business out there. As long as the ads can effectively be monetized, you should pay to play.

…

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Initiative: 4 Ways to Act without Permission

New ideas always encounter resistance.

Success requires initiative.

Leaders act without permission.

There’s too much permission-asking in organizations.

You’ve been asking permission all your life. It began when you were a kid.

How might you take initiative when you’re surrounded by naysayers?

4 ways to act without permission

Reject the idea that good employees ask permission.

Display regard for others. Don’t think of initiative as getting your own way. Act with the best interest of others when you take initiative.
Use curiosity, not anger. When you’re afraid to speak up, anger builds up. Initiative based on anger is self-serving. It’s about making things better for you. Self-serving leaders lose influence.
Be proactive, not reactive. A lousy boss is no excuse to do what you want to do. Initiative is acting-for, not acting-against.
Act with openness. A closed mind reflects a better-than spirit. Initiative is about humility, not arrogant superiority.

Don’t solve a naysayer’s objections.

The first response to new ideas is usually no.

The worst thing you can do is solve a naysayer’s objection. The moment you answer one objection, a committed naysayer spouts two more.

Anyone who is committed to ‘steady as she goes’ finds reasons to stay the same.

3 ways to respond to naysayers:

Seek input early and first. Don’t ask naysayers for permission to try something new. Tell them you’re developing a new course of action. “What problems might we encounter if we…?”
When they say, “That won’t work,” say, “What exactly did you try? What specifically did you learn that didn’t work?”
When they say, “We can’t,” say, “Lets come up with three reasons it won’t work and three reasons it will.”

What suggestions do you have for someone who wants to take initiative? (Act without permission.)

Still curious: Taking Initiative

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20 Questions You Can Use to Audit Personal Energy

“Being an energizer is 4X more important than your title, position in a hierarchy, position in an influence network, or your position in an information network.” Kim Cameron

Teams with one deadbeat suffer a performance disadvantage of 30 to 40 percent compared to teams that have no bad apples. Good Boss Bad Boss

Personal energy is more important than skill, talent, or resources. High talent and low energy disappoint. Low energy people earn low-level opportunities.

20 questions to audit personal energy:

(Ask team members to assess their ability to manage personal energy. Use a 1 to 10 scale.)

I know my most productive time of day.
I typically stay on task until I need a break.
I regularly express gratitude.
I feel my boss seeks my best interest.
I take breaks during the day.
I eat healthy food.
I have a consistent bedtime.
I know what today’s priority is.
I frequently do things I love to do.
I feel like I’m heading in a good direction as a person/employee.
I usually get the day’s work done.
I understand and embrace organizational purpose.
I use my strengths every day at work.
I feel like I make a meaningful contribution every day.
My work aligns with my values.
I feel like my boss listens to me.
I enjoy a hobby.
I exercise regularly.
I feel like I’m growing as a person.
I hang out with fellow employees outside of work hours.

Questions for discussion:

What did you learn after completing your energy audit?
Which items most influence your energy in a positive way? Negative way?
How might you better manage personal energy?
What’s one thing I could do to better fuel your energy?

Successful leaders help people manage personal energy.

What questions would you add to the above personal energy audit?

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

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Episode 1688 Scott Adams: From Russian Hypersonic Missiles to Fertilizer. I Cover it All Today

Whiteboard: Evaluating Studies
50 Intel liars about Hunter’s laptop
Russia fires a hypersonic missile
Operational attrition of Russian equipment
Ukraine’s resolve to fight to the end or victory
The fertilizer shortage
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topicsto build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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4 Benefits of Paid Traffic You Can’t Afford To Ignore

If you haven’t added paid traffic to your T-shaped marketer toolbelt, you’re missing out. Paid search marketing is a proven marketing strategy for getting instant results and dialing in the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

Let’s talk about the benefits of paid traffic.

#1: Speed to Market

The first benefit of paid traffic is speed. To illustrate what I mean, let’s compare paid ads to search engine optimization. You may think this is an unfair comparison, but it illustrates my point perfectly.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process by which you try to get your content to rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs. SEO strategy includes keyword research, meta data, backlinking, and all kinds of technical elements. Most people view organic traffic as any traffic you don’t have to pay to get in front of.

