John Cow dot Com » goal setting

Some Trusted Expert Stuff – Where Do We Go From Here?

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:51:42 +0000

So you may have noticed that the Trusted Expert series has dropped off a bit…well, alright, it’s stopped completely. And that is completely my fault. We’re so close to the end (around 5-8 posts left…I think) but my motivation to get them done has just kind of disappeared.

And I even know what it’s happened. The rest of the posts that I has planned for the series all dealt with the maintenance of your site – the importance of testing, what to do, the importance of fresh content, etc. All of these things are very important to the continued success of your site, and in making sure that your customers continue to view you as a Trusted Expert. There’s just one problem, the thing that prevented me from getting the posts done and finishing the series:

It’s boring!!!

And isn’t that the way it always happens?

It’s easy to get motivated and excited in the beginning – coming up with your niche, developing buyer personas, getting content and building your customer base. But once you’re up and running, and you’ve achieved your initial goals, the work involved is not as exciting. And even worse, there’s no end in sight. Unlike getting up and running, it’s harder to have definite goals when it comes to maintenance. “Continuing to do well” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Get website running and turn a profit of X”.

This is a trap many people fall into. The site seems to be doing well, there’s lots of small tweaks you could make, but it’s time consuming and the results you get aren’t as dramatic as when you first started. This lulls a lot of people into a false sense of security, that they can let these small things go because the site is doing fine.

This is a slippery slope. Sure, you can let things slide for a little while, but little bit by little bit your site will suffer if you don’t do the required maintenance. And if you’ve achieved the goals you first set out for yourself, it’s time to set some new ones. Always be striving to improve your business – it’ll help keep you motivated and keep going, even when the tasks aren’t as much fun.

So, it’s a new year, and it’s a time of renewed motivation. So I’m becoming accountable to you all here, that I will finish all the nitty gritty details of testing and maintenance and how it relates to being a Trusted Expert. Just because it’s not flashy and fun doesn’t mean that it’s not just as important to the success of your website as all of the setup was.

So be looking for the continuation of the Trusted Expert series every week until…well, until it’s done.

Click here for the list of previous Trusted Expert posts.

How to Set Goals

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:43:10 +0000

Before all the new tools and promotion vehicles come into play, you need to figure out quite a few things. Like who your company is. And what your goals are. And when you want to achieve them. And why people should listen to you and not somebody else. In short, you need to concentrate on the content before you can start figuring out where it’s going to go.

So, what are your business goals?

Do you have a product or service that you’re trying to sell or are you trying to gain a subscription base, paid or otherwise?

Are you trying to sell a membership to something?

Trying to raise money for charity or simply trying to drive targeted traffic to your site to enable you to charge other companies for advertising?

Now write down those goals in details.

What are your short-term and long-term goals for your site? This will help you figure out what to concentrate on, and make it the basis of your communication strategy.

Here’s what you need to figure out:

Where you want your business to be in 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years.
What your measure of success will be; if it’s money, how much money? Enough to quit your day job? Everyone wants to make more money, but if you set definitive goals (bring in 35% more revenue) it will be easier to come up with a plan to achieve it.
You also need to think about some more intuitive and emotional goals – how do you want your business to be perceived? What do you want people to think when your company is mentioned?
Once you know the direction you want to go in, you have to stop thinking about what you want or what you sell.
You need to instead start to focus on who buys your product or service (and who you want to be buying your service or product.
Then, you need to start thinking about their influences and motivations, about their buying process and the needs and problems they have that drive them to seek out your product.

That Often Overlooked Word of Setting Goals

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:38:31 +0000

So now that you know exactly how marketing on the web works today, and how it’s vastly different from how advertising used to work, it’s time to start looking at your own communications strategy. Now we’ll start to delve into the theories and ideas that you will be basing your own communication strategy on, the strategy that will turn you from a run-of-the-mill business owner to You, Trusted Expert.

You can’t do anything until you know what your goals are. How are you supposed to get there if you don’t know where you’re going?

And please don’t say you want to make more money. Well, duh. We all want to make more money. Have you ever come across someone who said, “No, it’s ok, I really don’t want to make any more money.”

What are the goals you have for your business?

Do you want to be able to quit that day job you hate? Or, if you’re already doing this full-time, what is a realistic goal for you for the next year?

If you’ve got an offline aspect to this business, how should the online portion relate? How much of the overall revenue do you expect it to bring in?

What are your goals for the next 6 months? What about the next 5 years? (They are very different things, but you need to have a detailed answer for both.)

