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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Free Training – Get Paid to Change the World'

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Is it possible to build a business that serves the greater good AND earns good money at the same time? Of course it’s possible. I’ve been doing it for many years, and many of my friends — and readers — are in the same boat. We love the idea of making the world a better place, and we enjoy an abundant lifestyle as well.

Some people feel these goals are at odds with each other. If you feel that way too, go ahead and try the either-or mindset for a few years, and see how it works for you.

But if you’d rather do some good in the world and enjoy the process — if you think it’s possible for service and abundance to co-exist gracefully — you’re certainly not alone.

One of my friends, Ryan Eliason, is launching a new webinar training program specifically for these kinds of people — people who want to be (or who already are) social entrepreneurs.

The best part is that Ryan’s training is FREE.

This training program is for people who care about making a difference in the world — people who care about creating a more compassionate, sustainable, and conscious world through business.

This training isn’t for dreamers who’d rather sit around hoping for things to improve. It’s for people who’d like to be part of a movement to change the nature of business on this planet, to make business about something more than just making lots of money.

As you’ll learn in Ryan’s training program, he expands the definition of the “bottom line” to include 3 parts:

• People – provide value to your customers, and create a delightful social landscape of support
• Planet – make a positive difference in the world
• Profits – generate income to make your work sustainable, and increase your impact over time

Helping heart-centered people earn a great living is Ryan’s speciality. He’s been coaching socially conscious entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Nearly 50,000 people have participated in his past programs.

This new training series starts on February 11th.

If this topic interests you, definitely check it out. Ryan has a reputation for giving away much more in his free programs than others include in their paid programs. You can sign up here:

RSVP Here (only takes 30 seconds)

Here’s what this free training series covers…

• how to build a successful business rooted in profound service
• thinking bigger (how to stop playing so small)
• strategizing for your business
• making the contribution you’re capable of
• 10 real life examples and case studies for you to learn from
• conscious marketing
• client attraction
• generating a mindset for success
• time management skills to dramatically increase your focus and productivity

And again… the training is free.

To make sure you get the most out of his training, Ryan is also offering two extra gifts when you register:

Gift #1 – Ryan’s New Book

Ryan’s new book is coming out on February 5th:

The 10 Best Ways To Get Paid for Changing The World
How To Make A Lucrative Career Out of Profound Service

Register for the training and you’ll get a copy of the book (at no charge) as soon as it’s available.

Gift #2 - Client Attraction and Enrollment Mind Map

Ryan’s Mind Map will help you improve your business strategy, so you focus on the right things while letting go of the time wasters.

Reserve your place in this no-cost training and get your free gifts here:

The 2014 Visionary Entrepreneur Empowerment Training

It will take you only 30 seconds to register, and it might just change your life.

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Steve Recommends

Visionary Empowerment Training – FREE training for socially conscious entrepreneurs

Site Build It! – Use SBI to start your own money-making website

Lefkoe Method – Eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes

PhotoReading – Read books 3 times faster (discount for my readers)

Paraliminals – Condition your mind for positive thinking and success (discount for my readers)

Getting Rich with Ebooks – Use ebooks to create streams of passive income

The Journal – Record your life lessons in a secure private journal

Sedona Method (FREE audios) – Release emotional blocks in a few minutes

Life on Purpose – A step-by-step process to discover your life purpose

If you’ve found Steve’s work helpful, please donate to show your support.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Read related articles:

• Passive Income is Not an Escape
• Is It Fair to Earn Passive Income?
• You Earn Passive Income by Being More Generous
• A New Ultimate You Mindfest
• Never Put Profits First

You may view the latest post at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2014/01/free-training-get-paid-to-change-the-world/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Why Do You Insist on Letting Your Customers Wait In Line?'

Let’s face it, when we’re out shopping we don’t want to be kept waiting right? Whether that is because people are waiting in a long line in order to get to the register or simply because we can’t find any qualified staff to answer our questions.

And ask yourself what you do whenever the wait becomes too long.

You let your feet do the talking and you leave the store right? There are a lot of place selling the shoes you came for so why waste time standing in line.

