Goal Girl’s Blog

The First Installment of Five: Time-honored Tips to Boost Your Goal Chasing Success.

Stop swimming against the tide! Yes, there are significant advantages to swimming against the tide. Being the one fish swimming left when the rest of the school is swimming right can get you noticed. Being the best at doing something a little different and/or more difficult than the rest of the herd can result in great rewards. For an excellent treatment of this, read Seth Godin’s “The Dip”.

In some situations though, finding a school of fish going the direction you want to go can also reap benefits. This is especially true at the beginning of your quest when you are in more of a student mode than a teaching mode. Associating yourself somehow with some big fish who’re going where you are going (or have already been there) and know the way can greatly flatten the learning curve. Sometimes the collective energy of a group of like-minded-people can contribute to your own passion (just be careful that you are only borrowing their passion and knowledge, don’t let the herd make decisions for you).

How do you find a “big fish”? First of all, go where they go. Twitter is a great place for this. Do a Twitter search to find out who is talking about your topic of interest. Then search on that person to see who is talking about them. If someone is being retweeted or discussed on a frequent basis, then a lot of folks are finding value in what they are saying. Unfortunately, not everyone you admire in the real world has mastered Twitter. I’ve had to unfollow a couple of ‘real world’ gurus whose books and lectures I loved, because they used bots to spam Twitter and provided nothing of value to me. Not naming names. If you happen to follow them, you’ll see for yourself!

You can also search blogs for people who have authority in your area of interest. Google’s Blog search or the Do-Follow Blog Directory are good places to start. If a blog really addresses topics pertinent to your goal, join the discussion. Make comments that add value. Ask questions.

Often finding someone knowledgeable in your area will also lead you to a group of like-minded people. I liked what Jodie Petals had to say about making Squidoo lenses, so I read more of her lenses and started following her on Twitter. That lead me to Jennifer Ledbetter, aka “PotPieGirl’s” One Week Marketing, a content marketing strategy. Eventually this lead me to join Wealthy Affiliate, which is a great place to pick the brains of good folks like Travis Sagos, Jennifer and Jodie.

Yes, road-blocks, speed bumps and long, long uphill climbs will come. Expect them. Prepare for them. How? When you set a goal, set your action plan. Then Act, act, act. Action plan implies action. You can’t steer a stationary vehicle.

I’m frustrated and discouraged with the affiliate marketing efforts this past week, hence the motivation for this post. Part of this is the lack of results thus far (in terms of money).  I had a great day last Wednesday, got a lot of stuff done on a new marketing campaign, but then… my daughter got sick, and when a four year old gets sick, they need attention, coddling, and occassionally, cleaning up.. they need all your discretionary time.   After a couple of days, K was feeling much better, but now I was sick, my mother was sick and my younger brother was also sick.   At one point my eyes were swollen shut from the cold and I could hardly read anything.

And also the frustration of marketing over a month without a single sale.    And not much traffic here either.  Even though I don’t expect to make money from this blog any time soon, saving my focus for One Week Marketing, I would like to see a little traffic…

Am I in “The Dip”?  Probably not yet… pretty early for that I think.    How do I deal with this frustration?  I act.  I push to finish my checklists for the campaign I started last week.  I write, write, write.  I try not to get to distracted by hundreds of things, though I do reserve an hour a day to read marketing papers, emails, ebooks, blogs, etcetera.   That said, I didn’t get a lot done today because K’s pre-Kindergarten was closed due to the ice storms.

Because my work-day job is pretty demanding, I am probably moving through the learning curve a bit slower than many would.  But I’m moving, grin.   Even unproductive campaigns are not a waste of time, because I learn from each one.

Motivation poster seen lately: “Optimism : Obstacles are just stepping stones to success.”

Do you cringe, run, hide when things get difficult? ‘Things’ getting difficult just might be an indication that you’re on the right path, if only you’d keep on keeping on! Read on…

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s book The Dip, and this short little book has changed my perspective.

What happens at around mile 20 of a 26 mile race (marathon)? Many non-elite runners experience what is called “The Wall”. Those who prepare for it either don’t experience the wall, or are able to push through it. “The Wall” is partly a physical barrier, i.e. glycogen stores are low, the aches and pains accumulated over the course of the race so far are talking your mind out of finishing. The Wall is largely mental though. At meeting the wall, you must decide: are the rewards of finishing the marathon greater than the cost of continuing?

How does the wall gives an advantage to the runners who can surpass it? It weeds out the competition, creating scarcity… in a market economy this is a good thing if you are doing the marketing. The bigger the dip you’ve pushed through, the greater your chances of being “The Best in the World.” There are incredible marketing advantages to being number one versus any other number. Market share may be linear from number two down, but the share number one achieves breaks that curve.

In The Dip, Godin also discusses when it is a good idea to quit and concentrate your resources elsewhere, coining the phrase “strategic quitting.” Want to know more? You can buy it here: The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

The Dip is a small book, only 80 pages, including blanks and title pages, but there is no fluff here; it’s all value. Thank goodness it’s not priced proportionally to the value within, or no one could afford a copy.

I can totally buy into the premise of this book. I started my professional career as a marine biologist. I loved it, but there were so many kids coming out of college who wanted to be marine biologists that the market for that skill set was flooded. I looked at my supervisor, who had been in the field for something like fifteen years at the time, and he was only making maybe $15,000 more than I was starting out, and I figured the stress-level and experience differential between his job and my job was worth a heck of a lot more than that. Through a series of fortunate opportunities, I ended up leaving the marine biology field and entering the IT world with both feet. The initial jump doubled my salary off the bat. In the nine years since, my salary has continued to increase to the point where I’m now making roughly 2.5x’s what my old boss was making with 15 years’ experience, and at roughly the same stress-level. And I haven’t had a hard-head catfish spine go through my boot and arch of my foot in nearly a decade now. Well worth it!