AMY PORTERFIELD: Welcome back to another episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield. Today we are diving into creating your promotional calendar.
In an ideal world this episode just went live, you’re listening, you’re going to jump in, you’re going to actually plan out your calendar this month (November when this is going live), and you’re going to be ready to hit the ground running on the first day of 2018.
That would be an optimal situation. However, let’s say you’re catching this episode way after it’s gone live. Don’t let that stop you from listening to this entire episode and grabbing the freebie because it’s never too late to plan strategically inside of your business.
If you have felt that you’re kind of flying by the seat of your pants, if you haven’t really thought out the promotions ahead of time, or if you’re not really sure how you’re going to make money in your business for the next six months then it is time to sit down no matter what time of the year it is and plan out your promotional calendar.
Here are a few things I want you to know before we dive in.
Mini Workshop – I want you to do this now. No matter when you’re listening to this I want you to find a time that you’re going to take the entire day and go through the mini workshop I’ve put together for you here. You’re going to plan out the next six months of your promotional calendar.
I say promotional calendar but we’re going to add everything into the calendar for the next six months, everything you want to work on. You heard me right. I want you to take an entire day to do this.
If you want to get extra points I would like to see you either book out a hotel room or a co- working space for the day. They rent out spaces in a lot of co-working spaces for just a day. Maybe you could do it at home but send everybody away.
If you’ve got kids they can go to Grandmothers. If you’ve got a husband or wife and they’re not included in this they should take the day away from the house as well and you have silence and are able to create, think, brainstorm, and all that good stuff.
You do need an environment where you’re not going to be interrupted. I say use a whole day because I want you to have the space to think and be creative and not feel rushed or pressured to get it done.
Another thing, don’t do it alone. Because we’re going to be planning out the next six months of your business I think it’s really tough to do it all by yourself. You might be thinking that you are a one man or one woman show. You don’t have a VA or a project manager, it’s just you.
If that’s the case, I want to encourage you to find a friend or peer that knows your business enough and knows where you’re going and what your goals are in order to at least be a sounding board with you. That would be ideal.
If you don’t have anybody on your team find somebody that you trust that you can hash out some of these ideas out that you might have. This is tough to do all alone so I do want to encourage you to have somebody with you when you’re doing this.
If you have a virtual assistant you could have them come into the conversation with you virtually or, even better, if you can afford it fly them out. I would love for them to be in the proximity with you. I think it does make a difference but it’s not a deal breaker. If they can’t be with you Skype is fine.
Do what you can but I just wanted to give you some suggestions around how to get this all set up.
One more thing. I’d love it if you had a whiteboard or those big sticky boards where you can write on them and tape them onto your wall all over the room if you want. It would be nice if you had somewhere that you could put your notes and ideas on the wall so you could see them because that’s the first part of this mini workshop that I’m going to walk you through.
I wanted to set the stage there. Oh, and one more thing, why are we talking about the first six months of your business? The reason for that, and I’m doing this in my own business as well, I’m literally walking you through the plan that we are doing in our business to plan for the new year.
I’ve decided to do six months and not the whole 12 months because you may want to repeat some of the successes you’ve had in the first part of the year. I often do a promo more than once a year, the same promo. I might make it better the next time but I’m all about the rinse and repeat if it worked out well the first time around.
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Also, you’re going to do some things in the first six months that don’t work. I don’t want you to repeat any of that stuff if it’s not working. Opportunities are also going to come your way and I want you to have a little wiggle room to include them in the second half of the year if you would like.
One thing I’ll answer is when do you plan the next six months? Let’s say we are going to do January through June of 2018. When should you be planning July through the end of the year? I’d say at least a month in advance. It would be nice if you started in June to plan for July through the end of the year.
Again, these are just some parameters around how you would tackle this planning workshop. That’s exactly what it is. I want you to follow the steps I’m going to lay out for you and in order to do that you’re going to need a handy-dandy cheat sheet.