With organic marketing, it can take three months to get a piece of content to appear as a search result. In other words, to rank organically.

If you’re trying to optimize for a term that has any level of competition, it can be 3, 6, 9, 12+ MONTHS before you begin to see any traction.

With paid traffic, you can see traffic the next day.

Both paid traffic and organic search traffic are critical to business success. But paid traffic needs to come first. Why? Because it’s so freakin’ fast. In the realm of digital marketing, you need proof of concept before you can scale. Proof of concept is difficult to have without speed.

Quickly & Easily Test Campaign Elements

Speed has another benefit. It gives you the opportunity to quickly test what’s working or not working with your ppc ad.

You get to test your ad copy, pricing, the call to action, landing pages, the ad creative, etc. And it can all be tested quickly.

Testing takes the uncertainty out of paid advertising. It doesn’t take a lot of time or money, because paid traffic is so fast.

#2: Analytics You Can Actually Track

Another of the benefits of paid traffic is the analytics that back it up.

With organic marketing, social media marketing, and especially email marketing, there are limited data points, and those data points are being taken away from us because of privacy first initiatives.

With paid traffic, the advertising networks – Google AdWords, Facebook, Bing ads, etc. – have to give you this information because you’re paying for the traffic.

The Conversion Path

A conversion path is the sequence of events a user goes through before they engage in a desired action. It’s important to track the conversion path and look for the common behaviors of your best customers.

It’s difficult to track the conversion path with free traffic.

For example, organic social traffic is very disparate in terms of the information that you’re given. Because of the iOS 15 update,…

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5 Mistakes Every Business Owner Makes

5 Mistakes Every Business Owner Makes – Michael and Megan ]]> Continue reading

Painkiller Side-Effects: This Common Drug Increases Risk-Taking

The painkiller is found in 600 different drugs.

Acetaminophen — known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — makes people take bigger risks, research finds.

Taking the popular painkiller makes people view risky activities as less so.

People report being more likely to speak their mind on an unpopular issue at work, change career in their 30s or even take up skydiving.

Acetaminophen is a painkiller that is used in at least 600 different medicines.

Most people are not aware of the wide range of psychological side-effects the drug has.

Previous studies have shown that acetaminophen reduces both positive and negative emotions, the ability to empathise and changes how the brain processes information.

Dr Baldwin Way, the study’s first author, said:

“Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities — they just don’t feel as scared.

With nearly 25 percent of the population in the U.S. taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society.”

For one of the studies in the research, some participants took a standard 1,000 mg dose of acetaminophen.

Then all the participants started pumping up a balloon, for which they were offered a greater reward for each pump they put in.

Dr Way explained how the experiment worked:

“As you’re pumping the balloon, it is getting bigger and bigger on your computer screen, and you’re earning more money with each pump.

But as it gets bigger you have this decision to make: Should I keep pumping and see if I can make more money, knowing that if it bursts I lose the money I had made with that balloon?”

People who had taken acetaminophen carried on pumping and were more likely to burst the balloon.

Dr Way said:

“If you’re risk-averse, you may pump a few times and then decide to cash out because you don’t want the balloon to burst and lose your money.

But for those who are on acetaminophen, as the balloon gets bigger, we believe they have less anxiety and less negative emotion about how big the balloon is getting and the possibility of it bursting.”

Dr Way thinks the results have some topical implications, since people are told to take acetaminophen for initial COVID symptoms:

“Perhaps someone with mild COVID-19 symptoms may not think it is as risky to leave their house and meet with people if they’re taking acetaminophen.”

The study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Keaveney et al., 2020).

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Turn a Cold Lead To a Hot Lead with Paid Traffic

There are three primary temperatures of traffic. It’s important to think about each type as you build your digital marketing strategy. If you’ve heard Ryan Deiss talk about how dating and marketing are similar, you’ll get these right away. If not…keep reading! You’ll see how easy it is to turn cold leads into hot leads.

What Is Cold Traffic?

Someone who knows nothing about your product is a cold lead. Honestly, a cold lead might not even recognize they have a problem. If they are aware of a problem, they might not know a solution exists.

Cold traffic isn’t ready to engage.
Cold traffic isn’t ready to buy.
Cold traffic might not even want to hear from you.

