Planning a Strategy to Exceed your Website Goals!
Yesterday, I talked a bit about changing the way we think about developing a website and creating a set of SMART Goals for your website, so we can easily track our efforts and measure our results! Today, I want to look at the various actions we can take to help achieve those goals! Remember, we still aren’t into the building process of our new site yet… we have a few more days of research first! Sorry for these long posts everyone, but one of my October goals, is to cut the size in half! Wish me luck! :-)
Why are Goals So Important?
Breaking it down into the simplest of ways… imagine you needed to go to the store for food. Getting that food… that’s your Goal! Writing a list, getting into your car, driving to the store, getting the shopping cart… those are the methods and action items you chose to do in order to REACH your goal! Just imagine if you got into your car and didn’t know the store you were going to shop at… would you drive around all day, looking at the different stores but never shopping? Of course not…
Why use the SMART Format for Goals?
In yeterday’s post, I also mentioned the acronym SMART, or:
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Specific- Make your goals very specific and have a very definitive target to reach for! My #2 goal yesterday was to post “5″ unique content posts each week. That’s a good example! A bad example, would have been to say… “add new posts every week”! There is no specific target! Once you have a target, its much easier to develop ways to reach it!
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Measurable – How will you know if you have reached that target if you have no way to measure it? I mean… I could “Add new Posts” all week and never have a way to measure if I reached my goal or not! Since my goal of 5 posts is specific, I can look through my actions and count the posts I did put up!
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Attainable – This method goes hand in hand with the next… but when you have an attainable goal, you actually have something to strive for and reach! Whether your goal is “develop a website in 30 days” or ’5 new posts each week”, you will feel a sense of accomplishment when it is reached, which makes you DO MORE when you form your future goals! Being able to say; “I Can do that, because I already have” is powerful!
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Realistic – Why set yourself a goal only Superman can reach? When you set a goal that is unrealistic, you are only setting yourself up for failure and will likely give up well before any of your measurable targets are achieved! Don’t make your goals “easy”, but on the same hand… don’t raise that bar beyond reach! 5 posts a week is very realistic, 50 posts a week is not! Not if you plan on living anyhow!
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Timely- You MUST have a timeframe to reflect on your actions and measure your results! By setting a 5 posts per week goal, I have a defined period of time I MUST get my goal completed by! If I just put… “create 5 posts”… there is no measure of the time I need to have it done by and I could take months to get that part done if I procrastinated! (Which I have been known to do!)
SMART Goals are just the beginning… now you have to micro-define, or lay out the steps and methods you will take to define how you will reach them!
What good is a goal if you don’t know HOW to reach it?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Step 1 – Set your Goals
- Determine & Set your New Website Goals!
- Don’t Let your Ambitions Exceed your Skills!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Excellent post Mark, I like the way you laid out the plan of whats ahead for everybody considering participating.
Personally, I’m very much looking forward to getting started on my integrated WP/BANS site (as you’re already aware!) on October 1st.
I agree totally 100% that goalsetting is important, in fact, I was in car & motorhome sales for a good many years as Sales Manager & can wholeheartedly attest that goalsetting is probably THE most important aspect of any project.
After all – If you don’t know where you’re going to, how do you know how to get there & formulate a route map?
Mark,
Good post, especially the part about getting links, which I have struggled with in the past.
Now, all I need to do is find some more time in my day to do all of this!
One question. I have a twitter account that I have used for my roadbikesource.com blog. It’s much more of a personal blog than affiliate/niche blog and I have 60 or so followers. Should I set up another profile to build the “brand” of my niche site or not?
Mark
Mark,
Excellent, clearly thought-out and mapped course for our success.
My only question is where do all those link building, blog writing, directory submitting, comment leaving monkeys stay? In your house or in your garage?
And don’t tell me about your kids doing all this-LOL!
Jeff
As a semi professional blogger, this is my best way of getting story ideas. Google Alerts.
Set them up and when a new story that has your keywords comes through Google News you have a story idea. Set up a few about generic terms in your niche and ideas will flow right through to your bottom line.
@Tom
Great Idea, I’m setting up a couple right now!
Great Post. It’s really easy to get way too busy with daily tasks and lose track of your goals. Using the SMART system helps to keep you on track.
Hi all,
Google Alerts! Love it. Plugged in my keyword and in a few hours I have aready got many, many good ideas for the future. For Niches’ this site is quick and easy.
A must have!
Thanks again Mark. Your site gives up gold once again!
Mark, something popped in my head the other day, and I thought you might be the ONE person who can address the issue.
To put it plain ‘n simple…………….how the heck to you manage to keep everything organized? Since I ventured into the “BANS world” I have accumulated a TON of information. I save everything that may be of value at some point in the progression of my site and it has become overwhelming!