That’s what the freebie for today’s episode is all about. I’m going to map it out here. You’re going to hear me talk about it and give you examples and suggestions. But you are going to want the roadmap so that when you’re ready for your entire day of calendar planning you will have the blueprint in front of you and you will know exactly how to do it and walk through the steps I’m going to outline here.
In order for you to get your hands on the cheat sheet of how to plan your promotional calendar all you need to do is go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/183download. It’s as simple as that. It will take you right there to sign up and grab the freebie.
If you would rather me text it to you all you need to do is text the phrase 183download to 33444 and I’ll text it to you if that’s easier.
I’m not going to make you wait any longer. Let’s go ahead and dive in.
STEP 1 – If I were to wave a magic wand and you instantly had a breakthrough year what would that year look like?
We’ve got to get clear about what a wildly successful year looks like for you. This is different for all of us. If I waved the magic wand, even more so, what would you do in your business if you couldn’t fail? This is where I want you to dream big. I want you to get excited about what a breakthrough year could look like in your business.
Again, remember, I’m waving a magic wand and you instantly have a wildly successful year. We’re fast forwarding it. It is done and it is so. What does that year look like?
I would love for you to spend at least 30 minutes brainstorming. Maybe turn on some music and just get into that state of really thinking about what a breakthrough year would look like for you. That is the first step.
In order to help you out I want to give you some examples. I asked one of my students what a breakthrough year would look like for them. She knew right away. She said, “I would never worry about where my next client would come from. In fact, I would have a wait list. I would never, ever have to worry about filling up my mastermind because I would have 12 students in my mastermind for a full year.”
She also said she would have 5,000 people on her email list by the end of the year and she would plan a live workshop for the summer so that she never, ever has to worry again when summertime comes and the sales start to go down. She’s always been worried about the summertime blues where her sales have gone down. She said she would have a live workshop that worked like gangbusters.
She also said she would have a $300,000 year. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to earn
$300,000 in revenue by the end of the year. To her this was a wildly successful year. It could be so dramatically different for you.
You could have way more lofty or bigger dreams or maybe simpler dreams. No judgment. You do you. What would a wildly successful year look like for you? That is Step #1.
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STEP 2 – Look at your nonnegotiables
What are you not willing to do or not willing to experience to get to your wildly successful year? I thought this one was really great. I have to give a shout out to my friend James Wedmore. He told me about this one and I thought, “Oh yeah, we’re including this in my own planning and I want to share it with my listeners as well.”
Let me give you an example. One of my nonnegotiables for next year is I’m not working nights and I’m not working weekends. Done. It’s not happening. I got into a really bad habit of doing that this year. I just don’t want to do it again. So no weekends. No nights. That is my one nonnegotiable.
I am sure I have a few but that was the first one that came to mind when I was putting this together for you. I asked one of my students and she said, “I will not take another client because I am fearful that I won’t make enough money. No more. I’m done.”
That was her nonnegotiable. Every time, moving forward, when she makes a decision in the new year to take a client on if there is any ounce of taking them on because she is fearful and won’t make enough money or there won’t be enough clients and that’s the only reason she’s taking that client on, nope, not happening. Nonnegotiable.
You could look at a nonnegotiable as every single week you are going to get a massage. I know that might seem like a weird nonnegotiable but I look at it that way because it’s nonnegotiable that you are going to have a self-care day once a week or once a month if that feels like a little much.
If you put it down and say “this is happening, it’s nonnegotiable. I have to have one day of self care every month,” then it’s going to happen. You’ve got to declare this stuff in order to make it real.
Those are just some examples you might want to think about. What are your nonnegotiables?
STEP 3 – Declare your number
This one’s easy. There are many ways you can plan out your promotional calendar. This is the way I do it so I’m sharing with you what we do in my business and what I think will help you. I know it’s helped a lot of my students.
It might be weird that I’m saying to declare your number. But here’s my hunch. I believe you already have a number in mind. Even before we look at how you want to make money next year, what promotions you’re putting on the calendar, what projects you’re going to work on, before we even figure out any of that I’m guessing you already have a number.
