I have always been a planner in that I have had ideas for the big picture and the directions I wanted to take my life in, but when it comes to the finer points, I don't give them any time or energy; instead, I assume that these things will figure themselves out as I continue to work hard in reaching my overall goals.
The reality is that planning as much and as often as possible will shave off gigantic chunks of time, condensing your timeline towards the success that you want.
So many people tell me that they want more traffic going to their site or blog, but when I ask them how they can do that, they don't have any ideas. They tell me that they want to build their business, be well known in their market and make money, but they don't have any ideas on how to sell themselves or their product.
They have lacked a strong focus on the planning aspect of their business and brand, and are struggling to get to that "next level".
Start With What You Want and Quantify Everything
It is fairly simple to get closer to your goals, as long as you know what they are. Most people say they want more traffic, but they don't quantify it. How much traffic is "more" to you? Is one more visitor enough to make you happy, or will it take thousands? Having numbers will give you a yardstick to measure things by.
What Do You Need to Do?
Create a list of everything that you think will get you to the next step towards your goals. If you want more sales, then figure out why people aren't buying and make adjustments. Make sure you can track every detail and change, so that you can revert back to things that were working well, and move away from things that reduce your performance or push you further from what your goals.
How Much Time?
The key to good planning is a time line. If you don't know how long something should take, how will you ever know if you have arrived at the point where your previous quantifiable metrics should have been met?
Sort and Prioritize
There will always be more than one thing that you need to focus on, and while it might be difficult to figure out which one is more important, I highly recommend that you spend time seriously considering the priority of your tasks, as time is finite and we can't do everything.
Conclusion: A Great Example
Why do we see Gary Vaynerchuk and Matt Mullenweg everywhere? These people are both strong corporate leaders, with great personalities, and instead of leading their companies every day, they are attending events, conferences and speaking to the public, building up their own brands and by association, the brands of their companies.
In this respect they have prioritized brand building over sales, conferences over other types of marketing and have quickly built up nice little business empires for themselves.
What is stopping you from doing the same?
I've always been weak on the business/organization side of things. I'm really trying to turn that around these days, but ignoring it and focusing on other aspects (like actual writing and such) is a hard habit to break. So far the best tool I've found for making myself to stuff is actually really simple....put it in google calendar. When I see "3pm-5pm Do such and such" I'm much more likely to take that time to actually do what I had planned instead of just pushing it aside for "later". Maybe because it's the visual of it not really being that much time or something, rather than just thinking about other things I could be doing...I dunno...but it's been working for me.
The main thing stopping me is that I don't aspire to live like that. I've always had as rule number one that I'd avoid the temptation to leave my family for days at a time for the sake of my career. If i was going to make a go at this Internet thing, it was not going to be about turning myself into a celebrity.
Ryan - I can understand that, but I would also remind you that to a group of people you have become an Internet celebrity through some of the work you have done. While it might not have been traveling around, you have found ways to build your own brand online.