In an increasingly bigger battle for the consumers, we have come to expect a high service level. Our demands and requirements have increased as we become more experienced buyers.

So why am I raising this issue and why do I accuse you of letting your customers wait in line?

Because we know how we would act if we were forced to wait in line in a physical store. But what do you think will happen when you’re forced to wait in an online store (or just a simple website).

While you might be willing to wait a few minutes in a physical store, you’re willingness to wait online is down to a few seconds.

If you look at the statistics then it’s clear to see that our attention spans have been decreasing over the past decade as we have seen an increase in external stimulation.

The average attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and this is in 2013 now down to 8 seconds!

We see that 17% of online page views last less than 4 seconds (source)!

The thousand pound gorilla Amazon found out that one tenth of a second that they can shave off a page load result in 1% increase in sale. Do you think page load speed is important to them?

According to Mozilla the makers for Firefox:

We found that a 1 second increase in page load time decreases conversions by 2.7%! Assuming our model is correctly specified, we have massive room from improvement and can easily increase our conversion rate by 5 – 10%.

Now if you’re selling something online whether that is luxury cruises, vibrators or custom made Santa Claus beards the business case becomes obvious.

However if you “just” run a non-profit blog you might not think it’s that relevant, because what’s a few visitors, right?

Wrong. It’s certainly not news that Google has been incorporating page load speed as part of their search algorithm. This means that you will become penalized if you have a slow loading website.

So you will receive less traffic to your website if it loads slowly!

And let’s face it. If you have some kind of online property, you want people looking at it.

Now if you’re a big shot company and have your own web team, they will probably be somewhat on top of this (although in experience the load speed is often something that is optimized quite late in the process when everything else has been taken care of).

But what happens if you’re just a small business without an army of trusted IT geeks living in your office basement?

The problem is that you as a business owner most of the time aren’t really aware of this, and if the website is loading – you’re not on the line with your “web guy” who’s charging you $50+ an hour for listening to your screaming.

The fact is that optimizing load speed is a rather technical task that you as a business owner really shouldn’t have to worry about. So my goal with this blog post is on one side to make you aware of this fact, but also show you what I’ve done about optimizing this blog.

Knowing Your Baseline

But before you can optimize anything you need to know how long your current load speed is. I like to use Pingdom for this. They have servers around the world you can instruct to call your website tracking how much time they spent.

Now to begin with I was quite happy with my load speed, but as I began to add functionality to my website running WordPress using plugins, I could see that more and more files need to be loaded and my load times started to increase.

First Step is to Cache the Shit Out of Your Website

You are probably doing this already, but it needs to be said as it is really the first thing to do.

If you’re not running a highly dynamic site such as a forum, you need to install a caching plugin (I’m writing plugin here because I kind of assume that you’re using WordPress – if you’re not doing so, you probably should ;)).

I’ve been using W3 Total Cache for a long time and if you want to get into some really cool performance optimization this is what I recommend.

Now I won’t go too much into the configuration of this plugin, there are plenty of guides online for this. Just know that you need to enable Page Caching that is effectively saving static versions of your site content. This way WordPress won’t need to generate the content with each visit.

All this was in place on my blog. Heck I had even added a Content Delivery Network (I’m using Amazon Cloudfront) meaning that all my static files (images and such) was distributed to servers all over the world so a person from India wouldn’t need to get images from a US based server but would – automatically I might add – just get them from a server in India.

I had also started using “minify” which gathers all JavaScript and style sheet files in fewer files. Don’t worry you don’t need to know what this is, just know that your website consists of a ton of files and some of them can be combined into fewer files allowing the visitor’s browser to make fewer requests and in the end speeding up the whole experience.

Reading the Data

But what I saw from the broken down Pingdom report was that I had an increasingly number of requests not being served from cache.

One example being my “pop up window” plugin. Now while most visitors hate popups, it’s one of the best ways to get people to sign up for your newsletter. And sorry – I really want to add you to my newsletter (and if you’re reading this, why don’t sign up for it in the box to the right :)).