You might be thinking, “why waste my time and ad spend trying to win over someone who doesn’t even want to hear from me?” Because…they actually DO want to hear from you, they just don’t know it yet.

Marketing Is Relationship Building

I feel strongly that digital marketing is relationship building. Think about any new relationship. They all start out cold with what Ryan Deiss calls a glance. You see someone from across the room that looks interesting. They glance back. It’s just a moment.

What’s the next step? Go and introduce yourself. That’s what paid traffic does. It introduces your product to the prospect.

Know Your Target Audience

Before marketing to anyone, you should create a buyer persona. At Digital Marketer, we call it the Customer Avatar. Completing a Customer Avatar Canvas helps you know the prospect to a point where you know:

What their goals are.
What their pain points are.
Their hobbies and interests.
Where they hang out.
Their dreams and plans.
What keeps them up at night.

If your marketing speaks to those issues, you’ll start to turn that traffic into warm traffic.

What Is Warm Traffic?

At the warm traffic stage, prospects don’t need to know about you, your product, or your brand to be considered warm leads or warm traffic. They do, however, need to be aware that they have a problem.

Warm traffic is any potential customer who has identified an issue and they’re interested in having that issue addressed in some way.

Examples of warm traffic include:

The minivan mom who realizes, “I need an oil change.”
The newly wedded couple who decides, “We’re interested in buying a new house.”
The overworked attorney who says, “I want to go to Tahiti.”

In other words, warm traffic is a potential customer who has identified a need.

What Is Hot Traffic?

Hot leads are the folks that are ready to go. You’ve “turned a glance into a stare,” as Ryan would say. You’ve introduced yourself and gotten the number. Now you’re ready for the first date!

Hot traffic wants to engage.
Hot traffic wants to subscribe.
Hot traffic wants to convert.
Hot traffic wants to buy!

As you might expect, this is…

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6 Shifts for Leading The Future that is Already Here

Something very unusual happened because of Covid 19 that hadn’t happened before.

The world had experienced pandemics and cataclysmic events before, but Covid was different.

Covid changed many things, but it accelerated everything. The future arrived not incrementally over time but all at once.

Covid ended the present and replaced it with the future.

Time honored traditions and proven practices were upended. While everyone was dealing with the health risks and behavioral changes needed to cope, most didn’t notice the sudden arrival of the future.

Things have not returned to normal, nor will they ever, especially if you define normal as pre 2020. Yet how many organizations struggle not just to make sense of the future that is here now, but what they should be doing and doing differently to thrive?

I’ve studied the future that is here now and based my findings on a national research project and interaction with hundreds of clients and leaders over the past few years.

I’ve identified six critical shifts you need to make to lead the future that is here now:

1. Certainty to confidence.

We are frequently surprised and sometimes shocked.

Why?

Because we think we are nearly certain what is going to happen. Certainty is one of five social rewards deeply important to the brain. It feels good to think we know the future.

Nobody talked about Covid until it happened as we were all pretty certain there wouldn’t be a plague in 2020 even though we knew it was always a possibility.

We were surprised when Russia invaded the Ukraine even though war has been a constant of human history.

In addition to certainty often being an illusion, there is another problem: a sense of certainty can provide a false sense of well being. It makes us flat-footed and inattentive.

If we can’t realistically be all that certain, especially about the big events and forces that change the world, what can we do? The alternative is to make sure we have the confidence to be successful in an uncertain world. “We will find a way” must be more than a bromide; it must be a learned behavior.

Confidence is about anticipating what might happen and preparing as much as possible. It is also about developing a mindset and skillset that enables team members to be confident that regardless of what happens, there is a way to respond successfully.

Does your organization teach resilience? Have you captured and codified what you learned from the Covid crisis? Are your contingency plans up to date? Do you discuss the far fetched yet possible scenarios that might upend your business model? And, most importantly, have you identified the necessary skills to respond to whatever happens? These are the things that develop practical confidence.

2. Planning and process to agility and experimentation.

In a world that changes slowly, planning and process create efficiency and need only periodically adjusted.

In a post-Covid world where everything has changed at once, planning and process are an anchor and impediment…