I know you must have encountered the same thing, especially since you have a multitude of sites now. So, maybe this is something you could speak to sometime.
I’m sure we would all love to hear any suggestions you have that would address this major issue.
@ Tom -
Google alerts are fantastic, I use them myself… and find they are priceless for finding topics!
Another great resource are Google trends… if you run a rss reader on your PC, you can plug the trends feed into it and “Hot Searches” show up in the reader “As they occur”!
In other words… if you see many people trending on your niche, you can write a post about it…
@ Mark 2
I use a separate twitter account & plugin on different blogs. You can see it at richskibum.com The plugin is twitter tools for wp.
I had followers in a couple days. Just make sure you write it down I started creating emails for each profile and forgot half. I found using my original twitter profile on different blogs was kind of irrelevant with posts.
What about submitting articles to article directories?
Isn’t that something we all should be doing too?
re: pdf reports and subscribers
most of my websites are product based, not IM,.some of them are BANS sites too – how can I use pdf reports for these type sites?
As for subscribers, I do not have a list as most of my sites are targeted to the consumer ready to buy. I’ve thought about doing some sort of monthly contest as a way to get people back.
any thoughts? ideas?
thanks!
Hi Mark,
I read your post regularly and think they are great! I have a question about Bans sites. I am new in the scene and read a lot about Bans, wanting to know all the new things for it.
The last days a read about a rumor that Bans is at his end, that google is deindexing a lot of Bans sites so on so on. What do you think about this? I know it isn’t smart to bet all your money on 1 horse and have other ways to make $$ online. Do you have any good tips on that to? Hope to hear from you!
Again nice post and thanks for the mentoring!
Robbert
@ Christine -
Article directories are one way to get a small bit of exposure to your sites, but IMO, they are not something to spend alot of time on. Write one or two articles, or have someone write the articles for you, submit them, and move on to creating content people will want to link to naturally.
Most people write and submit articles JUST for the backlinks… Just like link directories or any other form link credit for the sole purpose of search engines, the benefit of these types of links are greatly minimized.
Re: Product based pdf’s… Im sure your site has a common theme of products, ie: niche. A good pdf would involve the reasons people need them, want them, buy them, review them, how they use them, etc…
@ Robert –
BANS sites are not really the target, thin affiliate sites are. It just so happens that alot of BANS sites are also thin with alot of duplicated content. Heck, many of my own have been in the same boat… even with several pages of unique content on them!
There is no magic formula unfortunately… like, add one paragraph to each page and you are good to go!! I wish it were that easy.
BANS itself is not a dead horse… but I think if you were to create a standalone BANS site, with limited content aside from the rss content, it is a timebomb that will eventually blow. Actually, its a sure bet!
@ Bill G I did decide to use a seperate Twitter profile. I set it up Friday afternoon, started following a number of people that have my niche listed in their profile, and tweeted throughout the weekend as I did activities related to my niche. As of today I have 30 updates and 7 followers. I think it will continue to grow as I do more updates. So far I’m happy with it.
Mark
I had an idea for top 10 lists already….that could relate to making sales.
If I’m using my affordable boots site, I might blog about the “top 10 most purchased brand” of boots on my site. Could give potential buyers a “nudge” over to check out some products!
…just a thought
@ Eric –
Absolutely!! You can also get creative with it…
Top 10 Lists:
Reasons you break your shoelaces!
Reasons to put a Boot up someones butt!
Best Hiking Boots
Best Fishing Boots
Best Hunting Boots
Ways to get your Boots dirty
Ways to get your boots clean
etc etc…
You could go on and on with it…. have fun with them and write them as witty, and linkworthy topics.
Mark
When you all create these top 10 list, etc etc.. where are you going to have them? Are you going to do a category page on the BANS side and use a link on the WP side to link to it?
Thoughts?
Hello all, i just had a glitch so i hope this doesn’t double post!
When you’re doing things like the Top 10 etc etc..
are you doing a content page on the BANS side and putting a link to it on the WP side? Just curious where folks are using these type things..
Thanks!
@ Jeff/Jake -
Honestly, I have completely forgotten about BANS for the purose of content pages.
ALL content is posted through WordPress on my own sites.
Within those posts, I scatter a few links back into my store sections.
Mark
Cool, thanks.. i was just curious how to set up something like that.. if you had like a list of “top 10′s” then i guess the easiest thing to do would be to have a “link” section named “top 10s” and then have all your top 10 lists under that..
i really love WP! Soooo many options!
Thanks!
“Honestly, I have completely forgotten about BANS for the purpose of content pages.
ALL content is posted through WordPress on my own sites.
Within those posts, I scatter a few links back into my store sections.”
so this approach would not make the bans store a thin affiliate site? no content on the bans store is okay as long as there is content on the WP side?
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