Visualized.Feel.Abundance

Hey Folks,

Welcome to Goal Setting Lesson Two. I will be covering some basic, time-tested goal setting techniques here so you can write down your first goal clearly.

SMART
It is general accepted that goals need to be SMART. So what does SMART mean? It’s actually an acronym for:

Specific
A goal has to be specific so you know the direction you are heading towards.

“I want to grow my business” is a loosely defined goal. Which part of your business do you want grow? The revenue? The profit? The size of the company? It has to be specific.

A specific goal should sound like “I want grow the revenue of my business“. Now you know clearly which part of your business to focus on growing. No more ambiguity, right?

Measurable
A goal has to be measurable so you know the distance you need to cover to reach your goal.

“I want grow the revenue of my business” could not be measured. How much of the revenue do you want to grow? 5%? 10%? 100%? One thing for sure is that you will never know when you have grown sufficiently and you will never know exactly when you have reached your goal.

A measurable goal should sound like “I want grow the revenue of my business by 20%“. Now you know which part of your business to focus on growing and how much you want it to grow .

Attainable
A goal has to be attainable with your current resources at hand, level of competency or state of being to handle that given goal. In another words, do you have the physical means and resources to achieve the goal you set.

“I want our new advertisement to attract 10,000 customers a day” might be attainable by a business with a big budget to advertise on TV, Radio, does branding and the like. But will the same goal be attainable for a neighborhood convenience stall that only have a budget to distribute pamphlets only?

Knowing all your physical means and resources you have at hand will help you set attainable goals.

Realistic
A goal has to be realistic. Where attainable relates to your physical means and resources. Realistic relates more to conditions and circumstances surrounding us.

“I want to grow the revenue of my business by 500%” might be realistic for a new business in it’s expansion/growing phase in a new market but for a matured business that has grown almost to it’s current market limit, it is unrealistic.

A more realistic goal for a matured business would sound like “I want grow the revenue of my business by 500% by expanding into a new market“. Make sense?

Time-Bound
Every goal needs to be bounded by a time frame so it can be measured and a baseline can be formed for future goals of similar capacity. Also a time-bound goals will lead to an urgency to take action and measure performance against.

“I want grow the revenue of my business by 500% by expanding into a new market” would not give you any urgency, you could take a year, two years or maybe forever. When it takes forever, it’s called day dreaming.

“I want grow the revenue of my business by 500% by expanding into a new market by [fill in your date]” would give you a dateline that you can start measuring your progress against. A dateline would ensure that you move towards your goal in a steady and consistent manner. Even when you missed the dateline, it would not be far off the mark as compared to not having one.

Summary
Look at the goal(s) that you have set, are they SMART enough? If not, isn’t it time to do something about it.

Cheers
James

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Hey Folks,

Welcome to Goal Setting Lesson One.Congratulations to those who have downloaded The Ladder of Dream™ Template, you have gotten yourself a flexible and powerful tool to plan and achieve any goals you can dream of. If you have not downloaded it, you can still get it on the side bar to the left.

Let me assume that this is your first time setting goals or, at the least, first time setting goals consciously. So where do you start? Or more accurately, where should you start?

Where To Start
I would recommend that everyone start from something simple. Really simple meaning something from our day to day life, such as:

- Being more productive at work
- Keeping the house in order
- Maintaining a physically fit body
- Maintaining a healthy body
- Maintaining a balance lifestyle between family, friends and work
- Keeping up with technology/current affairs/etc

“These goals are written in plain English, not following any Goal Setting Guidelines, to make it simple for beginners to understand. Next post, we will talk about those guidelines for writing a clear and concise goal”

As you can see, we are not talking about awe inspiring goals such as making a million dollars, creating an empire of retail stores kind of goals. These simple goals we are asking you to consider are pretty close to what most people are struggling to cope with (one way or another).

Why Do You Set Simple Goals First
Since it’s the first time you decided to consciously set goals, the most important aspect is not how big or grand the goal is. The most important aspect is that you must believe that the goals are achievable and when you achieve the goal, goal setting becomes believable.

Once you believed that goal setting is a tool that can truly help you achieve the goals that you set, you can start setting bigger goals for yourself and achieve them.

Important Lessons
Most people believe that goal setting is for big dreams and not for the mundane stuffs. Hence, simple goals are often left out in goal setting exercises. They reserved their goal setting for big goals but their belief system in goal setting may not be strong enough to handle the passage of big, long-term goals.

When they embark on those big, long-term goals and met with obstacles or set-backs, their belief in whatever plan that was drafted during their goal setting exercise is shaken. When it is shaken sufficiently, they will start losing faith in their plan and their goals. They may lose faith in their belief in goal setting completely too.

By starting simple, you get a chance to build a strong foundation. A foundation that is build on a strong belief that goal setting is a tool that could help you achieve your goals. With this strong foundation, you will never doubt that you had started on the wrong footing.

