2013 Commitments: What are you Tracking?

This is part 2 of a series on commitments for 2013. Get the full list here and check back for the rest of the commitments throughout December!

Every December coaches go nuts telling their audience to “set goals!” “dream big!” and “plan for success!” and while all of those are good, and even necessary, they often leave out an essential piece of the process.

If you don’t have a system for tracking then you’re not only going to forget about your goals as soon as something bright and shiny comes along but it’ll be too much work to track it anyway.

Imagine you had the goal of posting on Twitter 7 times a day every day of the week and I asked you in June to go count your tweets for the last 5 months and how many followers you had gained. You would hate me and refuse to do it. Because it’s busy work and you have more important things to focus on.

But if you had a VA tracking your metrics each week including total tweets and followers in a simple spreadsheet then at one glance you could tell me the average activity per week, followers and percentage increase.

This isn’t just about tracking everything, because you probably don’t need to know how many sheets of paper you used in March or the amount of time between Facebook likes over a month. Understanding metrics and how you’re going to track enables you to stay on top of your goals and measure how far along you are towards reaching them.

For She’s Got Systems we use a multi-tab Excel doc that tracks social sites, the website and blog posts, and subscribers each week. I can look back over 12 months and see what strategies worked to help me reach my goals, what topics were popular and, even more important, I can project forward to see where I should be after the first quarter 2013.

As you’re creating your goals for the coming year don’t forget to account for how you’ll be tracking. If you already have some tracking in place like Google Analytics, I also recommend calendar reminders. Set aside 30-60 minutes once a week to read your numbers and adjust your strategy accordingly.

One final note on metrics, it’s really easy in December to say “where has the year gone?!” and get stressed out. If you are serious about meeting your goals you shouldn’t just set year long goals. Break them up into smaller pieces such as:

2013 Double my list size (currently 390)
April 1 = 488
July 1 = 586
Oct 1 = 684
Dec 31 = 780 people

This gives you benchmarks to follow and if you reach 600 people by April 1st (after the first quarter of the year) then it’s easy to see that you should increase your goals even higher.

The second benefit of notching down your goals to a smaller time frame is that you can then plan for January, February, and March and decide what you’ll do or launch to get 98 people on your list. You might do a telesummit, a speaking engagement, relaunch your free offer, or write a guest post. But it’s often much more manageable to think of 31 people a month (about one a day) than 390 more followers in 12 months.