Research shows that when you share your goals and commitments with others, you’re more likely to follow through on them. My own experience confirms this. When I got off-track with my exercise routine a while back, I decided to start going to the gym with my girlfriend every morning. After a couple weeks, it became a sweet, little routine and something we both look forward to. When one of us occasionally lacks the motivation to get out the door, the other provides the necessary encouragement to follow through. Of course, now and again, we both decide to blow off the gym and go enjoy some time together at our favorite breakfast spot. An accountability partner doesn’t have to be a spouse or significant other. It can be a coach, a friend, a colleague or anyone you trust and respect enough help you get back on track. When you keep your goals and commitments secret, it’s too easy to avoid changing your life and to drift back to old habits and routines.

The demands on our time are greater now than ever. Likewise, never before in history have we faced so many possible distractions. If you jump every time your phone rings, a new email arrives or you iPhone buzzes, you’ll never get back on track with your goal. When you create an implementation intention, you’re not only giving your rational mind specific instructions about what to do. You’re also making time in your schedule to actually do it. But you have to take it a step further. You have to set aside a specific block of time when your attention is dedicated 100% to working on your goal. Time blocking works best if you set a definite start and end time when you have no other meetings or commitments. Lock your door, turn off your phone and make yourself unavailable for any other tasks. If the Internet is too tempting, download what you need ahead of time, and turn off your Internet connection during your time block.

Part of the reason people never get back on-track with their goals is explained by how their goal is set (i.e., is it specific enough?). Another part of the problem, however, is there’s no clear plan for acting on the goal. An implementation intention is a mini action plan that’s been scientifically proven to help you follow through on your goals. In one study, for example, women who wrote down an implementation intention specifying when and where they would conduct a breast self-examination did so 100% of the time. On the other hand, women who failed to create such a plan did so only 53% of the time. An implementation intention takes the form of an if-then statement – if situation X arises, I will perform behavior Y. So, following my example from above, you might write down you implementation intention as follows: “If it’s 7:00am on Monday, Wednesday or Friday, I will go to the gym, and walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes.” Again, the key here is to be very specific.

A body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Likewise, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. You may recognize that as Newton’s First Law of Motion, also known as inertia. But it seems to work the same when it comes to our mental processes. Once we stop moving, it takes some mental energy to get moving again. When you do get going though, it’s much easier to maintain the behavior. The trick is to just get started. This is deceptively simple. Obviously, you don’t feel like doing whatever it is you have to do, or you’d be doing it. But that’s mainly because of inertia. The trick is to do something – anything really – to get yourself moving again in the direction of your goal. According to Professor Tim Pyschyl, an expert on procrastination, once you get started, you’ll feel differently, not only about the task, but also about yourself: “Just get started … Once we start, our attributions of the task change. Based on other research, we know that our attributions about ourselves change too. First, once we get started … we perceive the task as much less aversive than we do when we’re avoiding it. Second, even if we don’t finish the task, we have done something, and the next day our attributions about [ourself] are not nearly as negative. We feel more in control and more optimistic. You might even say we have a little momentum.”

Reader questions are great. Mainly because you can usually be sure other people share the same question. Also, it’s so much easier to address a specific question rather than have to pull content out of your own head. Example From: How to Create More Content for Your Blog and Kill 2 Birds With 1 Stone by Darren Rowse “Darren, do you have any tips for creating more content for my blog? I have grown my blog to become reasonably successful but as it grows find myself with more and more requests and questions from readers that take me away from writing content. What should I do?”—William “Hi William and thanks for the question. I do have one tip that comes to mind that I hope you find useful. It certainly helped me keep my inbox load light and create more content!”

What’s more compelling and inspiring than reading about someone else’s path to success? This is a tried and true approach to hooking your reader. It’s also great for linkbait (but that’s another article). The cool thing about this is the success story doesn’t even have to be your own. Example From: 10 Simple Tips To Get 250,000 Page Views Per Month by Niall Harbison “When we started our business 16 months ago we decided to use a blog as the central marketing tool for our business. We did it because we didn’t really have any money for advertising and we never really believed that attending networking events would work for us. We placed the blog at the center of our website and only had one commodity on our hands to make it a success….time. “It’s been a long journey but 16 months later we now get 250,000 pageviews to our site per month, in the last year we have brought in over $500,000 in business as a direct result of the blog and the business operates in 2 countries and our content has been picked up all over the world.”