When we think of goal setting, we usually think of goals that envision a specific outcome. Some examples include:
Of course, these are just a few of the more common goals that people set for themselves.
And this is a big mistake if you really want to achieve the best things in life! Setting goals is critical to your success and can act as a motivator to keep you going and you can also reward yourself for hitting milestones along the way 😊
Ok, as shown above, many goals are oriented around hitting a specific outcome or target.
But what if we based our goals on changing behaviors instead of obtaining a specific outcome? Could we modify or completely change behaviors that would lead us to the desired outcome quicker, healthier, and with less stress? Some experts certainly think so.
Behavior-based goals focus more on the behaviors we want to strengthen rather than the negative actions we want to remove.
The difference may appear to be subtle, but it does make a difference to the way you approach goal setting and the intended result.
In strengthening the positive behaviors, we change the way we act and react in many situations – not just situations surrounding a goal that is outcome-based. The ripple effect of creating more positive behaviors in our lives is wide-reaching, affecting far more than just what we may have had in mind when creating the goal.
Many businesses today are focusing on behavior-based goals rather than outcome-based goals, because of this ripple effect. Smart companies know that when behavior changes for the positive, the employee is happier not only at work but in their personal life and family life as well.
This type of goal setting isn’t seen just in the office, either. Personal trainers, life coaches, psychologists, therapists, and so many other professions are adding behavior-based goal setting to their repertoire of techniques. This helps those in these industries to help their clients reach success, whatever that may mean to them.
Goals that change behaviors can be seen as a kind of intermediate goal that helps one achieve outcome-based goals easier, faster, and with more residual positive effects. A positive behavior that is strengthened in order to reach a goal is going to be strengthened in every situation where that behavior is utilized.
Now, when you are looking at setting some behavior-based goals, it pays to make them “SMART” when doing so.
Not sure what we mean by “SMART” behavior-based goals? Well, let’s take a look at that now…
When you’re discussing goal setting, SMART has nothing to do with your intelligence. (But it is smart to use this technique!).
So, let’s get into what SMART really means!
While behavior-based goals can be harder to quantify than outcome-based goals, by focusing on the specific behaviors that need development or strengthening, we can see that clearly defining these behaviors is possible.
For instance, “I will close or turn off all electronic notifications while working on this project”, is basically stating that the habit of becoming distracted will be curbed in order to achieve more productivity.
To be effective, the road towards achieving a goal must be able to be measured.
In the example in the above paragraph, the measure would be how much more of the project one is able to accomplish by turning off all electronic notifications.
You want your behavior-based goal to be attainable, i.e. not so overwhelming that you start out feeling as if you can’t do it. That defeats the entire purpose of the exercise.
Build on these small successes and before you know it, you’ll be achieving your big goals, as well!
Set yourself up for success right from the beginning by setting goals that are realistic to your personality and your lifestyle.
Start with easy behavior changes that are easy for you to accomplish, and fit your lifestyle and personality. Once you’ve mastered those, you can ramp up to changing behaviors that might be more challenging to you.
Giving yourself a time limit on achieving a specific behavior change can often spur more action toward that goal. But there’s a fine line between too little and too much time.
Changing behavior patterns often takes time, so make sure that you’ve accounted for this.
So, what are you waiting for? Start setting your SMART behavior based goals today and see what a difference they can make to your life success.
Of course, you will certainly be aware that setting and achieving goals requires a lot of self-discipline, so if you want to learn about growing your own self-discipline then download the featured resource below which is a free report all about the power of self-discipline; download it, read it and take action 😊
Building a business can be an exciting time in your life. It can also be one of the most stressful and frustrating times for you. Any time that you start to do something – to move forward – things will crop up that stand in your way, threatening your success.
The problems overlap between your personal and professional lives. For example, problems at work can cause hostility at home, and vice versa. You need to become a master at handling obstacles with ease.
There are what seem to be a million tasks to get done every day in a business. You have to keep up with the day-to-day tasks while trying to juggle the new things that pop up.
Trying to grow your business while maintaining what you already have can quickly become overwhelming. This is why you need to have a schedule for when tasks need to be completed.
You need a task list. Every single thing that you have to accomplish each day for your business should be on this list. Whatever impacts your business the most should be at the top of this list.
By doing this, you can prioritize the tasks in order of importance. The first few tasks on your list should be whatever it is that you have to get done in order to keep the business functioning.
You have to keep the doors open or the site operational, keep the sales coming in and the payroll going, and keep the customers happy for positive word of mouth and steady growth.