From this point onwards, you will learn how to be persistence and how to be flexible. Persistence will help you reach you goal, sooner or later. While being flexible and adapting your plans to changing circumstances, you will learn to navigate obstacles.

Now, you have the most basic qualities to achieve anything you want in your life.

What Is Your First Goal
So where will you start and what’s your first goal? You don’t have to tell me your goal but write it down in your “The Ladder of Dream™ Template”. You may wish to choose something in your daily life that you always wanted to do but have not done so or have not achieved your desired results so far.

Cheers
James

Popularity: 8% [?]

Hey Folks,

If you have been following us for the past 5 post, you know we are currently on the topic of goal setting. If you have missed them, you can revisit them below:

What Are Goals and Goal Setting?

Can Dreams Be A Good Goal?

Are You A Day Dreamer Or Achiever?

Playing To Win

Even My Hamster Has A Goal

By now, you probably have, at least, made up your mind whether you should or should not have a goal. It doesn’t matter, to me at least, if you have decided that goals are not for you. It’s your choice and I’ll respect them.

For those who decide to set goals and pursue them, Congratulations! You have taken the first conscious step towards your dream and ‘ll show you what you can do next.

In the next couple of posts, I will be sharing the following topics about goal settings:

- Where to start and what goals to set
- General goal setting techniques
- Dream big and be inspired
- Taking it one step at a time
- Understanding your strength and your weakness
- Where to focus your effort
- How to set a right time frame for your goal

So before we go on with the first topic in the next post, I strongly encourage you to download The Ladder Of Dreams™ (Left side bar, top. Free Download), so you can follow us to plan your dreams.

Once you have downloaded The Ladder Of Dreams™, leave me a comment here. I would like to congratulate you personally for taking charge of your life and walking down the road of countless accomplishments.

Cheers
James

Popularity: 7% [?]

Focus On Market Research
Market Research is usually done at the beginning of a marketing life cycle where you decide which market or industry you would like your business to focus on. Or it could be done when you are identifying new products or sub-niches to add to your current niche or marketing segment.

Keyword researches, analysis of competitors, marketing plans and strategies to penetrate a market should be a focus here. But don’t dwell on it too long as opportunities come and goes. Once you have identified what you want, plan and execute it.

Focus On Site Design
Site Design is usually a focus before you launch a site/blog but it should not stop there. Continuous improvement is a necessity in fine tuning your site/blog to make it easy for readers to subscribe your RSS, comment on your articles and opt in to your mailing list.

A Good site design makes reading visiting your site/blog a pleasant experience where advertisements are merged seamlessly into or around your content and archived articles are easy to find. It will also encourage readers to help you drive your traffic by sharing your articles through Web 2.0 buttons/link and convert readers to clients.

Focus On Content Creation
Every person has a wealth of content to share. You may think that what you know has already been shared but I can promise you that your perspective has not been shared before. It’s yours and it’s unique and that’s what your readers want to know. When they like your style and perspective, that’s when you convert them from visitors to readers.

If you think you have no content to share, then surf the web and read up on contents! Once you find contents related to your niche, track back to that article and give your views on it. Never copy and paste, unless you get express permission to do so.

So who says you have no content? Your views and perspective are your unique content!

Focus On Tracking Results
In order to know if you have done something right and to allow you to focus on what brings you the best results, you will need to test and measure. In Online business terms, it means tracking your traffic source and sales conversion. If you know where you are getting results from, you can tune your marketing activities to drive maximum results with the least effort.

Tracking Results does not take a lot of time, just set things up at the beginning and monitor it once a day follow by an analysis of the results once a week. Fine tune or discard activities that bring little or no results, focus more time and effort on activities that gives the best result or add new activities and track the performance.

Focus On Driving Traffic
Driving Traffic must be the most talk about topic in any online business. Every single site/blog that talks about internet marketing, online business or making money online will have a whole section (if not all the content) on this topic alone. So what I’ll highlight here is this, Driving Traffic is just the beginning. You will also need to focus on the next 2 items below to make driving those traffic worth it’s while.

Focus On Traffic Retention
So you have a good niche, a fantastically designed site, added great content and drove a ton of traffic. What if you did not retain them? You start from ground zero again the next day. Kind of lame right? This is exactly the case where many sites/blogs have stagnant growth - traffic surge at the beginning and then levels off, never to grow again.

What’s lacking here is the lack of a Traffic Retention policy. Offering a weekly/monthly ezine, offering full feed RSS, hosting a forum for discussion, interacting with readers that comment are some strategies to retain your traffic. Focus on these and you will build up your traffic to new heights over time.

Focus On Selling
It does not matter if you are selling a product, service or information. It does not matter if you are canvassing for a cause or charity. It does not matter if you are promoting a way of life or belief. It is all marketing and the end result is that you need to sell something.

