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How to set goals and achieve them
With the New Year just underway, it’s time to reset and rethink what you want to accomplish in your life, as a person and as an authority in your niche. True thought leaders are strategic, and map out a plan before getting into the weeds. So start setting up goals today, and make this one of your best years ever.
The importance of setting goals
Around 95% of people that set New Year’s resolutions don’t follow through, and 25% abandon them in the first week! This means you likely need to take setting up goals to another level, because even if you set them, the chances you will follow through are not in your favor.
Why set goals?
Mindtools.com puts it this way:
Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge, and helps you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.”
And Melody Beattie adds another inspirational goal setting quote:
The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”
The amount of famous people that talk in detail about setting goals is almost endless, including personal development expert Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins on setting and achieving goals
One of my biggest takeaways from going to the Tony Robbins personal power conference was the importance of writing down your goals.
Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” – Tony Robbins
The clearer you become on what your goals are, the more likely you are to achieve them. In addition, you must also understand why you are motivated to achieve them. Tony Robbins calls this getting leverage.
Leverage can happen when you have a true belief in your mind of what will happen if you do not achieve your goal, or when you can truly envision the positive outcome of achieving one. Envisioning the positive and the negative can give you an incredible amount of motivation to persevere even when you feel like giving up.
Tony Robbins often takes people through a series of visualizations where he has them imagine what their life will be like in 5, 10 or even more years from now, after they have failed to reach their dreams.
When you can truly imagine the nightmare you would be living, you can then use that as leverage to motivate you. He then takes you on a highly emotional, positive visualization as well. After going through this exercise with thousands of people at Tony’s conference in Florida, there was barely a dry eye in the crowd.
The power of your thoughts
If you continually imagine your goals coming true, it propels you forward into a positive future. The movie The Secret talks about this in great detail, as does the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.
The premise is that when you envision yourself being successful at any of your goals, it draws them into reality. A simple example of this is an athlete envisioning themselves at peak performance and then winning a gold medal. This repetitive exercise is said to unleash the incredible power of the universe. Having faith and truly believing that you can accomplish your goals can be the differentiating factor as to whether or not you follow through fully.
As Napoleon Hill puts it “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe he can achieve.”
It may sound hokey, but you would be amazed at how many rich and famous people have used this technique. In fact, Napoleon Hill, initiated by Andrew Carnegie, spent 20 years of his life interviewing over 500 wealthy people in regard to what the key factors were in helping them achieve their goals. Overwhelmingly, they cite imagining the positive outcome as a critical factor.
Must-have versus want to have goals
It is only when we turn our wishful thinking goals into must-have goals, that we accomplish lasting results. Are your goals for this year casual, or are they things that you deeply desire, and are willing to sacrifice to achieve? It’s time to create a sense of urgency and put a deadline on achieving your goals. As Napoleon Hill says:
A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
Setting up SMART goals
Achieving your goals is more difficult than simply setting them. That is why many people use a system called, setting SMART goals. Smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
The act of writing down your highly specific goals seals them in stone, and yet so few people take time to do this exercise. Use the worksheet below to guide you. I suggest doing it for at least your top 3 goals.
SMART goal setting worksheet
List your most pressing goal for the coming year by printing out this post or goal setting PDF. Steps to setting goals are as follows:
List your most pressing goal:
Specific: List specific action steps on how you will achieve this goal:
Measurable: How we measure your progress?
Attainable: What will help make your goal attainable?
Relevant: Why you absolutely must achieve your goal?
Timely: When will you attain your goal?
Now that you have your goals documented, stop reading and take at least one small action towards creating a better future.
Why real people on websites are important
I just had an experience with the IKEA website that left me feeling really cold; like 100° below zero type of cold. I was trying to make 100% sure they were open on New Year’s Day, because as an obsessed entrepreneur, I of course must have even more bookshelves to contain the piles of marketing clutter I have around my home office.
When I couldn’t find any information that specified if they were open today, I used the live chat feature. The robot Anna literally blinked her custom illustrated eyes at me and said, “how can I help you today?”
I proceeded to ask, “Are you open today?”
Anna: “What store location?”
John: “Stoughton Massachusetts”
Anna: “Thank you for letting me know your store is Stoughton. How may I help you today?”
John: “Is the Stoughton store open today?”
