Goals, Do You Use Them? You Should, It’s Essential

Hav­ing goals are essen­tial to run­ning an online busi­ness. They give you some­thing to work towards and keep you focused. To suc­ceed you must have goals. So here’s a quick overview goals and how you can use them to grow your business.

Goals are some­thing that you set for you or your busi­ness that you want to achieve. For exam­ple, if you run a blog and you want to gain a large read­er­ship, that’s a goal. Here’s a few more to give you an idea:

- You want to make $10,000 a month

- You want to recruit 3 high qual­ity peo­ple into your oppor­tu­nity each day

- You want to cut down to 2 cups of cof­fee a day instead of 4

- You want to learn Ger­man within the next 6 months.

And so on. Goals can be any­thing you want. A goal is a spe­cific out­come that you set out for you or your busi­ness. And in achiev­ing that goal you cre­ate growth. That’s why it’s impor­tant to make your goals specific.

The more spe­cific you are with your goal the bet­ter focus you will have on that goal. I’m talk­ing num­bers here. Pick out a very par­tic­u­lar out­come you want from your goal. Look at the exam­ple goals I listed above. They all have a cer­tain num­ber attached to them. Whether it’s to make a cer­tain amount or learn some­thing within a cer­tain time period, your goals should have some sort of num­ber attached to them. Either an amount or a deadline.

This will cre­ate focus and give you some­thing to work for. Granted, you may not reach that exact num­ber, and you may do bet­ter than expected, but if you get as close to your goal or bet­ter, then you still suc­ceed. Obvi­ously a goal such as earn­ing a $10,000 a month or learn­ing Ger­man within 6 months may seem a bit daunt­ing, but you can break those down into smaller goals.

Goals that will take a lot of work and time are long term goals. These are goals that are going to take awhile, such as bring­ing your income to $10,000 a month. Obvi­ously hit­ting these long term goals head on is going to seem a bit daunt­ing. That is where short term goals come in.

Take your long term goal and break it down into smaller goals that lead up to your long term. If you want to make $10,000 a month then you need to make goals that work towards bring­ing in more income. What activ­i­ties can you do that work towards your long term goal?

For exam­ple, to make up to $10,000 a month your going to need to add another source of income or increase the ones you have. So you could put together a new prod­uct. Sell­ing that will bump your income up a bit more. Or you could learn some more effi­cient mar­ket­ing tac­tics to use with your exist­ing income streams.

Set up some goals that are more short term, but work towards achiev­ing your long term goal. Even these can be bro­ken down into smaller goals. If you keep break­ing these goals down, then you can con­cen­trate on each one in turn with­out look­ing at the daunt­ing prospect of your long term goal.

Break­ing down goals does 2 things: One, as I said, makes it much eas­ier to work towards your long term goal with­out being over­whelmed. And two it lays out a plan.

When you break down goals into smaller and smaller goals, then look at the trail, you will see a plan laid out right in front of you. Fol­low this plan step by step, work­ing your way towards your long term goal. You will have suc­ceeded before you know it.

Noone else can make your goals for you. This is some­thing you have to come up with your­self. Oth­ers may be able to make sug­ges­tions but it is impor­tant that you make the com­mit­ment your­self. Also goals are very per­sonal, and let’s face it, not every­one is the same type of per­son. So you need to make your goals tai­lored specif­i­cally for you or your business.

Set aside some time one of these days and pick out a few long term goals that you want to achieve. Break them down as I talked about above until you have a bunch of man­age­able chunks of short term goals. This list will be like no other. It may look sim­i­lar, but no one else has this same list. As it should be. If you make them per­sonal then your more likely to fol­low through.

When you set out your goals and break them down, make sure they are writ­ten down. Two rea­sons for this. Writ­ing it down makes it much more con­crete and ingrains it in your head. Some­thing about writ­ing some­thing down makes it much more real than just think­ing about it.

And the other rea­son for writ­ing your goals down is, as I said before, it lays out a plan. When you break your goals down into a step by step fash­ion, you just built a laid out, sim­ple to fol­low plan for your­self. And just made things that much easier.

As you can see, set­ting goals is pretty darn impor­tant if you want to suc­ceed. Remem­ber goals can be any­thing. From some­thing sim­ple such as fix­ing the com­puter chair, all the way to cre­at­ing your own lifestyle with the tons of money your making.

Goals are very per­sonal and only you can make them for your­self. Set your­self a time limit or a cer­tain amount to reach. But don’t for­get to be flex­i­ble as goals can change sometimes.

Set­ting goals is extremely impor­tant for grow­ing you and your busi­ness. And is an impor­tant exer­cise for work­ing towards to suc­cess. So what is your goal for today? It can be any­thing. Your goal can even be to make a goal for today.

~Chris

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Make a Con­tract With Your­self: Sign Your­self Up for Success
• 4 Ways to Re-Evaluate Your Busi­ness (part 2)
• The Old Debate: Qual­ity vs. Quantity

I’m glad to see you back at The OMV. I hope your enjoy­ing your time. Feel free to con­tact me for any­thing and if you haven’t already, don’t for­get to sub­scribe to The OMV Newslet­ter. Leave a com­ment too! I’d love to hear from you.