And while many of these request was running in the background it added to the load of my website.

So I started getting rid of those plugins. So you might enjoy that there are no longer any popups (probably depends on when you’re reading this, I could add one in the future :)) however I feel a bit sad about letting this go.

But the Numbers Lie

Now I was getting requests that would load in less than 2 seconds. Great – now we’re talking.

But don’t trust these numbers. They are like pissing in your pants and not noticing it. To begin with it’s warm and then…. it keeps being warm :).

Instead I would invite you to sign up as a user on Pingdom. It’s free for a single website.

This gives you some VERY interesting information.

For instance I have now gotten the “load time” down to less than one second (average 920ms last 30 days)

But this is only that half story. Remember pissing your pants?

This is the time that another computer takes to call your website. No – it’s not humans sitting with small stopwatches.

Inside your Pingdom account you also have access to something call RUM. You might like them already but it’s not hard liquor (sorry). Instead it stands for Real-time User Monitoring. And this measure how long it takes for the website to load for real website users.

And here my average (or rather my median) is 3.8 second. Quite different from the “less than one second” right?

So if you have site loading with a nice 2-3 seconds on pingdom (or other tools) you probably think you’re in the clear, but until you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you’re really letting them wait in line and you don’t even know that you’re losing sales or Google ranking!

(As bonus information I can tell you that Pingdom thinks you’re in the clear if your lower than 4 seconds in the RUM measurement – however to me there’s room for improvement).

So how fast is your website really loading?

Image by Lee Shaver

You may view the latest post at http://retiremyass.com/customers-wait-in-line/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'How to Setup a Professional Membership Site'

Several years ago I wrote an ebook about how you could create your very own professional membership site for less than $200.

It was a detailed look into the different technical components that make up a membership site. I offered this ebook to everyone who signed up for my newsletter list so if you’re a long time reader, you might still have that ebook sitting somewhere on your hard-drive.

As the material in the ebook started to become a bit dated I didn’t really update the information, and while 95% of was still spot on, I ended up replacing it with my new ebook Kick Ass and Follow Your Passion.

But I don’t think you should be cheated from the information about how to create a professional looking membership site on a budget.

I have used this method to create several membership sites in the past, including my private mastermind program The Lifestyle Business Mastermind.

But What is a Membership Site

A membership site is simply a website with some kind of information that requires a membership in order to gain access.

Some membership sites are free while others are paid. Or this model can co-exist in a scenario where a user can sign up for a free plan and later on upgrading to a paid plan.

Now with this simple definition you could call Facebook a membership site. And you would be right to do so. But in this post I will focus on describing membership sites where you as an expert releases some content in one or more formats and you are selling access to this information.

Content in the membership site can come in many forms such as:

• Text
• Audio
• Video
• Downloadable files
• Exercises and tests
• Morse code…

Or it could be some kind of combination of the above. One doesn’t rule out the other.

In my own membership site video makes up the majority of the content. I have recorded hours and hours of video with me being in front of the camera, drawing on a whiteboard.

However you can also download professionally design WordPress themes as one of the bonuses of the program, and I’m using after module exercises in order to help you reflect of the content you just went through.

All the content is structured into modules creating a clear path through the training material.

Next we will look at the major components of a membership site.

The Components of a Membership Sites

There are two main routes you can go.

1. Hosted
2. Self-hosted

If you go the hosted route then there is something like Kajabi.com. While I’ve briefly played around with Kajabi, I’ve never done any complete websites on their platform.

The pros are that you don’t have to think about hosting the platform yourself, so there is less geeky stuff to consider. The cons are that it’s fairly expensive as you pay monthly and you still need both a shopping cart solution and a payment gateway (and merchant account unless using PayPal). But more on this later.

If you’re going the self-hosted way I would recommend that you use WordPress as your “core platform” because there are a number of great membership site plugins that you can use to turn your WordPress installation into an awesome membership platform.

So this article assumes that you will self host your membership site and that we’re on the WordPress platform. I won’t get much into WordPress as this is out of scope for this article, but if you don’t know what it is, I recommend that you start on reading a bit up on this before proceeding and I will go into the reasons for using this as a base later on.