Anna: “You’re asking about opening hours. The Stoughton store is open Sunday 10am to 7pm, Monday to Saturday 10am-9pm…”
This didn’t address my issue at all because I was asking specifically about today… So I rephrase my question:
John: “No. That is not helpful. Are you open today on New Year’s Day?”
Then Anna gets really animated by blinking her eyes several times and cocking her head to the side, smiles and repeats exactly what she said before:
“The Stoughton store is open Sunday 10am to 7pm, Monday to Saturday 10am-9pm…”
In desperation I said, “This is so annoying and are you open today?”
Her response to my question made it seem like she was intentionally trying to annoy me, because she answers by saying:
“How nice. I must have been a great help to make you feel like that. Now, ask me a question about IKEA.”
After realizing the robotic system is ridiculous, I asked her just for fun:
“Are you an authority in your niche?”
Anna: “I don’t understand what you mean.”
John: “Can I trust you?”
Anna: “Sometimes you have to trust your feelings, sometimes no…”
Clearly, I am not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about IKEA. I guess it makes some sad sense because they are a very low cost provider and I can’t expect amazing customer service but this is the anti-thesis of what you want as an expert and authority.
People buy from people, not websites
While this may not be scalable for a company as large as IKEA, consider the following conversion optimization case study from gundogsupply.com.
Gun Dog Supply is run by two brothers who inherited the company from their father. The company did very well based on mailing an L.L. Bean style catalog to its customers for many years. When the brothers took over the company, they wanted to use the Internet to radically increase sales.
One of the brothers, Steve, is more into using the products such as hunting dog collars. The other brother Rob, is the marketing expert and I saw him speak once at a conversion conference. They did some research which showed that customers really love how knowledgeable Steve is, and how talking to him on the phone enables them to make great purchasing decisions. Their trust in Steve, lead to their decision to put his face in the logo.
They also added little highlights next to Steve’s favorite items, and called them Steve’s picks. They made $10 million more in one year, simply by highlighting a real person in the company that website visitors could connect with.
And here is what Gun Dog Supply says on Steve’s bio page:
“Steve Snell’s Dog Training Equipment Articles, Reviews, & Buyers Guides
Steve Snell is the president of Gun Dog Supply. He hunts quail, pheasant, duck, and dove. He currently has 17 dogs: 1 retriever, 10 pointers, 3 brittanys, 1 GSP, a mutt his brother picked up named “Georgia”, and a cocker spaniel named “Lucy” that his wife made him buy. Questions? Comments? Feedback? Send me an email or call 8-6 CT weekdays at 1-800-624-6378.”
People buy from those that they know, like and trust. When I asked Anna if I could trust her, she basically said sometimes yes, sometimes no. It pretty much sums up the experience you are giving customers when your website doesn’t do a good job of highlighting who you are and not just what you do.
Make sure that at the very least, your about us page highlights some of your people and a bit about your beliefs.
You might not make $10 million more in one year, but you certainly will warm people up much more than the blinking robot Anna.
3 must have website analytics tools
One of the most outstanding differences between Internet marketing and traditional marketing is the amount of ROI tracking you can do. Not only can you track if your efforts are working but you can get feedback that allows you to make changes which will improve your results.
Sadly, when we first start working with new clients, we see that many of them don’t even have proper tracking set up. They might have analytics installed but nobody took the time to implement Google Analytics goal tracking. This means that you are flying blind in terms of making meaningful improvements to your website marketing.
Another problem is that many people aren’t even aware of the amazing new analytics software that can help you improve your marketing or are not willing to spend the money on new technology.
This first post in a series will give you an overview of some of the most essential web analytics tools to use to track and improve your campaigns. Subsequent posts will illustrate in greater detail how to use each of these web analytics tools.
Back in the day, website analytics tools were expensive. When Google Analytics first came out and was free, we almost couldn’t believe it. Now, pretty much everyone has it and at the very least can see what marketing tactics are driving traffic.
To get the most out of it, setting up goals in Google analytics is absolutely essential. Goals can be things like how many people downloaded an e-book, filled out a contact form, bought things in a shopping cart, or even watched a video.
