Shooting a rifle well depends on a bunch of factors, and it's really impossible to point the finger at oneself and pinpoint a thing that made you shooter better, or worse. Further, if we try to juggle these myriad factors at once, while shooting, we're likely to end to with varying and confusing results.
Yet this is what many of us try doing anyway, especially the newer guys. They think that they can read the books, view the videos, sample the pointers, and zoom right in on ultimate accuracy. This doesn't work because the human brain is not capable of performing this kind of complex multitasking.
I hate to disillusion some of us, but good marksmanship is work, hard at first, and easier with the right kind of practice. There is no substitute for that, because the rote practice is the (only) means by which the mind can convert hard conscious concentration into a seamless learned process. These individual subtasks must become second nature, precisely because the failure to do so overloads the conscious mind and literally makes good marksmanship a genuine impossibility.
If you're not willing to dedicate a significant portion of your thoughts and energies to a years long, even decades long continuous process of managed improvement, take up golf.
For the details, see
this. If the name seems familiar; yes, he owns and runs this site. So what, it's still a great book.
This is another one, too.
Yes, I'm telling us to read books and soak the contents up. But make it a
good book; and don't be cherrypicking the details. The details work,
all as a part of the whole process.
We practice them individually, The novice practices them until they can get it right. The expert practices them until they can't get it wrong. They then move on, and finally, they come back and string them together until the individual processes become a single smooth process.
Eventually it's all about getting to the sighting solution and the trigger manipulation; about as much conscious thought as the average human mind can actually handle. Because we're all really pretty average at the start. Building a marksmanship skill set is like building a rifle. Start simple; add capabilities. That's whole process in a nutshell.
It's a long and drawn out process, and there isn't any other way to get it done so it remains a useful skill. Good marksmanship is a commitment to excellence and to the work that makes it so.
Greg