But what are the major components of a membership site. I’ve listed them below and will then proceed to go into more details.

• Hosting
• Platform
• Membership Plugin
• Community
• Theme/design
• Autoresponder
• Shopping Cart/System
• Payment Gateway and Merchant Account

Hosting

The term “self-hosted” kind of gave this away. You need some kind of web-hosting, a home for your membership site.

And while it might sound easy to simply go out and buy one of the cheap hosting solutions on the market, this part of the overall picture is something that I have had the most difficulty.

For the past couple of years I’ve been through 4 different web hosting companies and 5 different hosting plans. The problem has been that my sites used too many resources on the server main because I’ve been running three membership sites and this blog on that account. And while I haven’t had that much traffic to my membership sites (and this blog is using caching and should be able to take quite a load of visitors) the plugin that I’ve been using for the membership sites and that I will be discussing briefly, have been a resource hog.

So now I’m on a dedicated server from iWeb.com and so far the sites have been running smoothly.

You might get away with some cheaper shared hosting however I wouldn’t want to run more than one membership site per hosting account, and be ready to perhaps move you site if you start to get more than a few active members.

So while I cannot tell you exactly what you should do, as this all depends on how much money you’re willing to spend starting up, I can say that you shouldn’t try to stick several membership sites on a standard shared hosts.

I have also considered hosted WordPress plans like wp engine but I know people who are hosting there membership sites (using the plugin I will discuss in a moment) that aren’t quite satisfied with the performance.

So as you can see it also has something to do with the membership plugin I recommend. If you choose another plugin, then you might be able reduce your hosting expenses.

Now while a web server is really good for websites, they are not really suitable to serving large files. And if you are using video, you will be having large files.

I’m hosing all my video files on Amazon S3. It’s a little technical but this is pretty much the best option there is for hosting big files cheap and reliable (not to say lightning fast).

Platform

As I said before I won’t really go much into what WordPress is, but I’m pretty much using it for all sites that own and run. Besides the system itself, one of the forces is also the whole ecosystem around it. The sheer number of plugins (small pieces of code that expand the core functionality of WordPress) that exists is staggering and I don’t know any other system on the planet that has so many different plugins to turn your website into a membership site.

Also it’s super easy to use for the non-techie with a “one click” install option on most hosts.

One thing that I have recently starting doing is to create two different WordPress installations per website.

1. http://domain.com – A “normal” site that has all the sales material and signup information, and
2. http://members.domain.com – The actual membership portal

The reason for this is that in order to have your site load quickly, you need “caching”.

Caching is the technique where the server saves the output of a page and then just shows this “cached version” of the page to the visitor. This way it does not need to contact the database and spend time on generating the page again. This results in much faster load times and better experience for your visitors.

The problem is that you only want to cache your public pages, not any membership site pages. In the past I spend quite some time making sure that only the right pages were being cached and that I didn’t cache the membership pages and this was quite literally a pain in the ass.

By changing this you are getting the best of two worlds and even if you membership site goes down (or your hosting company tells you that you’re spending to many resources, something that I’ve experienced a few times), you could continue your “sales site” without any issues.

If you’re wondering what caching plugin I recommend, then I can fairly easy say that I love W3 Total Cache. While it does everything caching related, it’s also a beast to configure and if you want something simpler WP Super Cache will also work just fine.

Membership Plugin

There are a ton of different membership plugins available for WordPress and here you might go out and explore a little for yourself. However, I’ve tried quite a few plugins and I’ve researched many more and the one I recommend is Wishlist Member.

It may seem a bit odd because up until now the only thing I’ve mentioned about this plugin is that it’s requiring a lot of resources of the web hosting server. So why not just choose one of the many other plugins available?

Because Wishlist Member does pretty much everything you need in a user friendly way. Whenever I had to change host because my sites were using too many resources, I always considered just using another membership plugin, but again and again I’ve gone back to Wishlist Member (WLM).

