🎯 Goals That Will Grow Your Platform

Building an online platform takes time and effort, but once you’ve begun you’ll have opened doors to an entire new world of possibility. With all of these opportunities, it can be difficult to know which areas need your attention—and which ones you should tackle first.

One of the best ways to make progress (and gain clarity) is to set goals for your platform.

It may seem obvious, but you really do need to set platform goals to achieve any measure of success. But what goals should you set? That’s a great question.

We’d love to share some examples of areas where you should consider setting a goal for your online platform.

Reconnect With Your Why. What is the impact you want your platform to have on your personal life, family, or the world-at-large? It’s easy to start out enthusiastic and let that motivation burn out over time. Make time to reconnect with why your platform matters.

Publish Consistently. Are you publishing new content on your blog at least once a week? How could you increase consistency in the coming year?

Dial in Your Messaging. Is there anything unclear or confusing about what you offer right now? Set a goal to revisit your messaging. Perhaps you can update your tagline or about page on your website.

Refresh Your Branding. Do you still look like your headshot? If not, it’s time to get some new photos. While you’re at it, make sure your website design matches the brand image you’re trying to build.

Increase Website Traffic. I haven’t met anyone who enjoys writing blog posts that nobody reads. If you can increase your traffic, you’re getting your content in front of more people that you have the opportunity to influence.

Build Your Email List. Above all else, the quality of your email list determines the success of your online platform. Is growing your email list a priority? If not, consider making this your main focus in 2020.

Develop a Social Media Strategy. There’s posting on social media, and then there’s social media strategy—not the same thing. How does social media fit into your strategy to grow and engage with your audience?

Pursue Guest Posting. A few years ago, everyone was talking about guest posting strategies. Now, it’s less popular, but it still works! Where could you get published to reach a new audience?

Outsource Something. If you’ve never done this before, start now. Start with something you’re not good at or don’t enjoy doing, and you’ll free up more time to focus on content creation or other projects you truly enjoy.

Engage in Community. A community can be the single biggest factor that will determine your chances of success. Any new goal is, by necessity, outside the realm of your current experience. That means you won’t know exactly how to accomplish it. So why do it alone?

If you want to win with a goal that matters, your best shot is enlisting the help of someone who has walked that road before and can guide you.

How could a community of like-minded platform builders help you reach your goals?

We hope these examples will help inspire your thinking about what’s possible for your platform.

But we want to close with a warning: divided focus is the enemy of goal achievement. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, “Man who chases two rabbits catches neither.”

If you divide your energy between too many goals, you won’t make meaningful progress on any of them. So even if you want to tackle all these goals this year, choose no more than two or three to focus on this quarter.

Then move on to the rest once those are done.