Goal Girl’s Blog

So what did I do with the “frustration and discouragement” I suffered yesterday?   Today I brushed up four squidoo lenses, created a new one (content pending…), submitted three articles, submitted some rss feeds, posted some blog and squidoo page comments…

I feel a lot better.   I’m building a strong foundation for a towering success.   I’d have gotten a lot more done, but could only work on this during breaks in my normal work day.

Oh,  I also checked out the Lunar Electric Rover application on the NASA website, tres cool.   This was developed by a company in Virginia called AMA … http://ama-inc.com … excellent job guys!

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.

Ok, it’s only three weeks into the new year, so I guess I’m not *that* late posting my goals for the year! I really don’t have a ton goals, because I don’t want to spread my focus that thinly. Here they are in short form:

• Lose 50 pounds of fat.
• Reach $200/day in affiliate sales by year’s end.

That’s it. Those are my goals, which I will outline in greater detail below and discuss on a regular basis.

Lose 50 pounds of Fat

The Why’s:

• To decrease wear and tear on my knees.
• To be able to keep up with my preschooler and live to see her grow up.
• To enhance my martial arts practice.
• To not develop diabetes, which is prevalent in my family.
• To eliminated my pcos symptoms.

The How’s:

Cut Carbs. You may argue against ‘fad diets’, and that is fine. For me this not about following a fad diet. I have a metabolic syndrome related to insulin resistance. Among other things, it contributes to my weight issues (and vice versa by the way). I know from past experience that I can eat up to around 50g of carbohydrates a day and still lose weight at a good rate. In the past, however, I’ve taken those carbs as things like lower-carb bread, coatings on chicken, a tiny portion of chips or fries, etc… Well, I am doing it better this final time. In case you didn’t know, fifty grams of carbohydrates buys you a heck of a lot of leafy greens. Spinach, for example, has just over a gram of carb per cup (raw). A lunch of say, three cups of spinach with 1/2 cup of chicken, avocado, a tablespoon of bacon crumbles and an olive oil vinegret still leaves me with around 45g of carb to ’spend’, 48g if you subtract fiber from total carbohydrate (I’m not). A quarter cup of blueberries costs me around 5.5g (39.5 left). Dinner: A poached flounder filet with a cup of asparagus = roughly 5.5, let’s call it 6g since I put lemon juice on my asparagus. 34g to go. Add a cup of cooked cauliflower with a pinch of shredded cheese… now I’m down to about 30g of carbohydrate. Breakfast: Four scrambled eggs with half a cup of brocoli and 2oz of swiss cheese=~13g carbs, so I still have 17 grams to go! So add half a cup of cherry tomatoes, sliced and sauteed to breakfast, leaving 14g. I could add a cup of mushrooms to the spinach at lunch, to bring me down to 11g. I could add half a cup of babaganoush for something close to that.

So, on my horrible, fad diet, I would have eaten in a day:

3c spinach
~4oz chicken
1/2 avacado
tbs bacon crumbles
1c mushrooms
2tbs olive oil vinaigrette
1/4 cup blueberries
1 medium flounder fillet
1c Asparagus w/1tbs lemon juice
1c cooked cauliflower
1tbs shredded chedder
4 eggs
1/2 cup brocolli
2oz swiss cheese
1/2 cup cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup of babaganoush (eggplant, tomatoe dish)

Hmm… I see plenty of veggies here for 50g of carbohydrate. Now I would probably add a little more of (healthy) fats to this menu… maybe instead of flounder, a good piece of fatty salmon? Anyway, the point is, a “lower carb” diet can be a very healthy one if healthy choices are made. And low carb works for me; I lost 20 pounds last summer on low carb (and have kept it off), and just need to get back into my routine. I expect this to result in a reduction in calories as well. I’ll add my daily fat, protein, caloric targets to this post later.

Exercise:

• I’ve recently added a 2-hour pilates private session each week to my routine.
• My daughter has discovered “Kid’s Club” at 24-Hour Fitness, so now she helps me stay motivated to go there three evenings a week.
• When I get to the point that my knees aren’t killing me all of the time, I’ll increase the time I put into my martial arts (at one point, prior to my daughter’s
  birth, I was doing Kenpo around ten to fifteen hours a week…).
• I’m also adding one day a week in the pool on my lunch break.

