Focus on the Right Goals in 2015 – Stop Wasting Your Time

We all suffer from a lot of distractions. Checking social media, answering email, reading an interesting blog post or just surfing the web.

But in order to get ahead online and grow your business, you have to focus on your goals.

Do you know what those goals are?

And which ones are going to move your business or blog ahead in 2015?

Not Too Many At Once

The first step to success is: not trying to do too much at once.

I suffer from this problem too, and sometimes need to slap myself and focus on the most important things on my to-do list.

Sure I could write another blog post to entertain or inform you, my happy reader.

I could also spend more time on social media, networking and sharing amazing content.

But are these the things that will move my business forward the fastest? Maybe, maybe not.

You need to choose just one or two things to accomplish in the short term. Otherwise, you will only make small steps forward on many things, and get disheartened with your lack of progress.

Last January I put my head down and banged out a complete Twitter course in under a month. I made it a priority. And sometimes it was all I did for days.

But I had to focus. Planning each lesson, recording them with Screenflow, then editing and adding annotations. It was super time consuming. But in the end I had a Twitter course to my name, which now has over 750 students on Udemy. And now it is also a nice passive income for me.

Choosing the Right Goals

Knowing that you should only focus on a few things at once is only the beginning.

Sure it is a good start, but what goals should you choose for your business or blog in 2015?

Here are the kinds of things I do in order to decide what is worth my time and effort.

1. Determine what your long term goals are

Before you know what you should be doing, it pays to know what your actual long term goals are. There is no point walking towards the wrong destination.

For example, if you are building a business and need more customers, then becoming a social media superstar might not serve you that well.

However, if you are just aiming to share you knowledge with the world, and money is not an issue, then writing consistent blog posts could be more useful.

Having the big picture is important for your short term goals and can stop you not get distracted too easily from the things you should be doing.

So put that at the top of your planning page: What are my long term goals?

2. Find out what will drive your long term goals

This is more of a variable area, because it depends on your overall goals and what skills and knowledge you have. None of these things I can know, so I will give you some examples from my situation to help you understand what I mean.

To bring more customers to my online business Entice Online Marketing (my long term goal), I need to first generate more traffic to the website. After all, if no one knows we exist, we can have the best content, or the most amazing offers, but they will make little difference. So the first step for us is traffic. (we have The fundamentals already on the website – blog, sales page, contact form, social media etc).

Next we need to decide, based on the ideas we have for traffic, which one is going to move us ahead further and faster than the rest. If we had no ideas at this stage, it would be time to do a little research (blog posts, guest posting, link building. social media etc).

There are a lot of things we can focus on, but one at a time is the way to go.

Then once we have that set up and running, it would be time to move to our next significant goal – turning visitors into customers (or getting even more visitors).

Action Plan for 2015

To summarize and help you take action in 2015 here is what I recommend you do to get some amazing results:

• know what your longterm goals are
• focus on a few key short or medium term goals only
• find a few short term goals that will really move the needle

And interestingly, just as I was thinking about and writing this blog post, I read a very similar idea from a marketer you should definitely be watching – Noah Kegan of AppSumo. He recently read and reviewed a book which pretty much said exactly the same thing.

Focus, Grow, Thrive.

Happy New Year and Go Nuts in 2015!

Ashley