A few amazing things you can do with Google Analytics for free
- Create custom Google analytics dashboards to see important data first
- See what marketing tactics are driving traffic
- Discover how long people stay on your website and how many pages they visit
- Determine where users are located
- Use in-page analytics to see what things get clicked on the most
- Learn what people are searching for on your website
- Understand what pages get visited the most and why
- Identify your worst pages that have extremely high bounce rates
- Learn why people abandon your shopping cart
- See how many visitors are coming from mobile and if they are satisfied
When I was doing keyword research for this post, I was amazed to see that 1 million people search for the key phrase “Google Analytics” every month! There is no question that Google Analytics is a great first step for tracking your return on investment and how you are building your authority.
There are some things you just can’t get with Google Analytics and so I recommend installing other tools like ClickTale or Crazy Egg.
What is ClickTale? Here are just a few of the features and benefits to help illustrate what it can do for you:
ClickTale provides customer experience analytics such as the following:
- Video playback of actual website user sessions
- Heat maps of where customers are focused on your website
- Scroll maps that let you see how far down users are scrolling
- Form analytics that help you diagnose and fix problems with your forms
- Increase conversions by discovering where visitors are bailing out
ClickTale pricing: starting from $99 a month.
Looking for a ClickTale alternative? Crazy Egg is somewhat similar and starts at $108 a year.
If you don’t know what you’re customers are doing then you can’t fix site problems. If you want to build your authority using content marketing, then you absolutely need to know how people are interacting with your thought leadership.
Customer experience analytics tools like ClickTale look deeply at actual user sessions and provide something very different from other website analytic tools.
HubSpot is different than Google Analytics in the sense that it is an all-in-one Internet marketing tool. It also tracks more in terms of actual people than just data points. For example, when a user fills out a form on your website, or downloads an e-book, their contact information is sent into the database. Every time that person comes back to your website, you will then be notified by HubSpot, not only that they have returned but what pages they have visited and what actions they have taken.
When you are looking at the pages that the person visited, you are often also looking at a picture of them that has been imported into the database. This gives it a much different feeling than looking at IP addresses.
Being able to see what actual users are doing on your website allows you to improve your sales process and deepen your understanding of website visits.
HubSpot attribution tracking allows you to see over a long time span what marketing tactics are paying off. Google Analytics only looks at the last few months of data in regard to tracking conversions. HubSpot, on the other hand, can tell you if somebody initially had a first touch with your website because of Facebook, came back fourteen months later from an organic search but then bought today because they clicked a Google PPC ad. That kind of data is critical in determining where to put your marketing budget.
One of the other outstanding features of HubSpot is that it allows you to do marketing automation. If somebody downloads an e-book, an automated workflow system will allow you to send follow up emails, such as every few days, to nurture them down the marketing funnel.
If you are serious about Internet marketing, then you should be getting a lot of leads. If you are getting a lot of leads, you need to follow up with them regularly and that can be impossible to do without automation and a sales database/process.
Some of the key features of HubSpot are:
- Keyword research tools
- Blogging tools
- Social media management
- Search engine optimization
- Content management
- Landing pages
- Email marketing automation
- Attribution tracking
HubSpot is a leader in what is called Inbound Marketing, where the focus is on providing helpful information in order to gain trust as opposed to merely advertising or trying to constantly sell something.
HubSpot Pricing is dependent on how many contacts you have in your database but starting prices – billed annually – are as follows:
- Basic: $200 /month
- Professional $800 /month
- Enterprise: $ 2,400 /month
HubSpot alternatives are tools like Infusionsoft and SharpSpring.
Authorities don’t skimp
There are many other website analytics tools out there but these are three of the best. If you are serious about being a thought leader and tracking the return on your marketing investments, then it’s time to dish out some cash for the tools that are now required.
While you can certainly get by with just Google Analytics, authorities aren’t in the business of just getting by.
What are some other website analytics tools that you find essential?
How to write your first book quickly
Writing your first book doesn’t have to be unbearably hard. I have worked with numerous clients that say they are working on a book, and years later they are still talking about it. It took me well over three years to write my first book because I tried to do too much as a new writer. Having a book published is a powerful marketing tool and feels too good to be put on the back burner. If you follow these steps below, you can have a book in six months or less.
- Narrow down your topic so you don’t overwhelm yourself, or your readers.
- Write to a very specific audience / persona, such as small business owner Bob or financial marketing Mary.
