With the start of the New Year, a lot of people create New Year’s Resolutions that they want to achieve.  I think this is a good start but should be taken a step further.  The goals that you set should drive everything that you do.  In fact, if there isn’t an associated goal with the task, I don’t think you should even do the activity.

Be SMART

You might have heard of SMART Goals.  It’s an acronym that stands for

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Don’t create some sort of abstract goal like "Make a lot more money this year".  That is not specific or measurable.  Don’t create a goal like "Create business and sell for $10M this year".  While it could happen, it’s not attainable or realistic. 

Some Goals that I Created

Everything I do is driven by goals.  I have dozens of goals and most of them are just sub-goals to help me achieve higher level goals.  I go through them every Friday to track how I’m doing and possibly add some more goals. 

One of the goals I created was to generate $5,000 in new monthly bookings for our online marketing system in a new industry that we entered.  The $5,000 is just the bookings that we get from online.  While I could just say "Get $5,000 in new monthly bookings from leads generated online by EOY 2008", it’s not very specific for what I need to do.  So here’s how I broke it down.

• $5,000 new monthly bookings via web by July 1, 2008 - The main goal
• 100 new sales - I believe that we should be able to achieve this goal if we get 100 new clients.  It’s just $50 per client, which is way below our normal monthly revenue.  I just wanted to keep it conservative to make the goal attainable.
• 1,000 new leads - To get 100 new sales, I think we need 1,000 new leads.  Again, probably a bit conservative since this means just a 10% sales conversion rate but that’s ok.  If we get 1,000 new leads from online sources, we should easily reach our goal.
• 10,000 new visitors - Our conversion rates for online leads has been running around 10% so I think we need 10,000 new visitors.  This could be from PPC or from organic search rankings.  Since we have about 6 months, this means we need about 55 new visitors per day.  
• Increase rank to top 3 in Google for 3 search phrases - To get 55 new visitors per day, I think we could do this by getting a top 3 ranking for certain keyword phrases in Google.  This was based off of some research I did on the number of searches per day on these keywords.

After this, I have some more goals about how to get the top 3 rankings.  Mostly it’s around getting a lot more links to the website for this program.  However, I also have some goals for getting new PPC visitors as well.  Combined, I should be able to get at least 55 new visitors per day over the 6 month period. 

I have similar goals for the different projects that I work on.  That’s how I am able to determine what I should work on (and when).  If I realize I’m working on something that doesn’t directly help me achieve a goal, I stop working on that immediately.  It’s one of the few ways I can work to be a Lazy Owner.  What Goals do you have for the New Year?