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Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

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Previous Episode:Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet 'Facts' More Episodes Next Episode:Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

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A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

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5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

Vision and goal-setting are useful practices for business owners and professionals — but they can also be a recipe for beating yourself up and feeling like crap. Here are my suggestions for productive goals.

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This time of year, it seems like there are almost as many “goals and resolutions are for dopes” posts as there are articles about how to set goals and meet your resolutions.

Here are my thoughts on how to approach this practice in a healthy way.

In this 18-minute episode, I talk about:

  • The popular line of BS about why we don’t reach our goals
  • Making our own rules and facing our own constraints
  • The most important “ingredient” for healthy change (in any field)
  • My favorite specific techniques for vision and goal-setting
  • A fun and free resource if your goals include things like “get more traffic” or “make my website better”

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital BusinessSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • The Copyblogger Cornerstone Content Challenge
  • The brand-new Copyblogger FM podcast (this coming Thursday’s episode will be on resolutions!)
  • A great post from Rachel Rogers about “the missing step” for many of us when we set goals: Why Planning Fails (And What to Do Instead)
  • A podcast I recorded last year on Productivity for Flakes — this may make it easier for you to implement some systems and reach your goals for the new year 🙂

The Transcript


Sonia Simone: Happy new year, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me yet, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Now, this time of year you might be making some resolutions, and if you want to include some for your marketing or your business, later this week I’ll be covering that on the brand-new Copyblogger.FM podcast. That publishes on Thursday, so if resolutions are your thing, boogie on over to Copyblogger.FM later this week to pick that up.

Why we don’t reach our goals

This time of year, there are always a lot of pieces published about why we don’t reach goals — and the usual explanation is that we’re weak, we’re lazy, no one knows how to work any more, that kind of thing.

I’m going to call BS on that. These are almost always written from the peak of Mount Privilege, and yeah, they apply sometimes, but most of the time, there’s a reason we’re not putting the effort in.

So sure, on a very basic level, if we don’t apply the basic inputs, then the output isn’t going to look the way we want. But we also have to face the reality that sometimes, the work we put in is impeccable, but we still don’t get the result we want. That’s how the world works. If you are very privileged and all your stars have aligned since birth, you’ll be the one who tends to see the strongest relationship between input and output.

If you weren’t born with every advantage, there will be more bumps and curves in the road. Sometimes a whole lot of bumps and curves.

If this has been a bumpy or curvy time for you, first, let me say I see you and I recognize that a lot of folks’ roads are not smooth.

Second, the best tool I know for managing a crappy hand is the good old serenity prayer, widely adopted by the 12-Step movement:

Grant me the strength to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.

No matter what your situation, anywhere on the planet, this is what you have to work with — the arena of things you can actually change.

We can change our habits, we can change our behavior and activities, even if it’s hard as hell.

Making our own rules; accepting our own constraints

A lot of the time, we use our beginning-of-the-year goals mainly to make ourselves feel bad. I didn’t lose 30 pounds, I didn’t publish a bestselling book, I didn’t clear a million dollars with my business, whatever.

Now you guys know I’m all about making our own rules — I’m also all about getting real about our own constraints.

One person has three kids under five, another has six figures of student loans, another has something about your appearance that causes people to underestimate you. Your path is your path. No one else’s. That’s why I think it’s so important not to play another person’s game — because you didn’t inherit that person’s strengths or weaknesses or circumstances.

One very useful tool is to measure yourself against yourself. Not the person you went to college with, or your super-successful sister, or someone you think is a guru.

Most gurus are full of shit a great deal of the time. I’m full of shit a great deal of the time. The difference is that I try to be transparent with you about that, and present possibilities instead of pronouncements. I’m figuring it out one day at a time just like you are, and if I have something I’ve found useful, I let you know about it.

So, measure yourself against yourself. That means that part of goal-setting is getting real about where you are right now.

How much do you have in the bank? How much do you weigh? How fit are you — in other words, how fast can you run or how much weight can you lift or whatever you think might be useful to measure.

The most important “ingredient” for healthy change

In my experience, the absolute non-negotiable ingredient for healthy change is to be able to be both realistic and compassionate with yourself.