The When(s):

Here is my 50lbs-before-January 1st, 2010 goal broken down into smaller bites (with my current weight being 219lbs):

• 13lbs by April 1st, 2009 (206lbs)
• 26lbs by July 1st, 2009 (193lbs)
• 40lbs by October 1st, 2009 (179lbs)
• 50lbs by January 1, 2010 (169lbs)

Reach $200/Day of “Online Income”

Let’s clarify… since online sales will ebb and flow, the goal is to average $200/day over the course of a week, i.e. $1400/week, whether that is all made on Friday night at 8pm, or if it arrives in dribs and drabs over the course of a week.

The Why’s:

• This will give me capital to reinvest in my online endeavors to excellerate the growth of my business.
• Doesn’t quite replace my salary, but puts me on the path toward that wonderful state.
• I’ll meet the coolest people along the way (already am meeting some!).
• Eventually, when I go full time, I’ll be able to set my own hours… *very* important to a single mum!
• Who wouldn’t love an extra $72,800 a year?

The How:

• I love blogging, and I love it even more as I go along, but I think initially I’ll focus on Bum Marketing as my money maker, rather than trying to do battle on multiple fronts. I’ll continue to post to this blog (did I mention that I love it?), and I’ll keep the Google Adsense and The Goal Store, because it doesn’t take anything away from my Bum Marketing efforts, but I’m not going to spend a whole lot of energy on SEO just yet. I think good relevent content will go a long way toward that end.
• Squidoo, in conjunction with Bum Marketing. Squidoo, as others have quipped, has “Google Juice.” And it’s a lot of fun to boot. And addictive. Something addictive that will contribute to my bottom line more than my wasteline? I’m there, Baby!
• PotPieGirl’s One Week Marketing.
  One Week Marketing method, which puts Bum Marketing and Squidoo together in a very succinct, well laid out weekly marketing plan with checklists, tweaking exercises, etcetera.
• “Kaizen,” the Japanese concept of constant, continuous improvement. Each marketing campaign will teach me something I can apply to the next one. When I learn something that makes a measurable difference in results, I can then apply it to existing campaigns (without obsessing about the old ones too much ). Each week (or more?) I’ll add another OWM campaign. Together, over time, the rewards from these will add up.

The When:

Before January 1st, 2010(hopefully long before!), I will have my first week of $200 days.

Breaking this down:

• First Affiliate Sale by February 1st, 2009
• First $100 week by April 1st, 2009.
• First $500 week by July 1st, 2009.
• First $1000 week by October 1st, 2009.
• First $1400 week by January 1st, 2010

This will definitely stretch me, because I have a ‘day’ job and a four year old, but I know this is doable.  For one thing, my efforts should be cumulative using the One Week Marketing method.

Sometimes a goal isn’t as attractive in the close-up view…

From a very early age, I wanted to be a veterinarian.    I had a small menagerie at home, a closet full of reptiles (the closet was set up with shelves of aquaria with full-spectrum light, electric rocks for heating, etcetera), cats, birds, squirrels…  I hovered around the vet’s office down the block, making a total pest of myself.    By the time I was twelve, I had catalogs from about 15 different veterinary schools, and I had planned my highschool and college curriculum around the requirements of my favorites.

At thirteen, I started volunteering at the Lafayette Zoological Park (now the Virginia Zoological Park), still wanting to be a vet.   When “Tookie” the zoo’s vet-on-call came on campus, I followed him around like a lost puppy.   I fetched and carried during necropsies.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I was one focused kid.   With a full schedule of classes, a 120-house paper route, editorial responsibilities on the school newspaper, I volunteered ten hours a week.  In the summer I volunteered forty hours a week.   Because I loved it, but also because I figured it would look good on an application for admission to a veterinary studies program.