Once you know where you want to be, I can help you get there.

Stay tuned for the next post

4 Weeks to Answering What This is All For!

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:00:51 +0000

(This post is a continuation of yesterdays post Do You Already Assume How the Conversation Went?)

Can you really answer the question of “What This is All For” in your current situation/state of mind?

If you are not able to be honest with others (including yourself), if you have no time, if you are unhealthy, stressed out or any number of other things…. can you really answer that question?

For the past 6 months I have had what appears to be an enemy attacking me. I do not care if you are a Christian (I am and darn proud of it), believer in some other higher power or an atheist… there are times when you feel like everything seems to be going wrong and it appears like someone is out to get you. It seemed that everything that I had my hands in was being ripped apart and attacked.

I remember sitting in my office with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands just feeling overwhelmed. Every aspect of my life was under attack… and I was looking for someone to blame. It was not until 3 weeks after when I was talking about it with two very close friends that I suddenly realized what happened.

I WAS THE BLAME!

You see I have always been a big believer in the fact that in order to be successful you had to be accountable for your actions… but I was not practicing what I was preaching. I have always set goals, I have always planned accordingly but when the rubber finally hit the road I realized that I was a complete hypocrite. Now do not get me wrong, 80% of what i was doing was good… I was setting goals, I was achieving targets and I was progressing… but then comes that ole 80/20 rule again.

The 20% that I was not doing right… that was the most important part that I needed to be focusing on first!

So what did I do?

I sat down and tried to write out exactly what I was doing this all for… but I could NOT answer it. My first attempt was so fake it made me sick and that was when I realized that I was at fault. The problem was because of all of my current emotions, paradigms, internal and external stresses I was not able to actually even write that out. I was driven by emotion… I was frustrated with employees, with family members and with people I volunteered with… and all of this frustration was causing me a lot of anger and contempt.

SLAP!!!

I realized that I suddenly was slapped in the face and had to give my head a shake and stop everything. If I continued down that path I was traveling, I was going to fail!

Once again I picked up my pen and this time instead of writing out what it was I was doing this for, I started writing down all the things that were causing me frustration and stress. I wrote everything down… I did not care how immature it sounded, if it caused me any stress I wrote it down.

I then went through the list and categorized them into controllable and uncontrollable. What that means is the things that I have the power to control and the things that I do not have the power to control. To my complete surprise I had almost every single item in my list under the controllable category.

SLAP!!!

Talk about another slap in the face. I had been telling myself lies for so long and these lies were all about how I could not control certain things and I would just deal with them by suppressing them. I would constantly have conversations in my head and assume how the outcome would be and therefore act according to my assumptions… this HAD TO STOP!

My 4 Week Plan…

That was when I decided on a new goal… a goal that was set for 4 weeks and I created a plan on how to achieve that goal. I like working in weeks because it allows me to organize my schedule to get into a pattern (habit) in order to achieve goals. To do this I also knew I had to eliminate as much of my list of stress and frustration as possible… I needed to have a clear head…

I COULD NOT ACT ON IMPULSE OR EMOTION

So I started a mind map… just with a pad and paper to get one started right away and I tried to organize and prioritize how I could do this… and what I came up for myself was….

Time: I needed to give myself as much time as I could to focus on the right things, needed to eliminate activities that were time suckers or may even seem important but distracted me from achieving this goal.
Health: I needed to eat better, sleep better and exercise more so I could feel better and be more focused… but I needed time to do that.
Clutter: I needed to organize myself better and delegate better (ties into “Time” but for me I made this a separate category).
Family & Friends: I needed to make room for the people that I love first and foremost.

Tomorrow I am going to share with you the actual plan that I created and the details of it. This plan is my plan… but I HIGHLY recommend you heed my advice here and figure this out and make a plan for yourself before life starts slapping you in the face.

So.. any comments?

Posts in this series…

Do You Already Assume How the Conversation Went?

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:59:48 +0000

Over the last couple days I have been asking you a few questions and I am very impressed with the comments… well today I want to ask you one more question.

Have you ever avoided doing something, like talking to someone about an issue or perhaps avoided trying something new because you assumed you knew what was going to happen?

The best way I can explain it is that it is like you have already had the conversation in your head or have already performed the task out in your head and because of how your mind works (paradigms, experiances and so forth) you act out in real life as if the experiance that happened in your head was real.

Now think about that for a second and then think about the questions I have asked over the past 2 days.

What is this all for?
Is major failure (a slap in the face) necessary for acheiving success?

Do you see any connection between those two questions and my question about assuming outcomes?