However, if it’s something that won’t make a difference immediately, you can put that off until a later date and time. Some business owners find it helpful to use one of the “year at a glance” calendars to keep track of the tasks that have to be done in the future for their business.
If you’re dealing with feeling overwhelmed, then it’s highly possible that you’ve taken on too much responsibility. In order to stay on track with productivity, you’ll need to find a way to delegate or outsource what can be passed on for someone else to do.
It can be easy in any business to take on too much. The shiny new object syndrome can make you feel a need to try something different in the hopes of improving your business.
Then before you know it, you have twenty different things going on that, instead of helping your business, is slowly grinding it to a halt. If any task manager or any organizational tool takes you longer to actually use it than the benefit it offers, get rid of it.
This could be contributing to the obstacle of being overwhelmed. Simplify anything you can to keep productivity moving along when you’re struggling. That means if you spent money on a software tool that is too confusing to use and has a steep learning, stop using it.
Chalk it up to a lesson learned. If you have to simplify things by turning to a spiral notebook and a pen or pencil, then do that – if you find that you make more progress that way.
One of the biggest issues in a business that can trigger being overwhelmed to the point that it slows productivity is clutter. If you have a cluttered office or a cluttered system online, it can make it difficult for you to find what you need when you need it.
Keep everything organized as you go along to prevent this from being an obstacle. Sometimes that means letting go of projects you once thought were viable, but never have time for.
Taking on too much at once can lead to a time crunch. So can procrastination. The problem in a lot of businesses is a lack of planning for every step of a project – especially if the project isn’t due right away.
It can be too easy to think that you have plenty of time, so you do other projects first (or, if we’re honest, waste time on social networking site). Then before you know it, you’re suddenly faced with this deadline or launch date – and you’re not sure that you’ll have enough time to get it done.
A simple way around the obstacle of time management issues that slow your productivity is to make sure that each project you have going on has a detailed list of action steps.
You don’t want to tackle a big project all at once. It can lead to you feeling overwhelmed. The best way to handle this is to break down the project into mini tasks.
Use a calendar or other means to divide the project up into chunks. If you have a project that you know is going to take three months to complete, then do a little bit of work on it each week.
This way, when the due date arrives, you can be finished up with plenty of time to have done the job thoroughly and professionally. Rushed jobs can often affect the quality of the finished product and you don’t want to present work that’s less than your best effort.
You can still get the work done, but free yourself up to do other tasks. If you’re in the business of supplying information products and you handle everything from the writing to the graphics to the formatting, you can easily hire someone else to run this area of your business.
If you put out a lot of information products, it might be worth your money to hire someone who keeps up with making sure the product is completed the way that it should be.
This way, you remove several tasks from your own to-do list. That would include sourcing freelance ghostwriters and graphics providers, evaluating deliverables, and getting the end product launched with JV and affiliate partners.
This saves them time and money and allows them to be more productive. Focus on the skills you excel at and enjoy most – and find others to take over the tasks you least enjoy.
Other businesses allow an outside phone service to take care of their incoming calls. This way, they can focus on running the business and still have good customer service.
You might hire a virtual assistant to handle your customer service issues online. It’s all about freeing you up for the most important money-making and personally gratifying tasks.
This obstacle is one that hits a lot of business at some point during their operation. Having financial struggles can be detrimental to the business itself and it can affect morale negatively, too.
It can be difficult to want to keep on going when you’re facing cash flow obstacles. But what you have to do at this point is to remember what your dream was in the beginning.
Don’t lose focus during the hard times. So often, a business will go through a rough patch financially – only to turn around in the blink of an eye. Yet too many business owners get so discouraged when the cash isn’t flowing, that they slow productivity.
This slowed productivity then affects the overall business, which contributes to the cash flow problem. There are short-term and then there are long-term cash flow problems.
So just like that, your profit is slashed. If the obstacle is a short-term cash flow, you can turn this around in a short amount of time by picking up some easy jobs that your company can do to bring in money.
The faster you can bring in the money, the quicker you’ll solve your cash flow problems. If you’re used to making $300 an hour consulting for businesses, cut your price by a percentage.
You could bring in several smaller companies or individuals who couldn’t afford your services at the higher rate. Running a special to give our business an injection of cash helps you survive during the next planning phase.
Long-term cash flow problems are a bigger obstacle to keep your productivity on track with. When you have this kind of financial issue, it can lead to a lack of supplies, not having enough to pay yourself or your employees and struggles to pay your typical overhead expenses.
If you allow other companies or individuals to pay you in arrears, several slow payers could hurt your business. If this is the case, then you would need to cut off the company having access to your services until the debt was settled.