My second year as a volunteer zookeeper, however, I met Chris, the curator of herpetology.    I was so enthralled with his stories of field trips to the Great Dismal Swamp to collect turtles and frogs, with the work he was doing banding and rehabilitating birds of prey, and frankly, I just liked the guy <grin>, that I “graduated” from shoveling poop of domestic hoof stock to working in the small exhibit house with Chris.     Chris was the bees-knees.    Chris was cool.  Chris took me under his wing, taught me tons on reptile husbandry, carpentry (building exhibits), trapping (for biological studies), measuring, identifying reptiles and amphibians and birds, etcetera, etcetera.   A few months under his tutelage and I no longer wanted to be a veterinarian.   Vets pretty much stayed in a clinic, or maybe took a trip to a farm, except for the very few zoo vets.   A biologist, however…  !    Biologists got to go on field trips.   Biologists got to sit in bird blinds on islands in the Chesapeake Bay, drinking hot coffee out of a thermos.  Biologists got to collect bags of frogs without anyone asking why, and to set up bucket traps and sort the thousands of cool insects, arachnids and small mammals they trapped.

So I changed course.   Instead of going to vet school after college, I went to graduate school.   By some strange twist of circumstances I ended up studying honey bee physiology. I got my masters degree in Animal Physiology (LSU), and a year and a half into my doctoral program realized… this wasn’t what I wanted to do when I grew up, i.e. sitting in a lab, peering through a dissecting scope, running trial after trial on the spectrophotometer, chromatographing until I was really sick of it.

So after leaving LSU “abd, “all but dissertation”, I joined the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries doing sub-lethal oil spill effects monitoring.    Still some dissection involved, still some lab work involved, but hey, it got me out in a boat on the Gulf of Mexico on a regular basis.    Problem was, I was dirt poor.    So through several jobs I gradually gravitated toward the IT world and landed a position as the Director of Environmental Data Management at McNeese State University.   With a budget that allowed $20K for a database administrator.  I couldn’t get anyone to come for the interview for that money.  A little research taught me that a total newbie DBA, still wet behind the ears, earned more than twice what I was earning as a program director at a university!    With six months of hard study,  and a few tests, I was certified as an Oracle database administrator and hired by Oracle Corp.   The dba profession has been very good to me these past ten years.  I got to travel, I feel that the ever-changing technology keeps me mentally sharp.  I’ve made some good friends, and a heck of a lot more money than I would have made as a veterinarian or a biologist.   I ended up at a job that had insurance that covered the treatments I needed in order to be able to have my lovely daughter.    As an IT person I realized that a computer would really be an ideal gift for my mother, and as a result, she ultimately ended up working in internet support for the world’s largest bank.

Goals are good.   Flexible goals are not necessarily bad.   Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals along the way!

The Life Cycle of One of GoalGirl’s Personal Goals

About six years ago, I came to a not-so-sudden realization. Well actually a couple of realizations. First, I wanted to be a mom; I mean, really wanted to be a mom. Second, I wasn’t really set up for that. I’d been divorced for several years and wasn’t dating anyone seriously. Also, at 35-ish years old, I wasn’t getting any younger either. Not that you get younger at any age, but you know what i mean.

Ok, so that was three realizations, shoot me.

The more I thought about it, the more motherhood became a burning, driving need. I guess this is why humans haven’t become extinct; this procreation instinct is really powerful. and in case it’s not enough, we also have just plain old sex drive so there are enough ‘accidental’ pregnancies to make up for an lag… lags probably due to women like me who chose to finish graduate school, find a better job, travel a bit first, etcetera, and then made silly choices of marrying a man who didn’t want kids and expecting him to change his mind eventually.

ok, so a goal exploded forth and took me by the throat. I had a goal. This goal even had an automatic built-in time limit, and as they say, a goal with no time-limit is no goal at all. The time limit, in case you are wondering is the near certaintly of eventual menopause.

What are steps required to reach this goal? Well… normally on would say, find a mate, fall in love, get married, ya-yada… but hey, my clock was ticking fast. I’d done the first three, but the latter bits didn’t follow. So check them off anyway.

What are my other options? I could have started doing a series of one-night stands. I could have approached my male friends in the hope that one or more would be willing to donate to the cause, so to speak. Maybe I could have found someone in need of a green card and married them in exchange for their, um, services… I could have advertised for a donor who would be willing to sign away their rights to any offspring… or, i could do what I did do, that is, shop around for a sperm bank.

What are the potential barriers between me and my goal? Well, I couldn’t afford doctor-assisted artificial insemination (AI), so I found a sperm bank that would ship directly to my home, along with the necessary supplies to do the job myself. Are you grossed out yet? The nice thing is that this site also had a very good forum and the community there had a good spirit of mutual support. I went four cycles with that company at about $200 a pop. I knew I had some issues, but I was hoping they were as intermittant as the symptoms. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I figured I would go get a fertility workup. While researching my insurance coverage, I discovered that some fertility services were in fact covered, hurray!

