“Plan your work and work your plan from the beginning. – Build a Business Plan for Success”
How To Set Your Short & Long Term Business Goals
You have probably heard the old adage many times before:- “He who doesn’t plan plans to fail”.
For any businesses to succeed you need to have very specific plans and goals that you want to achieve.
They can and will be revised over time as things change but you need to start somewhere.
In addition, your goals need to contain a few different elements to be effective and you need several types of goals that are smart.
What’s a smart goal?
A truly effective goal that meets the smart criteria.
- Specific
Make sure you are very specific about what you want to achieve in your goal.
Saying you want to create more info products is vague.
Instead, you might want to set the goal of writing 3 new info products, including 1 ebook and 2 e-courses with video.
- Measurable
How will you know whether you have achieved your goal?
Say you want to grow your email list… One way of measuring it is to look at the number of subscribers you have and specify that you want to grow that number by 50%.
If you want to increase your conversion rate of prospects to customers, make sure you can track each part of your sales process so that you know exactly when and where the prospect becomes a customer.
- Action-Oriented
Your goal needs to be something you can attach specific actions to.
Can you create a step-by-step plan for achieving the goals? Is it something under your control?
For example:
Setting a goal of moving up to the first page of search results in Google is highly desirable, however, there are no actions involved and it’s not under your direct control.
Instead, you could say that you will implement 3 new SEO tactics over the course of the next 3 months to move up in the search engines.
Then list out the detailed goals for each tactic. Such as submitting one article per day to 5 article directories. You will be able to measure the results and then determine your next actions.
- Realistic
Don’t set yourself up for failure by setting goals that are unrealistic or impossible to achieve.
People (in internet marketing) often think that they can achieve as promised ’10 thousand in 3 days’ but that’s just not realistic.
Also, make sure that you have access to the resources that you need to achieve your goals in the first place.Â
- Time-based
As with any of your plans put a timeframe around your goals.
You can set a goal of doubling your traffic in the next 6 months or, writing one info product per month for the next year.
You will then be able to set up specific tasks to make sure this happens and you will be able to measure the results.
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Types of Goals to Set
#1 Long-Term Goals
It’s easiest to start with your biggest goals and work backwards to figure out what you will need.
Long term can mean a 10-year goal and you should definitely dream big. Maybe you want to be a millionaire or live and work in New Zealand.
Now is the time to put that dream down on paper as a real goal, not just a vague dream.
You can also break this down into 5-year goals.
#2 Short-Term Goals
Create goals that are one year out, 6 months out and monthly.
Your 1-year goal should be based on your ultimate 5 and 10-year ones.
The monthly ones will then be based on what it will take to achieve your 1-year goal
e.g. you might know you want to be able to live and work anywhere in the world in 5 years when your kids are out of college.
– What does that mean you will need to be able to do by the end of 3 years?
– How much will you need to earn?
– What will you need to have learned?
Break it down as much as possible.
#3 Immediate Goals
These are the goals that you set for yourself every week and every day.
You can have a goal that is the same each week, such as posting to your blog 3 times per week.
Then you will also need to sit down once a week to set goals for every day of that week to come.
These are likely to change from week to week based on what else is going on. But it will ensure that you will make progress towards your longer-term success. Your goals or your road map to your online success.
Every successful business person online or offline sits down and goes through a process of definitive goals not only yearly but monthly and weekly as well.
Setting and meeting your goals will show you just how much you are achieving and will keep you motivated along your path to success.
Have you set up your goals yet? Please do not continue to the next lesson until you have these in place.
Continue to the next video The Essentials You Need to Know for Estimating Your Future Revenue.
