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I recently started playing Chess at chess.com on a daily basis at the age of 30. I knew how to play, but that’s about it. Me being an Logician, I instantly became addicted, and I’m glad I did. I’m also angry that I didn’t play Chess growing up.

But why play Chess? If you’re a full grown adult and thinking about taking up Chess, it’s important to know why it’s beneficial to play the game, otherwise you’ll quit. You’ll quit because it’s so much more complicated and difficult to become even decent at. Here are 3 benefits to playing Chess as an adult.

1. Chess Improves Your Ability To Focus

Focusing is like any other activity. If you don’t practice doing it, you’re not going to be great at it. Practice focusing and your ability to focus becomes as close to a superpower as possible.

Chess is the ultimate game for practicing to focus on something. Chess matches can last for hours. Players will spend an hour and 7 minutes calculating their next move in a complicated middlegame.

2. Chess Protects Your Brain From Decay

Studies show that making your brain struggle with focusing decreases grey matter in the brain helping decrease risk of Alzheimer’s and overall aging of the brain.

Going to the gym helps prevent muscle waste and increases the longevity of your body in general. Intensely concentrating and focusing on solving a problem is like going to the gym for your brain.

3. Chess is a Challenge

To say playing chess is a challenge is putting is mildly at best. That’s like saying “It’s a challenge” to build a six figure business. It’s not just difficult, it’s one of the most difficult endeavors you’ll ever attempt.

Chess Will Tell You (over and over) that… You’re Not That Smart

As we age, we tend to develop an inflated ego looking down on anyone younger than us deeming them unworthy of an intelligent conversation with us for no other reason other than the fact that we’re older than them. This is a fallacy and should be abolished from our thinking. And chess is just the game to help you with that.

Do you know what happens when you lose to a game of Chess by an 11 year old?

You get a reality check.

Chess is a game of focus and cognition, but it’s also like any other game or sport. It requires thousands of hours of study and practice. If a 14 year old put in those hours, it doesn’t matter what your IQ is or what  fancy university you paid $200,000 for. You’re going to get intellectually destroyed by the 14 year old.

Do You Need a High IQ To Get Good at Chess?

Many people think that a high IQ is required to play Chess well. However, this is in fact, a myth. Yes, many Grandmasters have higher IQ’s. But there are also Grandmasters that have notoriously low IQ’s.

To recap, is playing Chess good for adults? Playing Chess is beneficial especially for adults.

Where To Start?

If your interest is peaked and you seek to build lower self-esteem, here’s where to start.

Go to chess.com and make an account. Play a few games and no more. Then it’s best to go learn and study one or two Chess openings for both White and Black.

Then just practice those openings over and over until you memorize them, then move on to additional openings. The more openings you know, the better you’ll do. That’s why every Grandmaster knows nearly every variation every opening. That will give you a solid start on your road to unbearable frustration and therapy sessions.

And remember… this ain’t checkers!

Are you looking for the best email marketing books that will nurture and convert your leads into happy paying customers?

In this guide, I go over the top five books I’ve ever read on email. These have helped me develop an email strategy that has been working and converting my leads for years (in multiple different markets too).

Email marketing is still the most profitable marketing channel to promote your products and services.

The company I study on a daily basis does this and is the best in the world at it. They build email lists and then sell their products to the list. That’s it. And they do billions a year in revenue.

Building your email list is as close to magic as it gets. Your list of interested subscribers and customers becomes your most valuable asset.

Imagine if your business got annihilated into oblivion. If you had an email list, you could be up and running making revenues within 24 hours. If you didn’t have an email list, you would have to start over again from scratch building from the ground up.

As your list gains momentum, value, and size — it’s easily your number one asset for predictable revenue.

Here are the top five books I’ve read on email.

 

Invisible Selling Machine
By Ryan Deiss

Email Marketing Demystified
By Matthew Paulson

Email Marketing: Strategies To Capture And Engage Your Audience, While Quickly Building An Authority
By Eric J Scott

Don’t Reply All
By Hassan Osman

Villainous Weapons of Persuasion
By Ben Settle

Conclusion

Remember, start with one if you can resist getting all of them or more. Get one, read it, and immediately implement what it tells you.

Don’t waste years like I did consuming information from books and courses without actually implementing any of the content.

You’ll learn much faster by doing it and going through the motions. You’ll also start getting feedback and a little thing called: results. The results are everything.

Do you know any good books on email?

Do you want to know how to find keywords that are: profitable, have high search volume, and have low competition? So did I when I was starting out with a brand new media site.

Let me guess, you wrote an article or two. You worked really hard on them; maybe even put a few hours into them. You added fancy images and other blog graphics. You did what you learned from articles on how to write good SEO articles.

You clicked “publish” a few times and waited. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, the flood of traffic to your site just never came.

Let’s fix that. First, a couple important points to make about business in general. Make no mistake, building a media site is building a business.

Business is simple. To make money in business, you have to sell something. At the end of the day, you either sold something and made revenue or you didn’t. So selling should be your only focus for at least the first year…

…but most people don’t do that. They do everything but sell. They spend time on design, thinking of strategies, and worst of all: branding. Branding something that doesn’t exist yet.

