What Are You Trying To Achieve?
Most people don’t know what they’re trying to achieve, and that’s what holds them back.
It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about ecommerce stores or getting more girls to like your Instagram photos; you need to have a goal in mind and you need to create an action plan that will get you to your goal.
I’m big on direct marketing principles and using the stuff you learn in direct response copywriting to make systems for everything better.
At the key, root and beginning of any direct response marketing campaign, you have to decide your overall goal. It has to be specific.
“Sell a fitness product.”
Only then can you say to yourself, “Well, how do we get people to that point?”
Most instruction online is woefully vague at just about everything, but it’s here where it falls down.
You might see something like, “12 ways to write amazing content that makes people buy” as an article title.
It starts with “Write the headline” and finishes with “write the rest of the article.”
There’s no frame or context to the problem and you don’t ever learn where content marketing fits into the system.
You start with your goal. Then you work out where people are coming from and what they need to do at any given point. Then you can work out what you do that’ll get them there.
So, “Sell a fitness product” as an overall goal might lead you to the following path:
Facebook Ad for “How To Lose Weight With Keto”>Free Opt-in To a Single Chapter From A Book>A 12 Email Series Overviewing Each Of The Other Chapters With Main Benefit>Sell Book On Keto Dieting
Only after you have that basic framework can you say, “What do I put in the emails?”
Where Most People Fall Down
There are three main places people go wrong:
- They’re vague about what they’re trying to achieve
- Or they’ll won’t have a clear path from A to B
- They pick objectives that don’t get them to their goal
All of these things are symptomatic of the same thing: You don’t know where you’re going and you don’t know how to get there.
Examples of them in order:
- “I want to have a better body” (Bad goal: Could mean anything)
- “I’m going to do keto, start swimming for cardio, power lift for muscle and do dance for flexibility” (Bad Structure: Totally Confused)
- “I want to have a better looking physique, so I’ll power lift for muscle” (Bad process because power-lifters are fat and so the action sets you back in terms of the goal)
The craziest thing is that it’s difficult to see when you’re doing this, but when you see others doing it, it’s obvious.
To fix the first; make sure you have an achievable goal and it needs to be as specific as possible.
To fix the second; take the realistic goal you’ve set and create equally realistic waypoints based on systems that’ll get you there.
Finally, to fix the third: Make sure your actions actually contribute to where you want to go.
If You Get It Right…
If you get the overview and goals right, then everything falls into place much easier.
Take social media for instance. You can do a ton of things that are technically wrong and still gain traction. On the other hand, you can do some really good things and get nowhere.
Most bloggers fall into the second camp. They’ll technically do social media right in that they’ll push their subscribers to blogs or generally amass followers over time, but then they’ll wonder why a) they aren’t making more money or b) what they do when having fifty thousand followers doesn’t change their life.
The reason for that is that there’s no connecting of dots going on.
If you want to make money from social media, then you have to think, “How do I get these pieces of content to turn into money?”
Then you have to chart that course.
Now, if you’ve never done this before, it’s daunting and you have to strain your brain.
But once you’ve worked it out (and you think in terms of social media as getting a person from A to B) then you find the concept ports well to all the other platforms.
The same is true of PPC, SEO and all of that. Ask what you want to achieve and how you get people there.
But you need the clear goal to start with and then you need to work backwards. As with all these things the execution should always be the easiest part.