The journey begins with the first step is something very true. I read my daily does of ZenHabits.net today, the post was about breaking bigger projects up into smaller ones. This is a concept I’m familiar with but often times still struggle with because I find myself staring at a white board FULL of action steps, that I may have gotten a little lazy with and haven’t fully broken down into what would truly be considered an action step by some.
So I felt inspired this morning to layout a post about reaching your affiliate income goals or other using the first step approach.
You Cannot Do it All at Once
While we can wake up one morning and make a very detailed plan of where we want to go with our affiliate business we cannot execute it all that day. For many, if you’re like me, the planning phase and dreaming about the BIG PAYOFF is very exciting. Unfortunately that excitement wears off as we get into the drudge work.
The Many Steps to the Journey
So if you cannot do the entire project in one day what’s the approach for you to take?
First you must break the larger plan/goal down into smaller concepts.
EXAMPLE: I’m working on a growth plan right now that is eventually going to involve 5 sites. How ever I don’t have the financial or time resources at the moment to build out all 5 sites at once. The logical thing is to break this project down into individual sites.
Breaking it down further
Chances are that first subdivision of the larger project still isn’t going to be of a manageable size. So you’re going to want to break that section of your “master plan” down into even smaller portions of either mini projects or actionable tasks, which are the things you’ll do on a day-to-day basis.
In my above example, I’ve broken my project down into 5 sites, so the only thing I have to work on right now site #1. How ever even with site #1 there are tons of things I must do.
- test keywords
- competitive research
- content creation
- copy writing & split testing
- link building
I cannot do each one of those at the same time, and if I don’t break the project down into steps & actionable tasks I’m going to run into mornings where I sit at my desk unsure of which part of the project is most important and which one do I need to work on the most.
So I take each component of that project even further.
I choose just 2 keywords I’m going to work on for SEO & link building as well as conversion and split testing copy.
I then look at adding more content to the site on another day which I dedicate just to contet.
Then I start to research and test other keywords.
By having an idea of what the first steps are I can more easily make my way through the labyrinth that is a HUGE project and actually come out the other side not just sane, but hopefully attaining my goal as well.
Try applying this concept of breaking your affiliate goals & projects down into first steps. All we can do in a moment is one thing, and all we can do to get started is a first step. So try not to get bogged down in the over all grandiose details of a project and look at just what you need to do in this moment right now.