Never risk your business’s viability over someone else’s lack of responsibility. Take care of the matter and if necessary, replace a slow or non-paying client with someone who is reliable.
Every business will always have an area where there’s a money drain. Go over every section carefully to see where you can cut costs. If necessary, have a mentor look over your day-to-day business operations and make suggestions.
If you’re a start up business and cash flow is an obstacle because you don’t have any at all, then barter what services you do have to get what you need. It’s also a good idea to consider working on other cash-generating ideas like freelancing or an offline job if you need money to pursue your dreams.
Your friends and family can be your biggest supporters when you own a business. But they can also be obstacles. People who care about you can fail to understand and not respect your work schedule.
They can drop by to hang out at the office when you know you should be working. Or if your office is at home, they can interrupt you several times during the day.
You must treat your business like a business and respect it – or others won’t either. Sometimes people who work in a similar field will show up unexpectedly to talk, and this can temporarily slow you down.
Other times, they come by so often that it becomes an issue. If this is a problem, you’ll have to take control – and it can be as simple as saying, “I’d love to chat, but I have a deadline, so I have to get back to work.”
Employees can create productivity problems when they don’t do their job. When one person fails to do what he’s supposed to do, it can have a trickle down effect. The project could slow down until someone goes back to complete the original task.
Things get missed during a workday or a workweek. Mistakes are inevitable. Repeat mistakes and repeated issues of not completing assignments on time affect your business negatively, slow productivity and cost you in long-term profit.
Sometimes, it’s vendors that can slow your productivity. They don’t deliver a product when they’re supposed to, so that can slow down the time a shipment needs to go out or a launch needs to take place.
You can work through this by finding a replacement vendor. If someone makes a commitment to you to have something to you on a certain day by a certain time, that commitment should be kept – otherwise, your business is the one most affected.
Sometimes, in an effort to save money and offer goodwill, business owners hire family members or friends. Working with people that mean a lot to you can be a great opportunity.
In order to protect the family or friendship, you might not want to give that person a boot from the business. If that’s the case, move that person to an area where what they’re doing won’t impact the productivity.
Let them answer phones or handle email or do other tasks that help. But don’t be afraid to put your foot down if there’s nowhere else to put them. You’re in charge of turning your business into a success, and you need to adhere to your own responsibilities.
How you feel impacts how your business runs. If you’re experiencing something in your personal life, it can slow productivity. For example, if you’re dealing with a family situation that causes you to lose sleep at night, it can be hard to keep your mind on the tasks at hand the next day at work.
If you have to deal with something out of the office that impacts your productivity, you need to take a step back and let someone else handle what you normally take care of in the business.
It can be a problem if you don’t have a second in command who can run things for you. If that’s the case, then you have to find a way to clear your head and push through.
Having the mindset that you’ve learned all there is to know can be a productivity obstacle. In this case, people will continue to do what they’ve always done – even if there’s a faster and less expensive way.
Not being teachable can easily cost you in terms of less productivity. Companies who produce tangible items or even strategies for you to learn from are counting on your ability to be open to growth through learning.
You’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you turn a blind eye to opportunities that can help you be more productive just because you’re comfortable with the status quo.
Obstacles are a given in life. You have to strengthen your ability to handle them without panic. Once you learn the right way to navigate toward your goal, you’ll find that the once intimidating obstacles put in your path look less frightening over time.
Want to learn more about productivity? Then, download the featured free report below, read it and take action 🙂
Are you feeling a bit confused by strategic thinking? How is it different to tactical thinking because both are important for your success in life/career/business?
To sum up the key differences between a strategy and a tactic is simple: A strategy is your overall plan to achieve your goals, while a tactic is a method used to implement the intended strategy.
As you can see strategic thinking skills are essential for your career and your business, but how do you actually do it?
Here are five questions you should ask yourself to really sharpen your strategic thinking. Ask them to gain clarity on the strategies you want to develop to move you forward in your life/career/business.
The most important thing to work out is where you want to be. Everything—goals, strategies, steps, should all be pointing to your desired destination.
Do you want to be CEO, or be running your own company?
Get it all down on paper and think big!
Do a survey of exactly where you are right now.
What skills, resources, and assets do you have? What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks in your current job or business?
Map out your network and what value you provide to them, and what they offer you. Write up your self-inventory.
Think about what is in your control at the present moment; you don’t need to worry about anything that isn’t directly under your control which can be kind of liberating!
What can you streamline or eliminate?
This can include anything from training, networking opportunities, to investment advice or strategic career planning.
Take another look at your self-inventory.
If this is difficult or overwhelming, consider finding a mentor or life coach who can help you find your way.
