Focus on the goal

Everybody is glued to the TV watching the World Cup football. But what I want to look at here has nothing to do with kicking a ball around.

What I want it for you to become like a top-scoring footballer.

What do the best footballers do – they score goals. And when it comes to internet marketing and building a business online, your goal is to score leads and sales.

That should be your focus – as much of 80% of your effort and time should be on tasks and actions that bring you in leads and sales.

Sure, sure, sure, it sounds so obvious. But what happens? We get sidetracked.

We are like a footballer who is always training and sits on the bench but does not get into the game.

GET REAL

Be honest with yourself. Are you spending the majority of the time you spend on your business focused on getting leads and sales?

Or are you flipping through Facebook? Taking another training course? Fiddling with your website? Going off on a tangent commenting on IM forums? Or going off down the pub for a beer?

Take a moment to assess just how you are spending your time. It is amazing where all that time goes. It disappears, never to be retrieved.

FOCUS ON YOUR GOAL

The problem with this is so obvious and yet nine times out of ten we fail to get into the game.
This is where 97% of wannabe internet marketers fail. Seriously.

I have been just as guilty as others. But luckily I am now steering my way down the right path where my goal is to make leads and sales.

Focus is so important here.

WHAT TO FOCUS ON

Internet marketers will have their own priorities but what I know from experience is I need to focus on the following tasks and aim to tick them off during the first half of the day.

(Note: Everybody’s circumstances will be different. You may have a full-time job, so can only work on your online business in the evenings or weekends. But the basic advice will be the same.)

What I focus on daily to score leads and sales is the following:

– Getting traffic to my offers (solo ads, social media, my website)
– Writing and sending daily emails – like this one – to my lists of email subscribers
– Tracking my ads and conversions to sales
– Making adjustments to this process when necessary
– Looking at new sources of traffic, including new solo vendors

These are my key tasks to score goals – to bring in leads and make sales.

This sounds super simple but it is easy to get off track.

SECONDARY FOCUS

Of course this focus on leads and sales will be helped by other work to bolster your presence online and engage with your audience.

This secondary focus includes the following:

– Working online with my teams
– Writing and publishing blog posts
– Working on videos
– Interacting on social media

These tasks are important. But they shouldn’t edge out the main tasks involved in getting leads and sales.

I will cover the importance of training and skill-building in another blog post. But while crucial to my overall online business, the training is secondary to running out onto the field and trying to score goals – getting those leads and sales.

If I can offer a word of advice – as somebody who in the past used to spend too much time on non-goal-scoring activities – it would be to zero in daily on goal scoring activities. Do this daily. Do this first.

I know from experience how easy it is to get off track.

So aim to be the player who gets out onto the field and scores goals!