- Write a very detailed table of contents, all the way down to the titles of each page. This will keep you focused. You can always change later, but it’s a great way to start.
- Write each of the pages around keywords that people search for in Google. This will require extra time, but you can outsource this to an SEO company.
- Decide whether you will write it all as prose or using podcasting.
- Commit to the process, even if it is just one hour a month of podcasting and then hiring an editor to clean it up.
- If you are going to write it yourself, then experiment with writing at least 500 words every single day for 31 days (I take Sundays off) to see if you are cut out for it. If you can’t do that even for a short time, then I suggest moving on to podcasting.
- Publish e-books first, which will then make up the chapters in your book.
- Don’t skimp on editing and proofreading, but don’t be overly obsessive either.
- Get feedback as you go, before publishing. This is much easier if you blog your content first.
If you are an experienced writer and can guarantee you will stay committed and get it done by writing prose, then go for it, but for nonfiction – first time business authors – consider one of the following methods.
- Podcasting to generate your content
- Writing blog posts to generate your content
- Podcasting to generate blog posts that generate content for your book
What is podcasting?
Podcasting is just having a conversation that is recorded using a simple audio device. The digital files are then uploaded to the Internet to places like iTunes and/or your blog, where users can subscribe. Doing a series regularly is preferable.
It’s all in your head
As an expert, you likely have been explaining your product or service along with negotiating deals that requires in-depth conversations with customers. Podcasting using the common topics that you discuss in sales calls, and that you have discussed for many years, will allow you to simply speak your mind into your book. The great news is that each 15-minute, 3-question podcast interview produces around 1,500 words of content.
I call this “talk marketing,” and will be producing an e-book on it shortly, using podcasting as the source of content.
Hiring a content marketing agency versus doing it yourself
There are plenty of content marketing agencies, like McDougall Interactive, that can handle the podcasting, editing the audio, and proofreading / posting the content to your blog and book. If you are not going to commit to writing at least 100 blog posts or pages of your book within six months (which is 16 ½ pages a month or at least one every other day), then podcasting on your own, or with an agency, might be ideal for you.
What’s easier for you, writing 4 blog posts a month or doing 1 hour of podcasting by talking about what you do every day? I would love to hear your opinions in the comments below.
Public relations tips and tricks using prleads.com
Good publicity can make your dreams come true, and that is just one of the reasons public relations agencies get 5-10k, or more, per month.
It’s not easy convincing TV stations, newspapers and magazines to quote you, much less feature you. Doing high quality press releases can still be very effective, and can occasionally lead to having a journalist write a story about you. But, in order to receive regular coverage, you have to reach out to journalists.
Back in the old days, good PR experts had a physical Rolodex worth its weight in gold. They built relationships with the media over time, and were able to call on them with story ideas. If you don’t have that kind of a list, you’re going to have to start building it on your own.
Buying lists of journalists’ names can be part of a full-scale PR strategy that can be highly effective, but if you want the low hanging fruit, I recommend using a service like PRleads.com or helpareporter.com. These websites can get you leads directly from journalists with deadlines to meet that are actively looking for experts to quote.
Why PR leads.com and ProfNet
The leads from PRleads.com come from ProfNet. ProfNet is part of the industry giant, PR Newswire, and gathers leads every day from reporters at the New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, Woman’s Day, CBS news and more. The leads share the stories that the journalists are writing, and what type of experts they would like to interview. The topics range from health, finance, women’s and legal issues, to technology, sales and more.
Are you worthy?
One of the key things to remember is that journalists actually want to talk to you, especially when they’re on a deadline. They can’t just quote themselves, and good stories require quotes from people like you. Think you’re not good enough? Think again. One of the most under looked parts of public relations is that sometimes you just have to be the expert that is available, not the expert that is the most knowledgeable.
If a journalist has a tight deadline, and the super high-level expert that they were going to interview bails out on them, then they are going to have to scramble to find someone else. If you contacted them politely and offered ideas of reasonable value, you will likely get the next call.
5 steps to regular success with prleads.com
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Open an account
The first step is to open an account. Here are the options:
- Monthly Service Just $99/month
- Pre-Pay for 6 Months – Save $99
- Pre-Pay One Full Year – Save $238
One of the biggest differences between prleads.com and a service like HARO is the cost. I think there are over 250,000 people using the free version of HARO. Using a paid service like PRleads.com is going to make your life much easier, very quickly.
