Earl Nightingale defines success as the pursuit of a worthy goal. Goals are as important to success as water is to swimming. It’s as difficult to succeed without goals as it would be to swim without water.
You probably already knew that but the way you write down your goals is important too. The best goals are related to actions or activities. Break down your goals into specific actions that can be taken every day, week, or month. As long as you take the required action, it should only be a matter of time before you achieve the goal.
Take a common goal like losing weight. Maybe the goal is to lose 20 pounds. That’s a worthy goal. But it would be better to break that goal down into actions like eating less, exercising more, or both. Stating the goal in terms of actions would be something like exercising 3 times per week for 30 to 60 minutes. It could also be eating more fruits & vegetables and less processed snacks like Fritos, Doritos, and potato chips. As long as you take those actions (exercising 3x per week & eating more fruits & vegetables), you should achieve your goal of losing 20 pounds.
Now take an Internet business. Perhaps your goal is to earn $1,000 per month. That’s a worthy goal. You can do much better but let’s just work with $1,000/month. It would be better to take that goal, work backwards, and state the goal in terms of actions. Maybe you have an information product that earns $50 per sale with a sales letter that converts 2% of visitors into buyers. Working backwards, you’ll need 1,000 visitors per month. With a 2% conversion ratio, 20 of those visitors will buy your product and you’ll make $1,000.
Now ask yourself what activities will drive 1,000 visitors per month to your website? It could be posting to a blog, article marketing, or any number of other link-building or traffic-driving activities. The specific activities are for you to decide but focus on driving traffic to your site. As long as your sales letter converts visitors into buyers, you’ll make money by driving traffic to it.
To take it one step further, you could take other actions that will help you achieve your goal even faster. You could increase the conversion ratio. Increase the conversion ratio to 2.5% and you’ve given yourself a 25% raise or you’ll only need to drive 800 visitors to your sales letter to reach your goal. Once you’ve achieved the first goal, you can create another product and repeat the process you’ve already proven to work.
Don’t focus on the end result. Focus on activities that will produce the end result.