It’s Friday and I don’t know about you, but this is when I usually look back and wonder what I achieved during the week. I check my nice little Action Plan and see what I managed to tick off each day.

While this is good and I know I’m making progress, sometimes the little things can get in the way of the big picture. So today I spent some time reanalysing my long term goals and planning for the future.

I think it’s important for all small business owners to do this, especially when it comes to your website. The website can often slip down the list of priorities as other ‘more urgent’ things spring up. My aim is to stop you mistreating your website like this and give it the attention it deserves.

Think of me as your significant other that harasses you because you just forgot our anniversary…again! Though it’s up to you whether you imagine me throwing plates at your head…

Why

Taking a step back and deciding where you want to take your website is an important first step in the improvement process. Without an idea of where you want to go, you’ll never reach it. Quite frankly, if you don’t know how important planning is we’re probably wasting our time here.

So let’s get to the real stuff.

How

Setting long term goals for your website isn’t the trickiest thing in the world. You just decide what you want to achieve with it in the future. Bear in mind, the more you want to achieve, the more effort you’ll have to put in. Which is really where I want your mind to be. Right now, your website is not living up to it’s potential.

When I plan I look at two areas: Objectives and Goals. Everyone seems to have a different method for planning, but here’s mine. I like to keep it nice and simple to ensure I’m not planning for the sake of planning.

First you come up with your objectives. These are in an unquantifiable form like make more sales, increase website traffic, etc.

Then I take those objectives and work out how they can be made into measurable goals. So in a years time I want to have x amount of sales and x amount of unique visitors a day.

So now I have my objectives and goals for the coming year. The next step is to fill in the steps it’ll take to get there. So I do my 6 month, 3 month, and 1 month goals.

The final step is to assign actions I will take to reach these goals. Again, I work back from a year and work out what I need to do, right back to the coming month. So now I have a list of the most important actions I will take each month.

I always plan more accurately in the short term and am a bit more vague in the long term. Those months will fill themselves in at the end of the month when I go through and plan out the next months actions in more detail.

The result is a Action Plan for the next month with the most important actions listed in priority. I realise these are the actions that will grow my business so they should always get the focus before the daily problems that tend to appear.

Make sure you’re getting closer to achieving your biggest priorities every day, before getting sidetracked with the latest emails or surfing the web. This is the way to growing a successful website and business.

Homework

Guess! Take some quiet time over the weekend and go through this planning process for the next year. Then on Monday, get started on your biggest priority of the month.

    

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Continuous Improvement, Growth, Mindset, Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.