Most of the newer membership plugins only have support for PayPal payments which might suit you well in the beginning. WLM has integration to many different payment providers as well as integration to the most used autoresponders.

And did I mention that it’s really easy to setup and use?

The only thing I’m really missing and that I need on my own membership sites, is the option to “drip content”. Meaning that a user gets gradually access to the content week for week.

The standard way of doing this in Wishlist Member is by using multiple membership levels, however this is a administration nightmare.

So I’ve created my own Wishlist Member Content Dripping plugin. If you need this as well, shoot me an email and I will send it to you for free.

Community

While you don’t really need a community, this is a great way to add value to your membership site and keep your members coming back.

There are several options here. In the past I used a WordPress forum plugin (there are several to choose from and I think I’ve tried them all) but I must admit that I’m more and more considering simply just creating a private Facebook Group. The only down side to this is that you manually have to manage access to it (since your membership plugin can’t handle this for you).

If you want to go the forum way, I recommend that you install the bbPress forum as a WordPress plugin (not standalone version). It’s developed by the same company that is also developing WordPress so the integration really works. Also it’s dead easy to configure. Most of the other forum plugins want’s to be able to do everything, but this also results in a ton of different configuration options and settings that you need to go through.

Theme/Design

You want your membership site to look awesome, but the WordPress themes you can buy online are only focused on making a normal website look good.

Now while your membership site could just look like a website with post/articles that just requires the user to login first, I prefer to have a membership portal.

Since I tend to have two different installations of WordPress you can also use two different designs or themes.

I really liked using the first version of OptimizePress for the membership pages. They look really gorgeous

However OptimizePress version 1 is no longer for sale so you could probably use OptimizePress 2. Just notice that in my personal opinion OptimizePress 2 is really difficult to work with.

Don’t get me wrong you can create some stunning pages, however editing your pages and setting them up is taken ages because you’re dealing with a slow visual designer.

However if you invest the time, you will be able to create some stunning membership sites (OP2 also comes with templates for membership sites, although they typically require some tuning before you can use it).

For now I’m still using OptimizePress 1 for my membership sites but slowly migrating some sales and squeezepages to OptimizePress 2.

Autoresponder

You need to be able to send out emails to both leads but also members of your membership site on regular basis.

If you plan on having dripping content like I do, you most likely want to send your members a weekly email telling them that some new content is now available.

As we will see in a moment, some shopping cart systems also come with autoresponders built in, however I’m usually recommending using either AWeber or Mailchimp. I’m currently on mailchimp but that is because Aweber had some issues with some special Danish characters. But if you’re in the US Aweber is often easier to use than Mailchimp (although Mailchimp is good at adding new features all the time).

Shopping Cart/System

If you just want to get start selling most membership plugins integrate directly with PayPal. This means that with a membership plugin like Wishlist Member and a PayPal account you can start taking money.

However while it might be ok to start your business on PayPal, it’s quite expensive (typically around 4% fees) and it might not even be relevant in your scenario.

One problem I’ve had with PayPal is that their receipts for recurring payments isn’t showing sales tax. And this is a requirement for doing business here in Denmark.

Also I wanted something a bit more “professional” looking. At least here in Denmark people don’t like sites that only takes PayPal and it would hurt my conversion in countries outside the US.

So I opted for the full monty meaning

1. Shopping system
2. Payment gateway (for taking credit card information)
3. Merchant account (for getting the money to my bank account).

I will discuss the last two later.

To begin with I signed up for 1ShoppingCart because this is really well integrated with Wishlist Member and most of my US friends recommended it (if I didn’t want pay for the more expensive InfusionSoft.

That turned out to be an expensive experience because it proved really hard to get a payment gateway in Europe to play together with it.

So right now I’m using a really nice solution called Simplero. It does pretty much the same thing as 1ShoppingCart however it looks much better and new features are being rolled out much faster than the old 1ShoppingCart system.

The price of Simplero is pretty much the same as 1ShoppingCart and it also includes both autoresponder as well as affiliate management.

If you want a cheaper setup, I’m considering the following setup (however I haven’t tried it myself yet).

