We all create goals.
Few of us reach goals.
I made a personal goal in 2008 to create an industry leading online marketing company. It took several years, and some AMAZING partners and clients, but we are there. I have also accomplished some strong personal goals in the last few years, but I have failed in reaching more goals then I have succeeded.
Recently I began dissecting what I did right and what I did wrong.
What I have come up with, with the help of a few recent books I have read ( and ) is that my success came from large goals that I supported with micro-goals.
The “goal” of becoming the best online marketing company is as broad as it is vague. To shoot only for that is almost impossible. In order to do it I had to create micro-goals:
1) Create the original Search & Social with Jordan Kasteler. We wanted to offer companies a firm based on youthful, fresh ideas in online marketing. We worked hard to differentiate ourselves from the older, more established firms. It worked to get us in the game.
2) When we merged with Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal, Inc. the goal was to make a real run at being the best linkbuilding company in the space. We wanted to do this through differentiated linkbuilding, i.e. blogger outreach, social media, content aggregation, and linkbait. We built commodities in a white hat fashion, in a way that had only been previously been accomplished in scale by less legitimate lini brokering
firms.
3) Second Step Search, which began in 2009, had the goal of creating scalable workflow solutions and reporting for SEOs and marketers. This included CopyPress.
4) The last step, the merger of BlueGlass, brought together all of the pieces into the final product that would allow us to achieve our original goal.
Breaking the micro-goals down further:
1) We entered the game and created a differentiation
2) We set out to become experts in one channel of a multi-channel market
3) We figured out how to scale other channels of that market
4) We merged with awesome marketers in those other channels to pull of the goal
By looking hard at these areas where I have succeeded I now know that in order to be successful I have to:
1) Create an overarching but tangible goal. Think big. $1 million in monthly widget sales recurring
2) Setup Micro-goals for this with deadlines. Lets say you want to achieve the $1million in monthly sales, first you should plan on a. creating a sales strategy b. hitting $250,000 a month in sales c. increasing sales force by 50%
3) Create daily tasks to help you reach the micro-goals. In the example above in order to hit my first micro-goal I need to a. do competitive analysis of the competitions sales strategy b. create a pricing structure based on this analysis c. create a sales funnel that meets or beats competitors.
By making this a daily activity, you work daily on achieving your dreams. The upside as well is that by dissecting items like this you know that you can get minor achievements accomplished without burning out chasing the big prize.
