I’m participating in a program at my gym. For 6 weeks, every day my goal is to walk 10,000 steps. Different activities translate into a number of steps per minute. My routine varies from day to day. Some days I am dancing. On others, I take yoga, Pilates, a combination of strength and sculpting, and of course, one of my new favorites, salsa.

What You Can Measure, You Can Manage

I work out consistently and frequently. What has changed with the addition of the pedometer is my focus on reaching my goal, 10,000 steps every day. As Buckminster Fuller said “What you can measure, you can manage.” I was surprised to see just how many of my current activities translate into this fitness goal. On several days I have exceeded by more than half the number of steps in my target. What I didn’t expect, I found myself looking for more opportunities to be in motion. All because I am wearing a pedometer.

In school, students are measured: attendance, turning in assignments, completing projects, social skills. In business, our performance is reviewed by our customers, our peers, and are managers. Stating the outcome we want and measuring our actions and results against the desired outcome, gives us the information we need to know to evaluate our actions compared to our intentions.

The very act of stating a goal, measuring progress, and being mindful of your goal, can help put you into action. In another area of my life, writing my book on marketing, I made a comment error. Even though I am working with a coach to help me build out my book, I neglected to write down my goals with dates and I didn’t make appointments to do the writing. I’m driven to take action when I have items in my calendar. This oversight putting back several weeks. When I met with my coach, I realized my error and I have now corrected it by putting time to work on my book in my schedule, a repeating event with alerts is now active on my calendar.

Planning your actions helps you reach your goal. Measuring your activities is a way to remind yourself, and reward yourself, for staying on track. Measuring and documenting your actions can also reveal what is getting in your way and give you a place to take corrective action.

A simple way to track your actions might be to make notes in your calendar. Of course, there’s an app for that too. Here are a few apps that can help you without taking up too much time and they are fun to use.

Evernote

It’s a free tool that I have installed on my computer, my iPhone, and my iPad. It lives in the cloud and syncs between all my smart devices. Tim Ferriss used it to write his most famous work, The 4-hour Work Week, and The 4-hour Body. It’s a great tool for writers, business owners, students, anyone who wants to keep track of information, websites, and organize the data. You can clip URLs, articles, and entire webpages with ease. You can create separate notebooks within Evernote. You can add tags, notes, voice annotations, photos, and you can even e-mail right from the program. There is a paid version of the program, most users will be satisfied with the free version. Check it out at http://www.evernote.com

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is a task management app that works on smart phones and computers (Mac and PC). You can ask it to remind you with alerts, e-mail reminders. You can create multiple lists, and like Evernote, sync your lists to your various devices via the cloud.

Google Docs

You can create a spreadsheet to track your actions and if you have others on your team, you can grant access to your Google Docs easily.

Dropbox

Is another cloud service where you can share documents on file by file basis. If you’re working with a coach, or other team members, putting your documents into dropbox allows sharing and editing with the people you grant access. To sign up for Dropbox, click here.

Tools You Can Use

I invite you to give these tools a try. They are free. Pick a project you want to complete and see how these tools help you succeed. You may be surprised to see how measuring what you do will help you do what you want to measure.

 

Want your next workshop to sell out?

Act like a rock star.

If you have ever tried to get tickets to your favorite band, you may have been astonished to find that all the seats were sold in just a few minutes. When well-known performers, like the Rolling Stones announce a new show, they are able to sell out scheduled performances in just a few minutes.

What’s their secret?

They have a huge fan base. When the word goes out, their fans already know them, like them, and are tuned in to consume their music and their life events.

How To Get Similar Results

You can stimulate the same kind of response for your products and services when you take these steps:

Build Your Fan base

If you have a blog you may have subscribers. But it is a common mistake that people can’t find out how to subscribe to your blog. You need to make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Where you place your subscribe button or form can make a huge difference in how many people take action and sign up.

If you have a Facebook page for yourself or your business, do you have have satisfied customers and supporters who like you on Facebook? Are you inviting people to “like” your page? What content are you providing to keep them engaged?

Perhaps you belong to online forums or groups. You might be posting questions or answering questions on LinkedIn.

You could upload videos, share slides, create podcasts or video casts, create a customized channel on YouTube, well, these are just a few of the social media opportunities out there. All of these channels have one thing in common, they are great places to engage in a conversation. Conversations are an exchange of ideas and through them, people connect. Connecting is just 1st step.

Grow your fan base

How can you have an ongoing relationship with your fans? You need to interact regularly. A small group of active fans is far more valuable than a big list where there is little loyalty, commitment or engagement. You need to nurture your relationships in cyberspace as well as those off line. Consistency, such as publishing new content on a regular, predictable basis can help people invest in you and build their trust in you as an expert and resource.

Capture Contact Information

Interruptive marketing (like paid commercials on radio or broadcast television, telemarketing calls) are perceived as annoying because they take you out of the experience of enjoying the story or music you were experiencing. Permission-based marketing is the new model for growing your business. It means that people who like what you have to offer, knowledge, services, or products, have given you permission to be in contact with them. On Facebook, we like people or their pages, on Twitter, we follow them, on YouTube, it is possible to subscribe a channel or to become a friend. I think you’re getting the idea. In each of these cases, there is an easy way for people to indicate that they want more of what they just consumed. There is a convenient way for them to opt in (join) your list.

Give It Away and They Will Come

Your opt in box should be prominently featured on your website. To incentivize people to opt in, you may offer something for free that is of value in exchange for their contact information. We have all willingly given our business cards away for a chance to win something valuable. The same idea works on line when you offer a free report or sample of your services in exchange for your visitors’ contact information.

“The Tim Ferris Effect”

I read a great post today on the forbes.com blog. It was about how to have a successful book launch. The author is a friend of Tim Ferriss (The 4 Hour Work Week, The 4 Hour Body). His book launch as tracked on Amazon was hugely successful because he posted as a guest on Tim’s blog. He went from being listed as 1,295 to an Amazon Best Seller at #45 on the day he posted to Tim’s blog. If you know someone with a very focused and loyal set of followers, you might consider strategies for getting to be mentioned on their blog or offering to create a “guest” post. The big guys do this all the time. When someone in the “Guerilla Marketing” stable publishes, they cross promote themselves on each others web site and email lists.

Start now to build your list and get growing!

btw – If you would like to create an action plan for building your list, see my special offer.