I’m not blaming you at all if you do this, I did it. I wasted years spending time on things that don’t matter. I’ve also watched people waste years as well (but that’s for a different article). All that is important but not at first. Selling is. To sell something, you need the attention of the prospect.

Writing content that ranks high in google is one of the most powerful, cost-effective (money-wise), and wise ways to get attention.

Here’s why: It doesn’t cost money.

You’re not spending money, you’re spending your time. If you do it right, you’ll build media assets that generate attention, traffic, leads, and sales every single day… forever.

Think about that.

So how do you know what to write about? That’s the easy part, once you know what to do. It’s almost like seeing the matrix.

You do this through keyword research. It’s one of the core pillars of SEO. There’s many different ways to research for keywords. One of the ways I do keyword research is so simple, I feel like it’s cheating.

Do you want to learn how to write good SEO articles? It’s simple. Stop trying to write for seo and start trying to write for the reader.

Are keywords important? Yes, they are. But what’s more important for “writing for SEO” by multiples and multiples is writing for the users.

In this post, you’re going to learn how I grew a website from 0 to over 15,000 page views a month, in one year.

Keyword Research Hack For Getting Over 20,000 Pageviews

There’s one thing that once you know how to do it, getting your site to generate massive amounts of traffic is gauranteed.

So how do you research keywords to find the write ones to target your content with?

When it comes to keyword research, business in general, but especially keyword research. There’s only one rule to keep in mind.

“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought”.

– Sun Tzu

You choose your battles carefully. You only put in time and effort into making a piece of content if you’ve done your due diligence beforehand. You know for a fact, that you’ll crush the rankings for the term. Only then, do you make the post?

Most search queries are simply too competitive to rank for with a new site. Can you rank for the 800 lb gorilla keywords?

Yes absolutely, in years. It takes time to move up the ranks on keywords like that. Worry about those later. There’s plenty of time. For now, finding long-tail, more specific keywords with virtually zero competition is a strategy that works.

The majority of my traffic come from long keywords that you would never expect.

Why You Need To Rank #1

Here’s a rule I go by and most others go by the same rule.

Thou shall not publish unless I’m confident it will rank #1.

William Steele

Thou shall not publish unless I’m confident it will rank #1.

If it doesn’t rank #1, you’re wasting your time. Of course you want to be #1, but with this game, it’s even more important.

The #1 position gets 87% of the traffic for that keyword. So #2, and every other page competing for that keyword is getting the remaining 13% of traffic.

Sharpening your axe before you start swinging is the key.

So where do you find these keywords?

If you find it difficult to find low competition keywords and finding ideas for content to write about, keep reading.

After you learn this, you’ll be flooded with as many keywords as you could possibly wrap your head around. I find too many to even be able to keep organized in an orderly fashion.

Here’s how to find dozens of low competition keywords with high search volume; within two minutes

The Goldmine Of Keywords

Especially when a blog is new, doing compeitor keyword analysis for the top dog in your industry isn’t the best approach. There are competitors that are better to go for at first.

Forums are as close to cheating as you can get to find low-competition, high search volume, and profitable keywords.

Here’s what to do.

1. Open a fresh browser window and type in the name of the market you’re going to be taking over with the word, “forums”.

For example, if you’re in the Astrology market. You would google, “Astrology forums”.

You’ll see multiple forums filled with people talking about the subject. Open a few tabs of forums. What we want is the largest forums. The bigger the better.

Grab the URL and paste it into Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest will tell you the pages that get the most traffic.

There’s also a tab that displays keywords that the forum ranks for.

Youll see the search volume, their position for that keyword, and the keyword difficulty for each individual keyword.

This is keyword gold. You don’t need any other information. You can get hundreds of article topics to write good SEO content for that will rank high as long as you do a good job with the content.

Start with the highest searched keywords and go from there.

This tool and all other keyword tools aren’t 100% accurate.

Use the metrics as indications.

But when you type in the keyword, if you see results from forums, Reddit, Quora, and a blogger type site, you got a green light.

How To Outrank Quora and Reddit

Keywords that Reddit or quora are ranked number one in, means that there is essentially zero competition. It’s easy to steal the number one ranking and featured snippets from any forum.

You don’t have to type out a behemoth of an article that 3500 words with sources, images, and resources either. You can beat them with just a 1,000 word post.

How long does it take to write 1000 words? It doesn’t take long at all. You can write a 1,000 word article and publish it in 60 minutes flat. In fact, Income School made this point very well.

The sooner you get the article done, the sooner you can start working on the next one. Then the next, and the next. The quicker you get the work done the quicker you can start getting results.

It’s really up to you how fast you do it.

Conclusion

I hope this post caused a lightbulb or two to flicker for when it comes to keyword research.

This is just one of the keywords research strategies I use to write good SEO articles that users are actively searching for. Remember, at the end of the day, this is a business and business is about providing value.

Find a need and fill it. Provide value to the reader. By finding a keyword that hasn’t been appropriately addressed yet with a piece of content, is an opportunity for your business to provide that solution.

There are many more keyword tricks like this one that give you unlimited content topics to write about.

There’s an infinite supply of opportunities out there. Keywords and search queries drifting on the first page like a lost tourist.

Ready to explode your organic search traffic? Go to the contact page and leave me a message with what you’re struggling with and what you want to accomplish.