The more you beat yourself up and call yourself fat or ugly or a loser, the harder it is to make healthy change. You might be able to make some kind of temporary radical change, but it nearly always pushes you in an unhealthy direction. So you trade some extra pounds for an eating disorder, for example. Or you make some kind of huge change that you can’t sustain, and you end up even more angry with yourself, plus you’re in a worse hole than the one you started with.

Now a lot of advice-giving type people completely disagree with me on this. They’re all about shouting at you and calling you weak, and telling you you have to hate yourself to make positive changes. All I can say is, I’ve almost never seen this work, and sometimes when it seems from the outside like it’s working, when you dig deeper you find a lot of self-hatred or misery.

That’s my bias, and you can experiment with it or not — you’ll know if this feels right to you.

Let’s talk vision and goal-setting

So, if the foundation of smart goal setting is getting real with yourself, without kicking yourself, that’s Step One, right? So this week, you take a look at where you are.

Let’s say you want more traffic to your web site, since that’s something that’s not too emotionally loaded. This week, you get into your Google Analytics, you look at your email open and click rates, what have you.

If you have nothing like that set up to measure, then that’s your first action — to make that happen by the end of the week. It’s one of those things that isn’t as hard as we make it out to be, before you do it it feels like Everest, but once you get it implemented, you realize it’s actually not hard.

Once you know your numbers, you can start to come up with some goals that make sense. If you have 100 visitors a day, in quarter one you can try to bump that up to, say, 125. Percentage-wise that’s a lot, and if you have 10,000 visitors, 12,500 is probably going to be harder to get to. So make it make sense for where you are.

When you’re setting goals, think carefully about what you want to measure. So, digging into our traffic goal, do we really want more visitors to our site — or do we want more email subscribers? What do you want to get out of it? Usually the email subscriber number will get you better results. So give some thought to what you want and why, and try to sketch that out, again by the end of this week.

Once you have a rough idea of what you want, I want you to get into your calendar. Outlook, Gmail, ICal, paper calendar, I don’t care. But start to put your goals into future dates on your calendar, so you can look at them regularly, and see your progress.

Decide how far in advance you want to run this goal. Do you want to improve your goal over the whole year? Then put something in your calendar every month, to check your progress. Every quarter, schedule some time to look more deeply at the numbers and adjust your strategy if you need to.

The vision thing

Vision and goals go together — the vision is just a snapshot of what things will look like when individual goals get accomplished.

I do find it valuable to take a half hour or so to sit down with a text file or a paper notebook and describe:

What will it look like when you get there?

What will the numbers be? What will your living room look like? How’s your relationship with your family look? How about your health? What kind of colleagues will you work with? How will those relationships feel?

What’s it going to be like when you get to where you’re going?

Then (compassionately), look at where things are today. Document them. Not with an attitude of “I’m such a loser,” but with curiosity and friendliness. “Hm, today I’m living in a crappy tiny apartment and not talking to anyone in my family. Where I’m headed is a nice two-bedroom with great natural light, and having a happy phone call with my dad and my sister once a week.”

Just notice it.

Then put your notes away (where you can find them), and schedule the next review. This is a good one to do quarterly along with your goal review.

I didn’t make this up, it’s sometimes called the Pivotal Technique and sometimes called TK. I’ve found it very useful. Perhaps you will as well.

If you have content or website goals

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we do have our Copyblogger Content Challenge going on, if you have on your goals list something like, “Improve my website” or “get more web traffic” or “gain more email subscribers.”

This month we’ll be talking about really making the content on your site incredibly strong and useful.

We have fun and simple exercises for you, to walk you through how we approach this on Copyblogger, and we also have a free webinar and even a pop-up forum where you can hang out with me and the rest of the editorial team and get encouragement and support.

It’s all free, you can get signed up at the Copyblogger blog at Copyblogger.com/cornerstone-content-challenge. Just swing by the blog, or come by pinkhairedmarketer.fm, and we’ll have sign-up links for you. Again, totally free, and it’s going to be a lot of fun — we have a few thousand people signed up already, and I think this is going to be really energizing and useful to you.

And in case you missed it a few minutes ago, I’m also the new host for the podcast that was called The Lede, and has been renamed Copyblogger.FM. That’s going to be all about content marketing news, strategy, how-to, that kind of thing. So if content is your game, you know I’d love to see you there as well. The plan right now is that that podcast publishes on Thursdays, and this one on Mondays.

Look forward to seeing you, and I wish you a wonderful and joyous and successful 2016.

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