Really going for success shouldn’t make for a joyless life, totally focused on getting ahead. Make sure you take time to have fun and do the things that give you pleasure. Think of what Future Successful You enjoys doing. What makes your future worth striving for?
Write down all the fun things you will do, whether it’s staying in 5-star hotels or being able to work for only half the year. Imagine driving your dream car. See yourself in your future executive suite.
Now, one of the biggest issues that stops you from planning and building for the future is by staying in the past.
Remember: the past doesn’t equal the future!
If you keep looking back, you will never move forward, so let’s look at how you can let go of the past and build a fantastic future!
You read much about why you should let go of the past. However, it’s more important to know how to do it. Most people will eventually come to grips with why they should do it. They get stuck on actually taking steps to make it happen.
Learn from your past experiences. There are learning nuggets contained within your past. Anything you have done or tried before is up for grabs in the University of your past. It’s up to you to recognize what those lessons are and how to use them effectively. The way to use them is to determine why they happened and how to avoid them in the future.
Consider learning meditation. When you are relaxed, you will have an easier time of purging your past. One of the best forms of relaxation is meditation. It takes several sessions to get your body and mind in tune with the techniques. Don’t expect fast solutions with this. The key is to keep doing it until you feel the effects.
Don’t hide from your past. People try to pretend certain aspects of their past did not happen, especially the more embarrassing moments. However, this may cause them to come back to you with a vengeance since they are bottling up within you. Acknowledge everything about your past but commit to pushing forward.
Don’t expect all changes to occur immediately. Your past habits may be difficult to break. Therefore, don’t try to change everything in one shot. Give it time. It took a long time to develop those bad habits.
If you are too hard on yourself about your past, stop. It’s okay to acknowledge that you made some mistakes but don’t get overly critical of them.
Concentrate on the good aspects of your past. Sometimes, you may focus on your mistakes and mask the fact that you had some wonderful experiences in the past as well. These are equally important.
Of course, using strategic thinking exercises takes a lot of self-discipline which many of us lack, so if you want to learn about how to harness the power of self-discipline, please download the featured resource below, read it and take action 🙂
Every single day, droves of people get on the internet hoping to make money online. Very often, they have a plethora of reasons for wanting to do so – ranging from wanting to quit their day job to having more money for the finer things in life.
One common thread that binds most of them is that they’re often on a tight budget… and is also probably the reason why they want to get into online marketing to boost their income.
However, they’re often told that they’ll need to purchase their own domain, pay for hosting, fork out more cash for autoresponder fees and so on. It’s almost as if they need money to make money.
While motivational gurus may spout motherhood statements such as, “It’s not about your resources, but your resourcefulness…”, the truth of the matter is that you can’t multiply by zero.
You’ll need money to pay for different fixed and recurring costs in your business. That’s a given.
However, if you’re financially strapped and can’t possibly get a second job because your first one is almost working you into an early grave, there are a couple of ways you can make affiliate marketing work, for free.
There are several platforms that will allow you to have a free website. The catch here is that you’ll have no control over the advertising that appears on your site.
If they feel like you’ve flouted their rules, they could boot you out unceremoniously without giving you any notice.
Countless beginner marketers have lost their businesses overnight by ‘building their houses on rented land’.
So, your goal is to build a free website and once you’re generating sales, you should immediately buy your own domain and hosting so that you’re in control of your business.
Here are 2 free platforms you can use:
WordPress.com – https://wordpress.com/
*Medium – https://medium.com/
*While Medium doesn’t allow you to build your own site, it allows you to post articles on their platform. That’s really all you need for now.
The site gets a lot of traffic and has potential when it comes to ranking for low hanging keywords that you may wish to target. From there, it’s just a matter of publishing more targeted articles and getting affiliate sales.
It should be free to join most affiliate programs on places like ClickBank, Amazon Associates, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, Rakuten Marketing and so on. Go ahead and sign up and get your links.
There are tons of excellent affiliate products that you can promote for free without having to jump through hoops.
Since money is tight, paid ads are definitely not an option here. The next best way to generate traffic to your pages will be to siphon it from high traffic social media sites and platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google.
If your content is valuable and top-notch, you’ll build a following and have people clicking on your affiliate links or article links. So, go ahead and create accounts in the different social media platforms and…
Once again, it’s important to remember that social media sites are not your web properties, so you’re never totally safe with them. The goal is to always generate sales until you have enough money to build your own website and list. These are YOUR assets.
One way to start will be to write and start posting useful articles on Medium (you’ll embed your affiliate links in the posts). Just remember to disclose affiliate links and DO NOT overdo it. Moderation is key here.
