Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

Sonia Simone on January 4, 2016

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.

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”

The Show Notes

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.