1. Organize Your Priorities on the IELTS

No one excels at everything. There will inevitably be some skills at which you are stronger and others at which you are weaker. Often, people can understand more than they can speak and read better than they can write. You’ll need to make sure that you spend more time practicing your weaker areas than your stronger ones.

2. Strengthen Your Weak IELTS Areas

Each IELTS area requires its own technique to improve and strengthen.

Listening is easy to improve -- and fun too. Watching English-language movies (especially just before the exam) will get you used to hearing the words, phrases and pronunciation you need to do well on your IELTS. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of it at first (you can even watch with subtitles if you want). But the more you hear, the less strange the words will sound and the easier they’ll be to recognize.

Structure can be improved by reviewing all of the grammar points the IELTS exam tests and memorizing one correct sentence for each point. If you can remember those model sentences in your IELTS exam, you’ll have a point of comparison for the answer choices.

Reading is easy to improve too but takes time and patience. Force yourself to read each day for at least half an hour to prepare for your IELTS exam.

Speaking is the hardest to practice without a native language partner. As you watch movies, try to repeat what the actors are saying, then substitute some of the words. It’s not a conversation but it will do wonders for your pronunciation and your IELTS score.

And writing is best perfected by... cheating. Look at sample IELTS essay questions, understand how the paragraphs and sentences work, and which grammar constructions are used -- and try to reproduce them as closely as you can. This is not a time to be original; it’s a time to get a high IELTS score.