Installing WooCommerce (a free shopping cart system) and then buying the $50 Wishlist Member Integration plugin

Just notice that you need another plugin if you want to do recurring payments with WooCommerce.

While this might be a cheaper solution because you don’t need to pay monthly payments, there are also more technical moving parts that you need to manage yourself.

Payment Gateway and Merchant Account

Now if you’re using PayPal, then you can skip this.

PayPal acts as both payment gateway and merchant account.

But if you want to go full monty like I’ve done, you can get your own payment gateway and merchant account.

There are several but you need to find one that your shopping cart/system supports.

Wishlist Member also supports integrations to a long list of payment gateways meaning that you can skip getting a shopping cart/system (although you won’t get other benefits like affiliate management and product specific autoreponders and better payment management if you do).

Since I cannot get a US based payment gateway, I can’t really tell you what to choose, but I can say that a lot of people are using Authorize.net and integrates well with both Wishlist Member and most shopping carts.

In Europe you can look at ePay.eu. They do not have direct integration with Wishlist Member so here you need a shopping cart that supports them.

The “One” Strategy

Now there are several ways of creating a membership site, this is just one of them. However what I can tell you is that this combination is tried and tested in production!

This means that you know that it will all play together nicely and you can have an awesome professionally looking membership site up and running super fast.

If you don’t want to do all this by yourself, you’re of course welcome to create a job on a site like Elance.com and have someone do it all for you. You can even point the provider you choose to this article so they know what to setup.

To end this of please notice that some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means that if you end up buying one or more of the products after clicking the link, I might get a small commission.

So, have you build or are you considering building a membership site?

You may view the latest post at http://retiremyass.com/setup-professional-membership-site/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Business Makeover 2014'

I am super excited today.

Not only did my family and I recently escape the cold and wet Denmark and arrived in our house in Hua Hin, Thailand, “plumber’s wife turned business makeover expert” Ellen Rohr is also releasing an in depth interview she did with me a while back.

Actually my interview is really just one out of 21 rocking interviews with super awesome people in the Business Makeover 2014.

My interview will go live on the 21′st of January (2014 that is) and you can grab it right here.

Let me just say that I’m excited to a part of this and humbled to be among such inspiring authorities.

Below is a few of the inspiring people who’s part of the Business Makeover 2014. All the interviews are free and you can access them right here.

It’s actually a funny story how I met Ellen.

I’m member of the non-profit organization JCI and we needed a US speaker for an event about entrepreneurship I helped organize.

So I contacted Clint Arthur whom I met at the Brendon Burchard’s Expert Academy a couple of years ago.

Clint helps people get on TV so he has an interesting network of inspiring people.

He eventually hooked me up with Ellen who would love to come and visit Denmark. As the plumber’s wife she is, she showed a great interest in our “central heating system” that is how a great deal of Danish households get their heat and hot water.

Something I’ve never even thought of but just taken for granted. Apparently this thing was – according to Ellen – one of the most interesting aspects of Denmark.

Most people just come here and visit the small mermaid or drink good Danish beer :).

While Ellen didn’t get to visit a heating plant (and I’m sorry Ellen, we will do this on your next visit :)) she did deliver a great speech at our event.

So when Ellen was organizing the Business Makeover 2014 event she thought of me. A strange line of events and places including Experts Academy, a non-profit organization, Clint Arthur, central heating and Ellen Rohr.

I guess that this is the exact science called networking don’t you think :)?

But back to my interview with Ellen.

In it I will share my model for building a lifestyle business in 2014 and what you can do to get more time and freedom in your life.

One of the things that means freedom to me is to be able to spend a few months with my family in Thailand each year – another is being able to only spend my time on the projects that I’m truly passionate about.

It’s probably something completely different to you.

Whether that is racing on motorcycles through Europe with a friend, taking your family out sailing around the world, or simply just you having more time for your obscure hobby of collecting working shoes from Canadian carpenters.

But besides the actual focus on lifestyle business modelling and building we also have a blast as Ellen is always super energetic and I’m always almost saying something provocative (pardon my manners :)).

