I’ve never been a big fan of setting year long goals. Especially when you consider that many people don’t provide regular checkins on those goals. Throughout my career, I have worked at countless companies and with countless managers, all who helped set goals, but did so in a yearly fashion.
What I found through those experiences was that we only worked two times a year on those goals; When we set them, When we reported on them. I never understood why. Until I read the book, The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran.
This quote is what got me to rethink how I made goals.
People need stability; we need some things to remain the same. The 12 Week Year as an operating system stays the same. It provides a consistent platform to implement corporate initiatives and change efforts without the chaos that usually accompanies change
In simplest terms, the 12 Week Year, is a a way to provide you with your goals and tactics along with those goals. It gives you just 12 weeks to get things done. Over the last 3 years, I’ve used this professionally, to break down the goals that I have with the companies I work for, and the goals I have for my side hustle. In another post, I’ll share with you my adapted framework. But for now, I’ll leave you with my next set of goals.
Relaunching Exchange
I acquired Exchange from iThemes and formed ExchangeWP LLC. This is my side hustle. I love building products and want to focus on building a simple eCommerce solution for content creators to easily sell their products online.
One of the biggest things I have been working on this past few months has been just getting the transition completed. When I started this process, I wasn’t quite sure what it would look like since it was inside of a company that had many other products. Having just spent a couple of weeks post transition, I have finally been able to notice a number of things that I need to do for the business to make it successful.
My goal for ExchangeWP is to generate a $5,000 revenue month.
Weekly Blogging – ExchangeWP Blog
I am a firm believer in driving traffic to your site organically. The best way to do that is to regularly write content on the site. While this is known as inbound/content marketing, it will help drive organic growth to the site.
ExchangeWP is currently a side hustle for me. I’m continuing to offer support to the many users that migrated over from iThemes. But I’m also testing the waters on a further niche market that I believe is untapped.
My goal with ExchangeWP is to post their 2 times a week.
Personal Blog – Blogging
Back in June, I happened to attend a conference for work called, Craft+Commerce. It’s put on by the folks that create ConvertKit. One of the speakers, Sean McCabe, gave everyone that opportunity to take his 30 Days to Better Writing course. I jumped on the idea and took it through July and August of last year (I fell off the wagoon a bit, so I jumped back on).
One of the things Sean teaches is to write daily. So that’s what I did. I then took the advice of daily blogger and my boss, Chris Lema, to have a runway of blog posts queued up. And that’s what I did. I started prepping for this blog back in October about topics I wanted to write about, topics I’ve learned about, and have created 60 days worth of runway for myself.
My goal for my blog is to publish at least 3 times a week.
Speaking Engagements
Last year I didn’t speak at as many conferences as I would have liked. I wanted to spend time with my family and other work trips also attributed enough time being away, that I actually had to turn down some conferences.
I’d like to book 3 speaking engagements in the next 12 weeks. I’ve already got one scheduled for January, so I’m already on track.
Wrapping Up
Those are my goals for 2018. There’s a lot of them, and they are no small feet! It will take a lot of hard work and focus to accomplish these goals. I’ll probably provide a quarterly update on these goals and where they are at. So make sure to subscribe to my blog or better yet, join my email list so you’ll get those updates.
Do you have any goals you are excited about? Is there something you are particularly ready to share with the world? Would love to hear what you are working on for 2018 in the comments!