If you say you don’t have a number, let’s say you weren’t scared to say that number. Let’s say you dug a little bit deeper and I forced you to come up with a number, how much money do you want to earn next year? I’m guessing if I pushed you a little bit you would come up with that number.
Many of you are already shouting it out. If you’re alone just shout it out now. You already know your number. When I was talking to one of my students she said $300K was her number. She wanted to earn $300,000 in one year. She said it would be life changing for her.
It would mean her business was finally getting the momentum she knew it would get. She just had to stick with it. She knows her number. I’m going to guess you know yours. If you don’t it’s okay. You could skip this step but I really encourage you to at least put something down that feels good and exciting to you.
Step 4 – Take a look at the past in order to move forward
It’s all about getting clarity. When I say to take a look at the past I mean the year you just finished or you are just about to finish. We need to look at what worked and what didn’t work in order to know where we want to go for the next year.
It would be great if you could whiteboard this or get those big sticky poster boards because I’d love for you to stand back and look at all of the ideas and insights and a-ha moments you have in Step 4. If you’ve got a whiteboard or something like it use it for this step.
If you can come to the table with some metrics that would be great, metrics like how much your email list has grown this year, your average click-through rate, or average email open rate. You might not know but if you do it’s great to come to the table with some metrics.
If you did any promos go ahead and do a little digging. What was your webinar conversion rate on average this year or maybe your webinar show-up rate? Just kind of get a sense of what the numbers look like.
More so than anything, you need to know your financials. How much money did you make this year? How much money did you spend on expenses? How much came in? How much went out? That’s really important.
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I remember when I was just starting out. I would literally close my eyes and not look at those numbers. I didn’t feel they were anything impressive and I didn’t want to be reminded that they made me feel bad. I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish at all times I knew what was going on with my financials. Listen friends, we’re only going up from here. Right?
Once you have some metrics, if you can grab those, great. If you can’t just keep moving forward. I want you to ask yourself a series of questions. This is the reason I would love for you to include your VA, project manager, or somebody that knows your business enough to have an opinion around some of these questions so that it’s not just you.
You might be a little bit biased so I want to hear from anybody that has been involved in your business and can offer a really great insight or alternative to how you might look at things and how the year went.
I have all of these questions. I ‘m going to run through them really quickly here. They are in the cheat sheet that I’ve provided with this episode at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/ 183download. You will definitely want to grab it so you don’t have to take a bunch of notes right now.
Here are the questions I want you to ask yourself and then I want you to whiteboard all of this.
- What did we enjoy working on this year? What did we just absolutely love creating and working on?
- What did we hate working on? What was tough? What felt difficult? What do we never, ever want to do again?
- What was our biggest money maker?
- What was our smallest money maker?
- What actually put us in the red, if anything?
- What brought in the most leads for us in our business? Maybe you had a great freebie or great promo that brought in a bunch of leads. Put it on the whiteboard.
- Where were we light on resources? Maybe you didn’t have enough hands on board to create your weekly content or maybe you weren’t able to really build out a promo the way you wanted because you just didn’t have enough people to work on it. Were you light on people? Were you light on content creation? Where did you struggle because you didn’t have enough people in place? That doesn’t mean you are able to hire a bunch of people for the next year but you’ve just got to be aware of this stuff.
I might not have asked enough questions. If you think of other stuff you want to bring to light about what happened this year, put it on the whiteboard or on your big post-it notes because it all comes out in this session.
You can take 30 minutes to an hour for Step 4. That’s why, again, I want you to have some white space so you don’t feel rushed here. But, get it all out. This is your final year in review and I want you to be really transparent and no hold back.
Another thing I do in Step 4 is take a moment to write down all of the stuff I wanted to work on this year but never got to. This is a good one. I wanted to do a live workshop this year instead of pre-recording the course. I wanted to deliver it live over six weeks.
I wanted to presell it. I have been dying to do it and I just couldn’t get to it so you can bet it’s going to be on the 2018 promotional calendar. But this is the time to write down all of the stuff you talked about and wished you could do. You’re so bummed you never got to it. Write it out.