I did two rounds of doctor assisted AI with no success. The ultrasounds showed that my ovaries looked like a bumpy ball from all of the unreleased follicles. Time to go for bigger guns. My doc had me “rest my ovaries” for a while by lupron injection, which kept them quiescent. Then I started the hormone shots to get the ovaries producing a lot of mature follicles for egg harvesting (i.e. to be used in in-vitro fertilization). I figured out once that in the course of trying to get pregnant, I gave myself something like 80 injections. Some of these were on an airplane returning from visiting friends in New Zealand.

Then I got a letter from my insurance company. They were implimenting a new policy that all covered reproductive services had to be performed at a “reproductive center of excellence”. I went ot the URL they provided and found two such centers in Texas. One was in Dallas, but was at the Methodist hospital, which would not provide said services for an unmarried woman. The other was in Austin, an over 4 hour drive away… considering the frequency of doctor visits required by an assisted reproduction cycle, this was really not an option.

After several letters and phone calls, the insurance agreed to “Grandfather” me with this course of treatment, since I was already 2/3rds of the way through this cycle, but future cycles would have to be administered at a center of excellence. Well, thank God my first invitro cycle worked!
After a Hypnobirthing class, gestational diabetes, insulin shots, swollen ankles, and aching hips (the little darling decided at around six months to jam her head into my pelvis and leave it there for three months or so), a double nuchal chord, and an emergency cesarean (didn’t get to use the Hypnobirthing stuff, darn it!), I reached my goal. I was finally a mommy!

Worth it? You bet. My daughter is the joy of my life. It’s often harder raising a kid on my own that it would be with a partner, but I still feel that this was the best goal I’ve ever set and met. My little bug is the joy of my life and my raison d’etre …

The point of this article (besides just want to relive the past), is that if I had not actually made a goal and broken it down into the necessary steps, if I had just left it as some nebulous longing, a “someday” thing, I would not now be getting good morning kisses from a little Princess.

If anyone is interested in discussing fertility issues, single-parenthood by choice or other related topics, please leave me a comment to that affect. If there is enough interest, I’ll set up a forum.

-GG

A little about one of my goals.  I make a pretty good salary as a database administrator.   A heck of a lot more than i made as a  marine biologist.  But not nearly as much fun.   Because DBAs tend to be expensive, folks don’t usually hire enough of us… which, coupled with the fact that most maintenance activities must happen after normal business hours (and in some 24×7 shops, in the wee smalls, when traffic is least if there is any downtime required).   We’re not known for sleeping a lot.   We take our crack-berry phones with us on vacation.  Our kids learn to amuse themselves while we tap away at our keyboards.  

It’s the last one that gets me.   Don’t get me wrong, I actually like being a DBA… it’s a job that really challenges the mind, the organizational skills, the diplomacy skills and endurance.  Never a dull moment, really.   I have a four year old daughter, however, and the number of hours I have to work for my <mumble> salary isn’t fare to her.  It breaks my heart that I don’t get to spend more time with her than I do.   I want to work fewer hours and spend more time with my sweet daughter, without compromising our financial stability.   That sound suspiciously like a goal, doesn’t it?

Replacing $<mumble> of income while reducing one’s hours-worked is a very large task (hence the Elephant reference in the title).   As the old saying goes though, regarding how one eats an elephant… “you do it one bite at a time…”    As I am still very new at the web marketing thing, I doubt that I can do this in one income stream at the outset.   I am fairly sure this will take multiple income streams as I grow and learn.   Also, as I still have daycare, mortgage, etcetera to pay, I will have to continue to work my day job, so the amount of time that i can devote to this new endeavor is necessarily limited to no more than a couple of hours a day if I squeeze hard.    I’ll continue to discuss this as I continue to grow my business(es?).  

It’s midnight here in Irving now, and my darling child will wake me up, no doubt, sometime around 5am.  Time for me to head for bed.  If you are still itching for some good reading, check out my latest lenses on Squidoo about Kids and Karate and about the coffee shop I’ll be visiting about seven hours from now.  

G’night y’all…