Branding David

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?