-
Select categories
Next you need to select the categories that make the most sense for your business. Keep in mind that sometimes you can spin it so that you fit into more categories than you would think.
PR lead Categories
- Arts / Entertainment / Media
- Banking / Personal Finance
- Computers / Telecom
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Education
- General Industry
- Government / Public Issues
- Health / Medicine
- Law / Crime / Justice
- Living
- Management / Workplace
- ProfNet en Español
- EScience
- World Regions
-
Respond to leads, briefly and promptly
When leads come in they look like this:
The good news is that it shouldn’t take more than 15 to 30 minutes to follow up to an inquiry.
Example email
Here is an example of a response to a journalist’s specific questions that landed me in Econtent magazine about e-books.
“Hi Erik, I am John McDougall, author of the award-winning Web Marketing On All Cylinders. My company McDougall interactive, an elite Google partner, has been helping companies like Arrow Electronics, MIT, Phillips Medical and hundreds of others improve their SEO/website marketing since 1995. I have been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe/Herald and in numerous media and would love to help support you in any way I can.
1) For professionals who aren’t writers, how can creating a nonfiction e-book help boost their bottom line and profile?
Creating an e-book allows you to have an irresistible offer or what we call a top of the funnel call to action, so that people who are not ready to fill out your contact form, call you, or buy something from you yet, will be able to connect with you in a more comfortable way initially. The great news is that you can do audio interviews to generate the content easily.
2) Why is publishing a nonfiction e-book recommended for certain pros in the e-content/digital publishing industry?
An e-book can position you as a thought leader and shows that you care enough to help potential customers understand your industry.
3) What are the benefits/advantages? Why is it worthwhile, even if you’re not a skilled writer by trade?
Once you have the name and email address and ideally phone number of someone that downloaded your e-book, you can then market to them on a regular basis. If you can speak well about your business, then you can generate plenty of content through audio interviews. If you don’t want the e-book to be in an interview format, you can have a writer clean it up, so that it does not look like an interview. That is much easier than writing it yourself.”
I actually answered numerous other questions, which sometimes can be a mistake because you want to just pick the things you can respond best to. In this case it worked out well, and I think you get the idea from my first few responses.
I learned directly from Dan Janal, the founder of PRleads, to keep my responses short and do them more frequently. It is the journalist’s job to write the story, not yours, unless you are pitching specifically to write an article yourself. That is a different and more complicated PR tactic than just getting featured through quick quotes.
Another tip is to use a subject line that looks like this:
ProfNet: How Companies Are Using E-Books in Their Content Strategy
It should contain the word ProfNet at the beginning, so they know where it is coming from. Then it should have the title of the topic they have chosen. By using their language, they know to respond, as opposed to you pitching them on something random.
And don’t forget to start with a tiny bio that shows how you are an expert.
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Spin it to get in it
You can also use what Dan Janal calls the magic hammer PR technique:
No matter what the question is, the answer is my topic.”
This only works if you do it in a way that makes sense, so don’t be thinking you can just cram yourself into any situation. However, a bigger mistake is not offering your interesting take on things that might be a little bit outside of your normal comfort zone.
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Wear it on your sleeve
If you really want to be successful with public relations you have to extend it by making people aware of your media coverage. Nobody is going to ask you how often you have been featured in the media, so put it on your homepage, throughout your website, social profiles, as well as framed on the walls of your office.
How much success to expect
The typical conversion rate on a website is 1% to 2%. Out of every 100 people, you only get one or two people taking an action, unless you engage in conversion optimization. With PR leads.com, the good news is that it’s not uncommon at all to get 5% or 10% conversion rates. Often, for every 10 people you reach out to, you can get one interested in interviewing you if you use the PR strategies above. Some top PR experts get well above a 50% success rate.
Just remember to stand out from the crowd, because even with a paid service there are a lot of people pitching to be quoted in the same story.
The benefits of regular publicity can’t be underestimated. As Steve Harrison, a leading PR expert says, “Position yourself to be famous and you can have anything you want!”
What PR strategies or public relations tips and tricks have worked for you?
Check out these related PR podcasts:
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