Goal Setting and Action Steps: Tips to Turn Your Art Business into a Reality
The best plan in the world means NOTHING if you never put it into motion! If you want to move forward and make your art biz dreams a reality, setting goals and action steps with clear due dates is 100% a MUST.
Get Specific About Your Goals
When you’re setting goals for yourself and your biz, it’s important to get specific. A goal like “launch my e-course” is pretty vague and doesn’t give you much to go off of when you start planning how to reach that goal. Instead, try something more specific like “enroll 20 students during my course launch.”
Giving yourself a clear, quantifiable milestone that is as black and white as possible will help you avoid any question marks about whether or not you met your goal in the end. Plus, it gives you so much more information about what action steps you need to take to get there.
For example, if I know my goal is to enroll 20 students in my course, I can use that number to inform my marketing strategy or to create a daily quota of wait list sign ups. If I assume I’ll have a conservative 3% conversion rate (meaning 3% of people who sign up for my wait list will actually end up purchasing the course), I can figure out that I’d need 667 people on my wait list to be on track (because 3% of 667 is 20 students). Now that I know that, I can focus on marketing efforts to get people to sign up, and I can tell whether or not I’m hitting the numbers I need to be hitting and adjust my strategies from there!
Let Your Goals Change Your Mindset
Set goals that challenge you, and focus on the experience of trying to meet that goal over the actual outcome. What we mean is, don’t let yourself get wrapped up in the end game and the “success” or “failure” or the goal you set. Because, surprisingly, that’s not actually the point.
The point is learning and growing from trying to meet your goal. What can you takeaway from the experience that will change your approach next time? What worked well that you can build on? What did you learn about yourself and how can you apply that knowledge in the future?
The amazing Mariah Coz said it really well during one of her online conferences, and her words stuck with us…. Mariah says “goal setting is 100% about the person you become in the process of pursuing that goal.” And WOW she's SO right. The process of goal setting is about transforming yourself into someone who THINKS and ACTS like someone who would reach that goal. It's wayyyy more about getting in the right headspace and mindset than it is about actually hitting that benchmark.
Turn Your Goals into Actions
Like we said before, specific goals make it easy to define the specific actions you need to take to meet those goals.
Once you’ve got a goal in mind, sit town and write out everything you need to do along the way to get to that point. And then SCHEDULE those action items. Adding a due date to each action item is the most important thing you can do to move it from your mental “someday” pile to an actual plan that will really get done!
If your goal requires a lot of action steps, to the point where it’s getting a bit overwhelming, it might help to break your to-do’s into categories or phases. If you’re working towards a big launch, for example, you might have a content building phase and a marketing phase that you can separate, making them easier for you to wrap your head around.
Prioritize
The day-to-day grind of working towards a goal can be tough, and sometimes we can lose sight of our overall strategy. Setting priorities can help you continue to move the needle even when you’re at a loss for what move to make next, or when you’re feeling really burnt out and need to take some things off your list for the day.
Consider sorting your action items into an A, B and C list. Your A list is the “non-negotiable, gotta do it” list, your B list is the “important but it can wait” list, and your C list is your “nice to have but I can ditch it if I need to” list. If you’re having a crappy day and you only have a few moments to devote to work, chip away at an A list task. If you’re killin’ it and are feeling extra productive another day, dip into that C list.
Setting priorities in the beginning will help you when you’re feeling emotional or overwhelmed later on.