That’s another thing that’s important because in the next step we will get into planning all of this stuff for the next year. We’ve got to look at where we’ve been before we know where we want to go.
Step 5 – Calendar your big promotions for the year
This is the fun stuff. It’s what you’ve been waiting for. We’re actually to the point now where you will calendar your big promotions for the year and actually calendar everything. Step 5 is actually broken into two phases. First you will decide you are going to make money in your business and the second phase is to map it all out.
Remember, we’re only focusing on the next six months. We do that because it’s way more manageable and it allows you some flexibility. You can go through the next six months, see how it works out, what worked, what didn’t work, and then plan on the second half of the year based on what worked and what didn’t work.
That allows you to be a lot more strategic. So we’re only focusing on the next six months.
Phase 1 – Decide how you are going to make money in your business – I’m going to give you a list of different ways you might want to make money in the next six months. I am sure this list could be a whole lot longer but let me just get those creative juices flowing.
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- Create and sell a pre-recorded digital course.
- Create and sell a live online workshop. Instead of prerecording it you can presell the live online workshop and deliver it over the next six weeks (for example).
- In-person workshop (in real life).
- Coaching and consulting clients.
- Speak on stage and get paid for it.
- Do done-for-you services if you are a web developer or nutritionist who creates meal plans. You could do some service-based business.
- Create a mastermind and have people pay to be in your mastermind. Or, on a lesser scale, you could do a group coaching program.
- Do affiliate marketing. Either you promote somebody else’s programs, products, or services or they promote yours. Affiliate marketing could be part of your master plan as well.
The first action item is to list all of the ways you plan to make money in the next six months. Once you write all of the items down you can whiteboard it and put it on the wall so you can look at all of the ways you plan to make money in the new year.
This is the hard part but I want you to do it, I want you to get specific on your revenue projections for each of the ways you plan to make money.
Let me give you an example of one of my students. She recently quit her corporate job as CFO. She was a CFO at a really big company. She quit because she wants to create a business around being a CFO for hire for smaller businesses. She wants to teach other people how to be the CFO in their own online business.
She hasn’t worked out all of the details yet but when I asked her how she wanted to make money next year this is the list she gave me. She said she wanted to bring in some retainer revenue. That means she would keep her current corporate client on retainer and do work for them every single month. It would be just a little bit of work because she doesn’t want it to be full time anymore.
The second thing she said is that she is going to take six coaching clients. She will work with them over the length of the next six months. Then she said she would create a small group- coaching program for those that can’t afford her one-on-one coaching and she will get ten people in that small group coaching program.
She is then going to create an online training course around the financial health of your business and she says this is just for really small businesses. She has an idea of what the program is going to be but she doesn’t have it all hashed out yet.
This is her list of how she’s going to make money over the next six months. Again, she doesn’t have all of the details yet but she feels pretty confident these are the things she can do. Then, from there the next thing she’s going to do is get specific on her revenue projections for each of the ways she plans to make money.
Remember, she wants to make $300K over the next 12 months. She’s going to cut that in half. You don’t have to cut it in half. You can make the money however you want over the course of the year but to make it easy she’s going to cut it in half and for the next six months she needs to make $150K.
She is going to look at the list of all of the ways she’s going to make money and now she’s going to work out some projections to see if she can get to that $150K. To be honest, the first time she did it she came in way low. She wasn’t anywhere near $150,000. I think she hit $90,000.
At that point I told her a few troubleshooting tips to consider. I put this in the cheat sheet for all of you but I’ll walk through some of them really quickly. If you do this exercise and you realize you are coming up short in terms of revenue projections here are a few things you can consider.
- You might want to change the price points of some of the ways you plan to make money. If you’re doing a coaching package or mastermind you might need to increase your prices or increase the number of people that are going to be in your mastermind or the number of coaching clients you plan to take.
- Create a VIP experience. Think about upsells. Maybe you’ve got six coaching clients, like my student wants, but then she will also take two VIP clients where they get a full day working with her in person. She could make a VIP experience to add a little bit more revenue to the first six months.
- Add affiliate promotions. Maybe she promotes somebody’s program, product, or service. That’s a great way to add a little padding in there if you come up short.