OK, enough with the questions now… it is time for me to explain to you where I am going with this and how these all tie together for me. My hope is that by sharing this I can help some of you avoid a lot of the issues I have had to struggle with and can help you set your self up for better success.

The first thing is who are you telling lies to?

Do not take that lightly… this is something extremly important to focus on and think about. This tied directly into answering all the questions I have posted over the past few days. I look back at the past 11 years and and I truthfully say that I have told many lies… and most of them were to myself but many were also to others who were close to me.

These lies mainly focused around the question of “Who is this all for?”

I remember arguing about the fact that all the sacrifices I was making were for my family… they were for making “OUR” lives better. I tried convincing myself of this fact and would defend it adamantly to my wife and family. I did it because of the fact that I had conversations in my head of what would happen if I told the truth and what the outcome would be and I wanted to avoid that.

So what did this do… it caused me to have conflicting interests and that in return caused me to not be able to focus on the right priorities. By not focusing on the right priorities I gave mixed signals to everyone I was involved with for both my business and my personal life.

The end result of that, you guessed it…

a HUGE slap in the face!

But was this all necessary for me to succeed… where all these things needed?

Tomorrow I am going to go into more details about this and how I think a “slap in the face” in NOT necessary to success and how I “could” have avoided it and how you “can” avoid it.

Until then… whats your thoughts on this post?

Posts in this series…

Why Do We Sometimes Need a Slap in the Face?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:12:32 +0000

Often times in movies you will see someone going crazy, repeating the same phrase or just talking nonsense and suddenly someone slaps them in the face. This immediately shakes the person up and seems to calm them down and you will often hear the character then say “thanks I needed that”.

Why is this?

I do not mean getting a slap in the face literally of course but I mean in general. Why is it that we often need something major to wake us up and get us back on focus?

If you listen to any of the successful people out there, it seems that there are often moments in thier lives where something major happened. It often is some financial disaster but not always. It is these “slaps in the face” arise that suddenly the person stops, sits back and takes a look at the big picture of everything they are doing.

Here is another question for you to think about…

Is major failure (a slap in the face) necessary for achieving success?

Yesterday I talked about asking the questions “what is this all for?” and I mentioned I would explain my thinking behind it but I am going to actually hold off on that for a bit and the reason is I want to discuss the above questions first.

So whats you opinion on the question…

Is major failure (a slap in the face) necessary for achieving success?

Please do not just give a yes or no but give a reason too

Tomorrow (for real this time) I am going to talk about this and also about answering the quesiton “what is this all for?”

Posts in this series…

What is This All For?

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:14:16 +0000

Have you ever asked yourself that question?

I am serious about this and I think it is a vital question to ask.

I often talk about planning and setting goals but really none of that makes any sense unless you can truly answer the question of “what is this all for?”

Looking back at when I first started my business online back in 1997, I remember that the initial reason was because I hated my current job and I felt like I was trapped. I saw an infomercial on TV about starting a business and actually bought it.

The course was a joke and the person that sold it has since gone belly up and actually has had some legal issues as well. The course was not in anyway expensive and in all honesty I did not feel that I got ripped off or anything. In fact I have to give a lot of credit to that initial course because that is what gave me the kick in the pants to get started.

What was wrong however was that back then I started to put hours upon hours of work into something that I had an unclear understanding of. I knew I wanted a better life and that I wanted to make more money but that was it. I really had no clue as to really what I was doing it for.

The challenge this put upon me was that I had mixed up priorities and things that should have been focused on were not and things that should not have been focused on were. I was guided by emotion rather then by logic… I was destined to fail.

Over the past 5 years, as my business has exploded I have found that it was my understanding of why I was doing this that helped me to put things in focus. The problem with this however was that I was not honest about this with others and this caused conflicts. You see I was truly doing this for a selfish reason but when others asked I would say that it was to build a better life for my family and I.

BULLCRAP

I was doing this because I wanted to and it was not about doing anything other then having more money then I did before.

The positive thing was that I had a focus and was able to set my goals on it but the negative was I was never able to be completely open and honest about this with others.

Over the past 3 months I have been going through a major turn around in my focus. I have changed staff, changed focus and I am now finally being open and honest with myself as to why I am doing this. I have loads of things planned and loads of things coming down the pipe (I already talked to my biz partners about this).

In my next post I am going to talk about how I came upon this realization and how it helped me to be able to understand exactly why I am doing this and…

What this is all for?

Trust me when I say this is not something to take lightly.

Posts in this series…