Measurable Goals Give You the Ability to Check Your Progress
The next step in the SMART Goals Framework is that your goals need to be measurable. This goes hand-in-hand with making your goals specific. You might say that you want to earn enough to quit your day job and work from home, which is a nice, specific goal.
However, you need to make it measurable, too. How will you know if you have achieved your goal if you don’t know how to measure it? This is not only from a financial viewpoint, either.
Financially, you will need to look at what you currently earn in your offline career and divided it by about 20 days if you plan to work Monday through Friday, four weeks per month – or 30 days if you plan to work every day of the week.
Then, you will know that if you make $3,000 per month offline, you would need to make $100 per day for 30 days in order to replace that income. This is measurable and specific so that you will not be left guessing and possibly put your finances at risk.
Measurable goals work with all areas of your business. For example, you need to have goals for how many people you want to add to your list each month. You might set a measurable goal to add 1,000 new subscribers every 30 days.
That allows you to create an actionable plan that you can implement in order to achieve that goal. If you simply say you want to “grow your subscriber list,” that might mean growing it by a single subscriber.
That’s definitely not the kind of growth you were probably intending, so you need to make sure your goal has a specific data point in mind. You can also apply this to your social media following.
You might put a specific and measurable goal on the number of followers that you have for your channel or profile. You can also have goals for how many views or shares that your social content gets on networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
You can set measurable goals for your traffic ranking so that you know whether or not your search engine optimization (SEO) is working properly. For example, you might have a measurable goal to rank on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs), or to increase your traffic by 5,000 unique and organic visitors per month.
Conversion rate incremental increases can be a measurable goal that you create. If your conversions on your sales pages are just 5%, aim to raise them to 10%, 15%, and so on until you reach something reasonable and worthy of your copywriting efforts.