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- She could always go back to the drawing board. Remember, I’m encouraging you to take the entire day to go through this mini workshop of planning your promotional calendar so that you can go back to the drawing board and just erase it all and start over. If you look at all the different ways you plan to make money, do your revenue projections, and you see that in no way is it adding up, it’s not big enough, it’s too big, or it just doesn’t feel right then go back to the drawing board. Start over and do it again. You have the time and space to do so. At the end of the day you want to dream big but it also has to be doable. You need to commit to saying you are actually going to do “this”, you are going to hit the goals, and you’re going to do the work it takes to fulfill all of the planning you have put together. So you might need to work on it a little bit throughout the day to get it into a place that you feel really confident and excited that you can do it.
One more thing and then I’ll move on. You might be scared. That’s okay. If you feel like the whole plan you put together is so easy breezy that you could do it with your eyes closed then go back to the drawing board. Obviously that is not what we want. We don’t want it to be so easy that it’s not going to challenge you. But I feel I don’t even need to say that.
So many of my listeners are huge go getters and achievers so if anything you might need to scale it back just a little bit. I know you. I know how you operate.
Map it all out – Remember I said that Step 5, calendar planning, is actually in two phases. We are now moving into the really good stuff where you will map it out on a calendar.
You will need a big dry-erase calendar that you can tape to the wall. I have typically only used the calendars that are a full year. Of course we’re only going to use the first six months. But if you can find one that is just the next six months that’s great.
The key here is that it’s a dry-erase calendar so that you can write all of your promotions and then realize you need to move them all around. This is a lot of trial and error so you can erase it and start all over.
I highly recommend you get a calendar. If I can find a good one I will link to it in the show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/183.
Now that you have your calendar taped to the wall you will look at the list of all the different ways you plan to make money in the new year. The goal here is to figure out what needs to happen in order for you to make that money.
Let me give you an example. I was talking to my student, again, the CFO who wants to quit her corporate job and start her online business. Remember, one of the things on her list was that she wanted six coaching clients.
I asked her how she was going to fill up her six coaching client spots. She said she was going to send some emails. She was going to run some Facebook ads, maybe to a webinar. She said she might even do some affiliate referrals and, “I think that will probably cover it.”
I was silent. I just looked at her and said, “Ummm, no. That is not going to work.” You have to actually plan out the time on your calendar where you are going to focus on filling those slots. That pretty much means you’re going to do a promotion or a launch.
When I said “launch” to her she said, “That word just freaks me out. I feel like I’m going to get burned out and stressed out and it’s too big for my one-woman show kind of business I’ve just started. I can’t do a launch.”
I told her not to get caught up on that word. Let’s just take it out and call it a promo or a campaign. Those things actually matter if you just change your language a little bit. But she needs to have a concentrated time where she is promoting her coaching spots.
Instead you can look at the calendar and chose two weeks in early January or early February where you are only focused on filling those spots. Yes, you may do a webinar. You may do an email promotion. You might even do a challenge. Whatever it might be, plan out when you are going to do it.
She chose the first two weeks of February were she is going to focus on filling her coaching spots. But that means she then needs to give herself a little bit of time to get all of those promotional materials in place.
This is the stuff that people typically won’t put on their calendar. If in the first two weeks of February she is promoting her coaching opportunities then in the last two weeks of January she is going to work on a webinar or putting together some emails for a special email campaign or whatever it might be.
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She has to kind of think about what she wants to do in terms of that promotion to give herself enough time to promote and plan for the promotion. Again, she doesn’t have to have it all figured out but she has to have a pretty good sense of what she wants to do in order to get the dates on the calendar.
We went through one by one on her list of how she’s going to make money and then we asked what it was, an email campaign? Is it a webinar campaign? Is it a challenge you want to do? How are you going to fill up the opportunities in terms of what you have put down for how you are going to make money.
Here’s where things get interesting. After you have put down all of your promotions on your calendar I want you to step back. There are a few things I want you to look for. Do you have enough white space between your promotions?