If you want to get access to all the 21 interviews all you have to do is to go to http://businessmakeover2014.com and enter your email address. Each day a new fantastic interview will be released.

If you missed some, you can still get access to the past interviews but in order to not miss anymore you should hurry over to the site and signup.

In the mean time I’ll relax a bit. I’m currently writing this next to the pool and planning on getting some chicken with cashew nuts for lunch. One of the big reasons why I love Thailand is because of the food. It tastes fantastic and is dead cheap (the last part is also something that suits me rather well as the cheap guy that I am ;)).

If you follow my facebook page I’ll probably post some photos from our place here in Thailand – heck you might even see a kid picture or two (isn’t that what Facebook is for anyway? :)).

And if you’re in the Hua Hin area (2.5 hour drive from Bangkok) in the January/February period, don’t hesitate to contact me. I would be happy to buy you a beer or two.

After you’ve listened to the interview please let me know what you thought. Either in the comments here or on Facebook. And hope to see you in Thailand…

You may view the latest post at http://retiremyass.com/business-makeover-2014/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Your Business Online has posted a new item, 'Goal Tracking Framework for Running and Growing Your Business'

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src="http://dx80j0zj5pg2e.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/goal-setting-framework-300x186.jpg" alt="Goal Settings Framework" width="300" height="186" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-2999" />It’s interesting how a change of year implies that we all need to go out and make plans for the New Year. I’m no special case and in spite of the fact that we may as well all be doing arrangements and setting up objectives for the duration of the year, we have a tendency to concentrate on them at whatever point our schedule increases the year.

Traditionally I’ve been rather bad at setting up long term goals for this blog. So this year I thought I would try to do things a bit different. I would create a plan.

This post is for you if you’re bad at creating plans and goals or simply want a little inspiration on structuring and following up on your business goals.

The small framework that I present in this post is something I’ve used to categorize and prioritize my own goals for this year. The goal of the framework is to cover different aspects og goal setting around your business, while mainly focusing on recurring actions that needs to be taken over time such continues marketing or blogging efforts.

Last in the post I will also share a free tool that I’m using to follow up on my own goals.

But first let me briefly discuss why I think it’s important that you track and follow up on your goals.

Following up on your goals

What you don’t measure/track doesn’t get done. It’s that simple.

That’s why that if you wanted to lose weight, the first two things you should do would be to a) get a scale for weighing yourself and b) create a simple spreadsheet where you could track your daily weight.

By consistently adding a focus to your goal but also being able to see how even small results tie into the overall goal, is a route to success much more relevant than a specific raw food recipes in the case of weight loss.

Don’t know how we suddenly got into weight loss src="http://dx80j0zj5pg2e.cloudfront.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif" alt=";)" class="wp-smiley" /> if anything I should probably gain a little muscle mass.

By wanting to track your results, you also make sure that create goals that are actually measurable. It is hard to track a goal stating “I want to be a better father“, but I could create a goal saying “Number of times I took my daughter to the cinema“.

By only stating I want to become a better father, I might express a wish, but it’s hardly something that will change my behaviour unless I follow it up with an action.

Creating the right kind of goals

Now if you’ve ever worked with setting goals before chances are that you’ve heard about “ href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria" >SMART goals“.

Your goals should really live up to the following criteria:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

As you can see I focus mainly on making it measurable. While making smart goals are great, I don’t want to bog you down with too much theory. Just focus on the two first criteria and make them specific and measurable. It’s also a good idea to have a deadline on the goal (that’s the “time-bound”) for now I’m assuming that this is something that you will be working on over a longer period (since we’re focused on business goals here).

So the goals we’re working with here are those that has actions reoccurring over time, since they are part of running and growing your business.

We are not focused on one-off goals like “create a website”. This is typically more about breaking down the project in small tasks and then executing them.

We want some very feasible recurring goals like “Write X of words on my new book in Y period“.

But notice that the X and Y may change.

