Hello
It’s midway through January so I want to check in with you to see how you’re progressing with your goals.
Maybe you had a New Year’s resolution?
Maybe you had a whole roadmap for the year with actionable steps and success metrics?
Or maybe you’re just winging it?
Whatever your situation, I got you.
My ‘Dry January’ attempt lasted 7 days.
My heart was never really in that one.
But there are some goals that I’m determined to hit, and I have a plan…
I’m a huge believer in work smarter, not harder.
I believe you should ALWAYS have a To Do List with items listed in priority order for your business.
If you don’t have an ordered list,
Then your first task is to make a list with just ONE item.
That first item is ‘Make a To Do List’.
For my To Do List I use Trello.
It’s free.
Each card is a task, and I like that I can colour code each item depening on which niche site or project it belongs to.
I drag the cards around to move the highest ROI and most urgent ones to the top.
And when a task is done, I drag it to the Done column for a little hit of dopamine.
My goals fall into four categories:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Personal Growth
Those are listed in order of importance for me this year.
In the past I’ve had different orders.
When I first started my business I had: 1. Personal Growth, 2. Wealth, 3. Relationships, 4. Health.
You can list these four things in whatever order you feel is best for you, there’s no right way.
Health goals
I have health at the top because I feel that without health, you have nothing.
In the UK, the average retirement age is 65.
The average age at which people start to experience serious health declines is 62.
That’s zero years of good health in retirement, on average.
I don’t want that.
So my aim is to retire early, yes, but also to give myself the best chance of staying healthy for longer.
My steps to stay healthy include walking the dogs every day, working with a personal trainer 1X per week, gym sessions 4X per week and rowing 1X per week.
I’ll continue to eat plant-based, focusing on more protein and fewer processed snacks.
Wealth goals
I’ve split this into two parts:
- Financial
- Business
The financial part involves working with a financial planner to optimise my investment strategy.
The business part involves developing and executing business plans for each of my projects to hit monthly and quarterly goals.
In my experience, predicting how much revenue you’ll make each month from a niche site business is almost impossible.
The factors we can’t control, like algorithms, are just too strong.
So if you make 10% of what you planned, or 1000% of what you planned, it doesn’t mean you did a bad job with the predictions.
The main purpose for making the predictions is that it helps you to see what are the most important tasks to work on, that will move the needle and drive growth.
Relationship goals
My relationship goals are split into three parts – Children, husband and friends.
Within each of these I have actions I will follow such as ‘limit screen time during family interactions’ and ‘volunteer twice per month’.
It’s easy to forget that relationships need work.
But they all do.
And if you don’t actively work on them now, you’ll have so much more work down the line.
If your kids start acting out from lack of attention, your wife asks for a divorce, or you find you have no close friends any more…
These are all problems where prevention is much better than cure.
Personal growth goals
Personal growth is a huge topic that spans may things.
I picked out the two sub-topics I want to focus on:
- Learning new skill to help with business growth
- Improving social and interpersonal skills
I find that podcasts are very helpful with both of these. I listen to a lot while I walk the dogs.
My favourites are ‘Niche Pursuits Podcast‘ for the business growth and ‘The Diary of a CEO‘ when they have guests that are experts in interpersonal skills.
It’s important to move beyond that theory and put what you learned into practice.
Each month I’ll try out some new tools or courses that might improve my business processes.
And I’ll practice techniques that will help me remember people’s names, for example.
The importance of measurements
One final motto that I think is key to all of this is:
“What gets measured gets changed”.
That’s so true.
It’s important to measure not just the outcome, but the actions that will get you there.
Let’s say you want to lose weight…
Step one – weigh yourself each week.
But that will only get you so far.
For the best results, you also need to measure the food you eat and the exercise you do every day.
You’ll need to know how many calories to consume and how much exercise to do to meet your goals.
Let’s say you want to make $200,000 in 2025…
Step one – record your income each month.
Again, that will get you only so far.
You also need to measure your investment and your return on every project in your business.
- How much did you spend on growing your email list last month?
- How much did you make from the emails?
- How much is each subscriber worth?
- How well did each lead magnet convert?
Answer these and you’ll know which lead magnets to use and how much to spend to meet your email revenue goals.
It’s all about taking your big goals, and then breaking them down into small manageable steps.
I hope you found this helpful.
I always find it helpful for myself when I write these emails.
Yes, I primarily write them for selfish reasons – to practice my writing and to make myself accountable to follow through on any goals I set publicly.
So thanks for reading to the end.
I appreciate you.
– NSL
P.S. You can access my previous emails, including my 2024 income report here: https://www.nichesitelady.com/newsletter/