You want white space because you want to give your team and yourself a break. You also want to give your audience a break. You don’t want to be promoting all the time. It’s important that you actually see the white space between the promotions. I like to give at least 30 days before I ever promote something again.
You want to think about the other projects that are not necessarily promotions. This is where I really screwed up this year and why I’m doing my planning differently in the coming year. I planned out the entire year and shouldn’t have done that. I’m only going to do the first six months, like I told you.
Also, I never even put on the calendar my website redesign and my business rebranding. Those are two really big projects that were expensive and took a lot of time, effort, and focus. They weren’t even on my calendar!
So guess what I was trying to do while I was putting my big B-School promotion together? Guess what I was trying to do while I was trying to rework one of our course funnels for an evergreen launch we were doing?
I was also trying to tackle my website redesign and do photo shoots for my rebranding and choose colors and fonts and all this other stuff. I was so overwhelmed and so was my team.
The big lesson here that you can learn from my mistake is that you have to put those big projects on the calendar.
They might overlap with some of the promotions you’re doing but you still need to put them on there so you’re aware of it. Then you can say, “This will never work,” or, “I’m going to need a little extra help during this time,” or, “I’m going to need to give myself more time to finish this because there’s a lot of overlap right now.”
Now I want you to think about all of the other stuff you want to do this year that has nothing to do with your promotions (your direct revenue sources) but they have everything to do with driving your business forward. Again, you’re relaunching a website or launching your podcast or a new video show you might want to do.
Maybe you’re planning for a big live event that’s going to happen at the end of the year but there’s a bunch of stuff you need to do at the beginning of the year to get ready. It is important that you look forward and all around. What are all the things you want to do?
I know this might feel a little bit sobering because you are thinking I’m taking away all of the creativity and it doesn’t feel fun anymore because it doesn’t feel as doable. This is where we have to be big boys and big girls when it comes to being an entrepreneur.
You can’t do everything all at once. You do have to spread this out because you will hit overwhelm. I have no doubt in my mind. Listen to a girl that’s been there too often. You really need to plan this out and give yourself more white space.
Allow yourself some extra grace. Really think about how long something is going to take you to create before you can launch. What about the fact that you want to create an online training course or a membership site that you plan to promote because that’s the number one way you will make money?
You’ve got to give yourself the time to create it.
I guess my whole goal of this episode is to be as real as possible with you because if I’m not you’re going to put a really fancy calendar together that you will never execute. That’s the last thing I want from you.
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This is the time I need to mention FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. As you put your calendar together (and you just heard me say that you can’t do everything all at once) there are going to be things you really want to do. I suggest you open a page in your notebook or inside of a Google.Doc and write all of the things down that you want to do that are just not going to make the six-month calendar.
You don’t want to forget those things. You want to make them real so you’ve got to write them down. But not now. They are just not going to happen right now. But that doesn’t mean they are never going to happen. Fear of missing out is real.
When you start to see other people work on projects that look exciting, when they start to do big promos and you are still working on your course that’s going to happen. But have your little list of the things you just can’t wait to get to but you are going to stay the course on your six-month promotional calendar.
We’re in the home stretch. We’ve done the biggest step, Step 5, planning your calendar. We did it in two phases (How you are going to make money with your revenue projections with each thing and then second literally putting it on the calendar and seeing it all mapped out).
Step 6 – Review all of the work you’ve done for the day
I want you to ask yourself a few key questions. Again, this will be in the cheat sheet. This is the really, really important stuff. You’ve done all the work at this point.
You might have a bedroom full of sticky notes and poster boards and craziness. It might look like what my mom would say when she would come into my room as a teenager, “It looks like a cyclone hit this room.” That was her favorite thing to say.
That might be what your room looks like after this whole exercise of the whole planning day. But now you are going to step back, look at everything, and ask yourself a series of questions.
If you were to pull this off and have your wildly successful year and it looked like this (you are looking at your calendar) are you excited? Does it light you up? Do you think, “Bring it on,”
because if that is a “no” then the whole thing is a “Hell no, we’ve got to change it.” You’ve got to feel excited.