Since it’s easy to create a really ambitious goal and say that you want 50000 words written in two weeks (while this is certainly doable, it’s probably not something that I or most people will ever do), but it’s also easy to feel it as a failure if you don’t succeed in this.

Getting into the habit

So in the example of writing on your new book, you should rather focus on getting you into the habit of writing first. If you get a habit of writing each day, it’s easier to scale that up, rather than starting out by writing 5000 words per day for three days and then quitting.

Therefore your first goal could be “Number of words written today“. And then add a monthly goal of 5000 words in your first month but gradually incrementing the goal to 20000 words per month (or even tracking this per week).

If you can introduce the activity leading to goal completion as a habit, there is a higher chance that you will reach your goal.

Therefore focus on getting the habit before you focus on completing the goal itself.

Or using other words… /> Your first goal should getting the habit of working on completing your real goal src="http://dx80j0zj5pg2e.cloudfront.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley" />

So let’s look at the Framework

Now framework sounds like a big thing, polished chrome and everything, but it’s more about how you find and structure your goals to keep focus on the most important aspects in your business.

Step 1

First up I want you to write the following goal categories on a piece of paper:

• Business Development
• Marketing
• Selling
• Customer Support

Now the first three categories are very relevant to look at, the fourth one “Customer Support” is more dictated by your customers’ actions. So it’s a bit harder to proactive in this regard, but I’ve kept it there if you come up with any repeating actions that you could do.

Step 2

Next we can expand on each category by adding subcategories. Don’t worry, we’ll keep it in only two levels.

Your categories might look a bit different but I wanted to show a small part of how mine is structured (mainly the goals for this blog). Notice that while I don’t make any money on blog (I only got a few affiliate links here and there and certainly not enough to ever sustain me) I do regard it as “the business” in this example.

• Business Development
  • Blogging own blog
  • Guest blogging
• Marketing
  • Social media
  • Newsletter list
• Selling
  • …

Step 3

Now we come to actually adding the goals to each subcategory.

For instance, I really want to be much more consistent with my blogging effort, so one of my goals is to “Write X words for my blog” per month (a number that will be increasing).

I actually also have a “Schedule X number of posts on my blog” per month. It might be unnecessary with the other goal, but it doesn’t need much tracking so for now it’s there as well.

Under social media I have goals like “Schedule X tweets” per month.

Notice that I use the word “schedule” instead of just “tweeting”.

Instead of doing a tweet here and a tweet there, I’m going to “batch” the creating of my tweets to optimize the time and effort I have to spend on it. So to begin with I might revisit this goal every week

Step 4

Turn it in to a spreadsheet where you can track your progress either daily or weekly whatever you feel like. I’m tracking daily but I’m also cheating and using a free tool that makes it easier to manage.

More on this last in the post…

Following up

Now that you’ve created your goals, it’s of course also important to actually follow-up on them.

I don’t have a messy desktop on my MacBook Pro, actually I only have a few links there, but the shortcut to my goals are right there so I can find it. I recommend that you do something similar. If you don’t see yourself clicking on that link at least once per day, you could go a step further and make the link open automatically each time you start or log on your computer. How to do this is however a bit out of scope for this post, but I’m sure you find the instructions to do this in no time.

Now when you begin your day you can quickly look down through the list of goals and decide what goals you will be working on that day.

Some might need you to do a little each day, but if you focus on batching you might choose to only focus on a given goal on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. /> Heck you can even make small markers indicating when your goals should be inspected.

Free tool for tracking your goals

And now the free tool I use myself and that I promised in the beginning of the post.

There are ton of different goal tracking tools out there, and even more if you count the task base “to-do” applications as well.

I needed something where I could track progress and preferable free. I actually signed up for 3 or 4 other online applications (nothing to download) before choosing this one.

It’s easy to use and the free plan is well…. free src="http://dx80j0zj5pg2e.cloudfront.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley" /> (but has all the features you need to track your goals): /> href="http://42goals.com/" >http://42goals.com/

Are you using any tools for tracking your goals?

You may view the latest post at http://retiremyass.com/goal-tracking-framework/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Your Business Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com