Selling a product, service, information requires the same process as selling an idea, belief or donation. And unless you learn how to sell effectively, one of your main objective of your site/blog will not be met. So the focus you need here is a call to action.

Focus On SEO
If you have configured a self hosted wordpress blog properly, you are pretty optimized for SEO already. What you need to focus on is to optimized your headlines and articles with keywords and key phrases to attract more organic traffics. If you are not on a self hosted wordpress, it’s time you think about it.

How To Focus
If you are now suffering from information over load or at a lost about what to focus on, you need some help. On the left side bar, there is a free tool known as The Ladder Of Dreams. It has been proven to help online entrepreneurs set a clear path to their goals and keep them tightly focused on the critical activities they need to take action upon to achieve success.

Go ahead and download it, it’s FREE.

Cheers
James

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to teach internet marketing or how do you carry out an online business. It does highlight the crucial areas that an online business should focus on and some activities which are commonly neglected by internet marketers and online entrepreneurs.

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Hey Folks,

This post was inspired by a post I read at positiveblog.com about “7 habits of highly ineffective people” and since I just met up with more then 700 hundred internet markets last month. I thought what I am going to be sharing here would help online entrepreneurs hugely.

Addicted To Traffic Statistic
Tracking your traffic is important to any internet marketer. It tells you what works and what don’t. It also tells you what is your traffic, sales and opt-in’s are from. But you just need to check it once a day, maybe twice. If you find yourself checking your statistics every 30 minutes. You are addicted!

Tell you something, it doesn’t matter if you check it 50 times a day or 1 time a day, it won’t increase your sales. Once a day is enough to see a short term trend or if your newly implemented tactic is working. Once a week is good enough to check if your strategy is working well enough for you and which source provides good traffic. Got it?

Addicted To Instant Messaging
I seldom use IM but I know a couple of fellow bloggers who are IM fanatics who cannot get off IM. True, it’s a good way to build relationship online and provide support for friends but there are times where IM is a pain. If you don’t know how to control your IM, it will interrupt your schedules at the most inconvenient time.

The result? At best, you take a longer time to complete your task. At worst, whatever you wanted to do never gets done. You might want to consider setting up a time where you will switch on your IM. Let your online friends and buddies know about the timing and you get to network with them during that window. This way, you get the best of both worlds

Addicted To Email
I guess in some ways, anyone with an email account are in some ways addicted to email. Similar to traffic statistic, we tend to check this all too often. Sometime people get so carried away, they just stare at the screen willing another email to pop in. It is as if you are some kind of pest control guys wanting to get rid of every pest and the emails are the rodents.

Let’s face it, unless you are working as a online tech support, you don’t need to check your email that often. The emails won’t run away and it won’t self destruct. So, just like our solution for traffic statistics, check your email once or twice a day is sufficient. I check mine once in the morning and once at night.

Addicted To Web 2.0 Site
Now the new fave of the internet are Web 2.0 sites or what is commonly known as social networking sites. It’s fun with loads of information, people to meet and interesting stuffs to do. It is actually a marketing haven for Internet Marketers to socialize and get to show off their wares. All Internet Marketers should get involved in Social Networking Sites if they are serious about their online business.

What’s wrong here is that some marketers get too addicted to a particular site and that’s all they do - Stick to one site. Now, it’s good to be focus but you need to move on after you have build up the rapport and credibility to “explore new land”. Sticking to just One or Two sites just don’t cut it. Think about it.

Addicted To Finding The Next New Thing
I know everyone is looking for the latest and greatest in Free Traffic Strategies, Viral Marketing Tool, etc. How I know? I am one of them too.

But what’s important here is when you find one, stick to it, put some time and effort in getting it to work. Once you get it to generate a decent, if not outrageous, kind of traffic then you move on. What many marketers do is to sign up and leave it on it’s own and start looking for the next big thing again.

Do you really think it’s gonna work that way? I don’t.

Addicted To Surfing
Now don’t get me wrong. As part of an internet marketers daily routine, you will have to surf the internet and surf a lot at that. The problem is after sometime, some marketers get addicted to surfing and surf for the sake of surfing! What do I mean by that?

Look, an internet marketer surfs for publicity, knowledge and relationship building. Even if you are not a internet marketer, this applies to you if you wish to promote your charity site, online dairy or share your secret. Wherever you go, leave a trace and by that I mean a comment, a remark on visitors log, a reply on a forum, a note to the author, etc.

You have already hit the site and read the post why not leave a trace? Think about it.

Are they Bad?
The 6 things above are important tools or habits for any internet marketers if used in the right dosage. Going overboard and getting addicted will be counter productive and side track you from your real goal. So take some time to think over and I invite you to share your experience and thoughts about them.

Cheers
James

Popularity: 8% [?]