Point your YouTube videos, Facebook posts, tweets, etc. to your Medium article so that you can pre-sell the reader by providing more information and value. Once you build trust with your audience, your chances of getting the sale will be much higher.
Your Medium account with all your content will act as a hub-site for your affiliate marketing business. The free traffic methods you employ will siphon traffic from different platforms and point them all to your hub site’s content… just like how all roads lead to Rome.
Then it’s just a matter of time for the traffic to convert into sales (if your content is valuable and persuasive).
Keep on keeping on until you start seeing sales trickle in. Give yourself 6 to 12 months to see your efforts yield fruit. This is a slow process, but a rewarding one.
Being able to build your own mailing list will help to elevate your marketing to the next level and skyrocket your commissions.
This is the best way to bootstrap your way from scratch to affiliate marketing success.
“Every artist was first an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once you have started to make progress you should consider taking the next step and investing in your business to take your affiliate marketing to the next level. If you want to know more about this then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it and take action 🙂
Have you ever wondered why some online marketers seem to be so much more successful than others?
Or why one marketer bounces back from a failure within days, while another one gives up and begs for his old job back?
Or why you see some online marketers everywhere, and other marketers hear only crickets?
Many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs realise that your thoughts have a huge impact on how you see yourself and thus impact on your actions or lack thereof!
And wouldn’t you like to know how to improve the way you think about yourself?
Here are seven mindset hacks that help to set some online marketers apart from others. Use them for yourself and you can boost your chances of success almost instantly! What have you got to lose…?
Successful online marketers believe in themselves and their business.
You’ve got to believe that you are fully capable of building this six or seven figure business, that you are able to bring tremendous value to your customers, and that you can overcome any adversity that gets in your way.
Obstacles will always be there but if you believe that you can do it, you are already halfway there.
Some marketers don’t look beyond what niche they’re going to enter and what their domain name should be.
But you need to have a plan in place, a roadmap you can follow when you get stalled.
If so, what problems will those products fix or what benefits will they give the customer? Will you blog? Podcast? Make videos?
Your plan can be flexible and change as needed, but the importance of having a plan in the first place is unquestionable.
Without vision and goals – both of which will be in your plan – you’ll get up in the morning without a clue of what you should be doing. And that is a recipe for failure.
You’re going to be doing things you’ve never done before. It’s going to be uncomfortable, and even scary. You might be afraid to take the next step.
And all of that is perfectly normal. The key is to embrace the fear and do the things you need to do anyway.
But if you embrace the new and unknown, there is no limit to what you can do.
Try to reframe challenges that you face and make you uncomfortable into opportunities to learn and grow and see your life and business flourish
As an online marketer, you’ve got to think about the big picture. What is your end goal – to make $100,000 a year? Or maybe to build a million-dollar business and sell it? What campaigns will you use to reach your customers over the coming year? What is your marketing strategy for the following year?
It’s easy to get so bogged down in the little stuff, that we lose sight of the big picture. But if all you ever focus on is the big picture, you’ll never get anything done today.
Figure out the three things you should be doing every single day that will bring in more business.
And then no matter what, before you quit for the day, make sure that you have done those three things.
For example, maybe it’s writing and sending an email to your list to make sales, posting on social media to get new subscribers, and contacting 3 possible affiliates to promote for you.
Whatever your three things are, do them every single day and you are guaranteed to be successful.
When you first start creating success habits, you can also try rewarding yourself for keeping to them to positively reinforce the habits. The reward doesn’t have to be big; it is just there to help you to ingrain the habit in you.
Too many online marketers make the grave mistake of creating a product and then going in search of customers for that product. This seldom works.
Then find out what they want and need and sell that to them.
Repeat after me: “Audience first, product second.”
This last one is two-fold, and yet I find they are intricately intertwined.
Give yourself to your audience without holding back. Do you suffer from the same stupid mistakes they make? Then let them know that. Do you have an answer to your readers’ problem? Let them know what it is.
You cannot go wrong by being generous. And you also cannot go wrong by being honest.
Tell them the shortcomings of the product you are promoting. The REAL shortcomings. Show your human side. Talk about your own trials and tribulations and struggles.
Hey, you’re not perfect? Your audience already knew that, but they’re mighty glad to hear you say it. It makes you one of them.
Post a card above your desk – “Honesty and Generosity.”
Master these seven keys in your life and your business, and you cannot go wrong.
By the way, if you want to learn more about developing your mindset, download this free report, How To Develop A Strong Mindset which will give you much more information.
Just click on the Featured Resource image below.
