Hey everyone, this is Vernon Ross and welcome to the Self Strategy podcast. This is a Friday wrap up. I think it may end up being called five minute Fridays because I want to spend a lot of time and I want to give you something really, really quick that you can digest and use to make the rest of the day and into next week productive. So a lot of things were happening this week, uh, two different interviews, one on the Savvy Young Professional podcast.
So if you go out to the Savvy Young Professional.com, you can find the podcast out there. We're going to be tracking my progress over the next year. And this is an experiment that a podcaster and a former mastermind member is doing. She's tracking progress to see how people actually go about achieving their goals.
So this was a, this was a fun thing to start doing and it, um, creates a level of accountability to continue to do what you want to do because you don't want to number one, uh, look like a complete failure or disappoint your audience. So I will let you guys know when that episode is going to come out, when she's going to air that, but something that we touched on that I wanted to kind of touch on for you guys is when you're talking about goals, there's a lot of different ways to go about achieving them. And one of the things that I've put into practice over the past few years is making sure that I clarify exactly what it is that I'm doing. And often with goals, goals can be these things where if you fall off of doing something that you're trying to achieve, that it becomes disappointing.
And anything that's disappointing, you're going to avoid like the plague. So one of the techniques that I use is called dumb goals and it's dream focused, uplifting, method based and behavior triggered. So I'm going to do things that are going to move me more towards the dreams that I have as far as those goals are concerned. I'm scheduling things because if it's not on the calendar, it is a dead dream.
And that is entirely true. You have to put completion dates down for things that you want to achieve. You want to have learning dates. So actually schedule time and dates for me to just sit down for two hours and learn something about what it is that I'm doing with her social, whether it's podcasting, no matter what it is, I schedule that time.
I also make sure to schedule habits and practice times. If there are things that I'm trying to get better at, if there are things that I'm trying to really achieve and there's some good habits that I want to form, I actually have to schedule time for that because if I schedule time for it and give myself a reminder, I don't have the excuse that I've forgotten to do it. Oh, or oh man, I forgot to do that because it's on the calendar. I can set a reminder and then the calendar does the work for me.
It's, I mean, it's super easy. And another thing that I'm doing is reclaiming my mornings. I don't, and I don't check email for the first hour of the day. I spend the first hour of the day just doing things for me, whether that's workout, whether that's meditate, whether that's read something, whether that's just spending time with the family, that first hour of the day, I do not pick up my phone and check email.
The only thing I will do is a quick glance to see whether or not I had any text messages come in early morning for something that might be urgent, but that's about it. And we touched on a lot of this stuff on the Savvy Young Professional podcast. So definitely check that out. I'll let you guys know when that goes live on the podcast and smarter podcast through Pye Bean, really was honored to be featured on there as a guest.
And we talked about podcast sponsorship and monetizing and making money for your show. I don't hold anything back. This is stuff that people will charge you for and try to get you to buy silly eBooks and courses and everything else like that. And yes, I do have a course on sponsorship, but I'm thinking about changing a little bit and enhancing it a little bit and making it a lower cost, higher value product that you can go and get and learn about this stuff.
Because the information is out there, but the stuff that I'm talking about is not concept. It is stuff that I've done. It's stuff that's successful. And it is ways that you can make money with your podcast and know how to accurately represent yourself in the podcasting space to potential sponsors.
Pye Bean does an amazing job at positioning podcasts to get successful sponsorship through their podcasting marketplace. So definitely check out Pye Bean. Of course, they are a sponsor of the show and I'm doing some work with Pye Bean as a client. So yeah, I'm all about Pye Bean, but it's not because of that.
I just happened to switch over because I've formed a great relationship with their CEO over the past few years, actually met a podcast movement, which is something that I definitely recommend you go to if you've never been to a conference for podcasting, podcast movement, DC podcast. And there is pod fest that's actually going on in Florida coming up here next month. So definitely also good things to check out. So we've passed the five minute marks.
This won't be a five minute Friday necessarily, but I did want to talk to you about one thing that's going on in social media. And that is the Twitter loops. Any video under 6.5 seconds, just like Vine will loop automatically on Twitter. That's a good thing because as you know, if you were a fan of Vine, Vine officially went away on the 17th, I believe either 17th or the 18th, but it's gone.
Now, Vine is dead in the water. It has made the list of the ever growing sites that go down. And, you know, it's just one of those things. Sometimes sites just have to go away.
Vine is one of them. But if you were, you know, one of the people that use Vine and you really enjoyed it, enjoyed what Vine was and the creativity that came out on Vine, you don't have to worry about going to Instagram and using Boomerang because any video under 6.5 seconds will automatically loop on Twitter. So definitely check out that feature. Make sure you update the app because it is in the app now.
So there is a latest update for the Twitter app. Go out, download it, update it and play around with 6.5 second videos because it's, it's kind of like Vine, but not really, but it's going to give you some enhancements to playing around with social. There's some interesting things going on on Instagram. Definitely check out Instagram, check out Gary Venerchuk's videos and what he's doing and the call to actions that he's making in his videos.
He's right hooking like nobody's business here recently. So if you've ever read any of his books, he's got a book called Jab, Jab, Right Hook. I talked about it when it first came out a couple of years ago. Now he's right hooking.
He gives a lot of info, a lot of content. But right now there's the ass. He's asking you to join his email list. He's asking you to buy his t-shirts and it's not spammy or salesy or sleazy or anything else like that.
It's done very naturally and in a very authentic way. And I think you guys should really study what he's doing, not just watch the videos and consume the content, but study what he's doing, how he's actually doing it, how he's editing the videos and stuff like that. I've played around with it a little bit and I've done some stuff with ScreenFlow because you guys know I use ScreenFlow and of course, ScreenFlow is a friend of the show. I'm an affiliate with ScreenFlow.
So if you guys want to check out ScreenFlow, definitely click on one of the links in the show notes, either on the pod being side or just out of vernenross.com. But I use ScreenFlow because I can customize the size for my Instagram videos so that it works right in the Instagram story. Then I can just upload that to my Dropbox, download it to my phone, throw it in the camera roll and then upload it right to my Instagram stories. So that's something that you guys want to take a look at because you can throw videos in your Instagram stories and customize them and then upload them.
So it's not just, you know, it's got to be stuff that you're just doing right there. I'm going to put a couple of videos that I did in the show notes to this podcast. So you can kind of get an idea of what's going on. Plus there are some apps out there where you can do some text over pictures and stuff like that.
But you can also do that in ScreenFlow, do exactly what you want, make the call of actions that you want to make them look the way that you want them to look. So I've been having some fun with that playing around with it. So many things you can do with ScreenFlow and customizing sizes for video, quick hit videos. It takes me about 10 minutes to put together a video.
What's already have the plan in my head, what it is that I want to do. I'll jump out in Canva with the, um, with the graphics that I want and then I can just throw those right in the ScreenFlow. So it makes it really, really easy to do stuff like that. Fun stuff.
Uh, I don't have to go through a whole lot editing and get the stuff done because I just don't have the time to do it. But with that guys, I want to do, uh, go ahead, get out of here. I just wanted to drop a couple quick tips on you, catch you up on what's been going on in the week. Definitely pre-order of the book.
You know, the book is being formatted right now. The interior design is done. So I cannot wait. The cover wrap is being completed as we speak and I am stoked.
Follow me out on Twitter at Ross PR, Vernon Ross dot com is a website and I look forward to seeing you guys in the next episode.