Do you feel a little or a lot scared when you look at that calendar and everything you’ve created over the course of the day? Do you feel scared? I want the answer to be “yes” even if it’s just a little or a lot. We’ve got to step outside of our comfort zone. I don’t want you to be smooth sailing all year and not push yourself.
You don’t have to hustle. You don’t have to kill yourself but I do want you to step outside of your comfort zone. That doesn’t mean you need to work really hard. It means I want you to push yourself to make some bold moves. That’s what I mean. I want you to feel a little scared or anxious or nervous excitement around it.
Another question I want you to ask is, “Who do I need to be in order for all of this to work?” What kind of person needs to show up to just crush these goals? I’m going to guess, because this is true in my life, I have to show up a little bit different.
If those goals are big and audacious and a little bit scary I might have to change some of my bad habits or I might need to get more organized or be more efficient. There are a few different things that might need to happen.
Who do you need to be and how do you need to show up in order to crush those goals? Also, who do you need on your team?
This is a scary question for so many of us that are just starting out and we don’t have a lot of funds. Before you go into not being able to afford to hire any people I do want you to answer this question as though you could. Who do you need to have on your team in order to make this work without killing yourself because you’re not going to do it all alone?
That is not a badge of honor to run your business all by yourself. You are missing out on so many amazing opportunities and making a bigger impact in this world by thinking you have to do this all alone. Maybe it’s time for a VA. Maybe it’s time for a project manager.
I have an awesome podcast episode about how to hire a project manager. My financial advisor actually listened to that podcast episode and took action. He has a full-time project manager that he said is just kicking butt. He couldn’t be more excited.
He was scared to take that big leap and hire someone full time but he’s never looked back. You might just amaze yourself with what a few new hires could mean for your wildly successful year.
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Another thing is that as you’re looking at everything look for any red flags. Is anything nagging at you, eating at you? Do you know this one thing is not going to happen? Do you really not want to do that one promotion you see on there? Is there anything that the little chatterbox in your head is saying, “No, no, no, something’s off there”?
Fix it. You’ve got the time. You’re giving yourself the whole day. You can go back and rework anything you need to rework.
There you have it. Those are the six steps to walk through your full day of planning your next six months. What would you do after that? Let’s say you wrap it all up. You’re done for the day. What is your next big step?
That would be to choose the first thing that’s going to happen. Look at the next six months. What is the first promotion? Work backwards in terms of how you’re going to get prepared to launch or promote or do the campaign.
You will take the first big project and start tackling it right away. That’s how you would work in this calendar. You can’t do all of the stuff so you’re just taking one top priority at a time. You are putting it into Asana or Basecamp. You’re planning it all out and getting your team on board.
Speaking of getting your team on board, after you’ve solidified this calendar and you feel really good about it you do need to share it with your team if you do have a team. Get everybody on board at that point.
You don’t need to include your entire team in your planning day. You could but you don’t have to. But you do need to communicate with anybody who wasn’t part of the big planning day. Get them excited. Get them on board. Let them know what you’re going to be doing for the next six months. Communication is key here so that everybody gets on board.
Let’s go ahead and officially wrap this up. There you have it, I’ll make the wrap up short and sweet. I did this episode for you today because it’s a question I get asked all the time. I often hear, “Amy, how do you plan out your promotions for the year?”
I thought I could give some tips, ideas, insights, but why not give you the exact blueprint that I use in my own business? Don’t forget to get the cheat sheet because when you’re ready to take action, when you’re ready to literally take an entire day to plan out the next six months, you’re going to find my cheat sheet incredibly valuable so you don’t miss a step.
I’ve added a few extra insights that I haven’t talked about on this episode. So I promise it will be incredibly valuable. Go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/183download to get your hands on it. If you go through this process I want to hear about it. Tell me on social media what it was like for you, where you did it, who you included on your team as you walked through the process, and just give me some insights and share with me what you thought about it because I’m dying to hear.
Here’s to your most wildly successful year ever! Have a wonderful week and I’ll see you here again next week. Bye for now.
