Are Your Goals Really Just Hopes?

Yup. A goal without a doable plan of action is a hope.

What you've outlined is pretty much how I set my goals.

1. Define a specific, measureable goal.

2. Determine what activities will be needed to achieve the goal (this is the only tricky part, especially if it involves activities you've never done before, or on a scale you've never done before, as you may not know what results you can expect. But you plan them anyway, then tweak as necessary based on feedback.).

3. Break those activities down into sequential steps.

4. Execute the steps.

As you start getting really good at doing this (I'm a freaking internal
calculator) you can start to do stuff like this.

List size - 5,000
Open rate - 10%
Conversion rate 10% on the 10%

That translates to 50 sales for one mailing.

So, want to make $2,000 for that one email?

You need to promote a product that will pay you $40 per sale.

You get the stats from doing this long enough. You then just plug in the
dollar amount and figure what you have to promote to get it.

So let's say my income goal for the month is $10,000.

I can...

Promote 5 $40 products or a little more than 1 per week. That's really
not a lot IF you're offering value to your list in between promotions and
the products really tie in to what you're teaching them.

Or, if I don't want to promote that many products, I can promote 2 $100
products. One at the beginning of the month and one in the middle of the
month or even end of the month. Problem with end of month is that the
beginning of the next month comes too soon.

Point is, once you have the metrics down on how your list responds,
you can pretty much decide how much you want to earn each month,
again, providing you're treating them well.

Otherwise, you're going to burn them out and lose them.

I have a group of people on my list who I literally can't stop from buying
something when I come out with it.

These are your golden customers.

Treasure them.

A Simple System to Achieve Your Goals

Free. Nothing you have to do but download it. Worksheets and all. They point you to a plan with specific steps, just like John described.

I put that together as a Christmas gift for my subscribers a while back. Help yourself...


Paul

Shut it, Jerk.

Very well said, John and Steven especially I set a financial goal of $1k in 30 days(it's actually day 30 today) and I've fallen short of it. That said, as a result of being accountable to myself I have moved forward in a lot of ways, especially in terms of organization and motivation.

My goals are now all about tasks. I'm still tweaking, testing and finding out what results I get from specific tasks. Hopefully in the not too distant future I'll be able to say definitively what I need to do to get specific results, like Steven mentions above.

The "trick" John is talking about is making #4 the goal you are trying to achieve. You can control your own actions.

If you set your goals according to other peoples' actions, you rely on luck to reach them.

Even in Steve's example above, he talks about what he needs to do in order to achieve results his past experience tell him are likely to happen.

He stated his goal in the active voice - "promote 5 products at $40 within the next 30 days". Not the passive voice - "have 50 people buy a $40 product five times this month".