12 Weeks to GOAL starts NOW! Are you ready? Do you want to do a massive push on your blog this quarter? Personally, I do. I tried this out last year to be sure it was going to work for me and by golly, it did. I accomplished more in those 12 weeks than I did the entire life of my blog!
This week is about goal setting. I don’t care if you decide to just do your blog or do personal goals. It is all the same concept. Here’s what you will do.
Step #1 - Grab a piece of paper and a pencil (or a blank sheet on your computer… whatever is your best way to brain dump) and start scribbling everything you want. It can be everything from “Get to 1200 twitter followers” to “buy a new house.” Dream and scribble! I suggest you set a timer for 15 – 20 minutes and don’t stop writing until that timer goes off. Then, walk away and find something to do. Come back in about an hour. Set your timer again, read through the things you wrote before, and start scribbling again. When you have completed this process, you should have pages of things you want to do. Some will be very specific and some will be pretty generic. Some will be doable and some will be so far in your dreams that you might think it is never going to happen. LOL!
Step #2 - At this point, you need to go through and decide which things could actually be accomplished in 12 weeks. For example: If you put “Make 1 million dollars” then you need to move it to a different place. That is a LONG TERM goal, not a 12 week one. If you put “Buy a new house” but you haven’t looked, haven’t saved, haven’t had yours appraised, etc then you need to move it to a Long Term goals page and maybe add something like “save 1000 dollars per month for the next 3 months to put towards a down payment on a new house.”
Step #3 - Looking at your new list of fairly attainable 12 weeks goals, go through and start really looking at them. You need to make them more specific. If you just wrote “Increase Facebook Fans”, you need a specific number. Maybe it is “increase Facebook fans by 25%” or it is “Get to 5,000 Facebook Fans”. Whatever it is, clean it up and make it specific.
Step #4 - Go through your new, very specific list of goals (I would guess you have a few dozen) and start breaking them down. You want to choose 4 – yes, FOUR! That you can actually accomplish. They need to be fairly specific. For example, my goals for the last time I did this were:
- Complete A – Z Curriculum Book
- Double Visitors on Deal Blog
- Write 8 Guest Posts on Other Blogs
- Have 50% more Facebook Fans
- I met 3 of the 4 in my 12 weeks! Yes, seriously! Plus, I found that when I met the above goals, it actually made me meet some of the others that I hadn’t even chosen to use! For example, I wanted 50% more Twitter followers and by increasing the guest posts, visitors, and Facebook fans, I also gained lots more twitter followers – yes, enough to mark that off even though it wasn’t one of my four.
Step #5 - Write a blog post and link it up below. That is all we are doing this week. Take your time with it! Next week, we will start breaking down ways to actually reach those goals!
I set my goals for the entire year, already. So I am looking at those goals to help me break down the four things I would like to complete in the first quarter:
GOAL NUMBER ONE: Increase Twitter Followers to 12,250 for @momof3boys3702 and 5,300 for @Deals_3BD
GOAL NUMBER TWO: Increase Newsletter Subscribers to 800
GOAL NUMBER THREE: Add pictures to 10 of the 37 recipe posts missing images
GOAL NUMBER FOUR: Complete A-Z Alphabet Book through K!
Through the next 12 weeks, you will be accountable to everyone that reads this for those 4 goals and I will be giving hints, tips, tricks, and advice to help you reach them.
You can even email me to specifically ask: “Kelli, one of my goals is to XXXXX. What can I do to try to reach it?”
- Remember, you must link back to this post so your readers can play if they want! Link up here:
About Kelli
Great thing, i think I will be back to that site..
I decided to accept your challenge. I tried to link up and I don’t know what I am doing wrong! Here is my post: http://allthingszoo.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-goals-to-focus-on-for-next-12-weeks.html .
I am a little late for the challenge but I really like your ideas. I may have to do my own little challenge. I have so much to learn so a lot of my time needs to spent on educating myself.