Set Goals That Force Progress

The easiest way to stay motivated in your business is to set goals that force you to make progress.

For example, let's say that you have just recently started your own online course business. Try setting a few simple goals to reach in a relatively short time. Examples of goals easy to achieve can be "Get your first email subscriber" or "Post 100 days in a row on social media" or even bigger goals such as "Get your first customer" or "Launch your first product".

Related article: 5 Actionable Tips on How to Boost Productivity For Content Creators

These types of goals are great because they force you to keep taking action once you reach them.

In other words, each goal should lead to the next one, this way you are forced to take the next step as your previous goal depends on it.

For instance, if your first goal is to "Get your first few email subscribers", once you reach it you will have a few people on your email list expecting to receive content from you. So now you are "forced" to go ahead and create your first email newsletter, which can be your second goal.

If your goal is to launch an online course and get your first customer, now you have to go and create your lesson content for them.

These types of goals make sure that you are highly incentivized to keep taking action and make progress in your business. Instead of waiting for motivation to strike you, you are creating the motivation yourself and starting a "snowball" effect where each action leads to more results and more motivation.

Launch As Soon As Possible

The biggest mistake online course creators make is simply not launching their online courses.

Many course creators will delay their launch because "their course is not ready" or "there is a better course out there" or "they don't have a big enough audience" or their content is "just not perfect".

Delaying your launch can significantly impact your level of motivation, as you are delaying any possible result that can come from the launch.

If you are worried that your online course is not good enough, or is not fished, you can always go ahead and make some changes after is launched!

Even better, if you launch your online course before is 100% complete, you have the chance to attract a few first clients, get them to start the course and collect feedback. This initial feedback is a fantastic opportunity for you to understand what your students want, make changes to your content and simply create a product that your audience needs.

A similar strategy involves launching your online course before it is finished, or before you even create it. This is called pre-selling an online course, where creators put a course up for sales (many times at a discounted price) and try to validate their idea, collect initial feedback and a small revenue to promote the production.

Set Yourself Up To Success

While it can be helpful to have big goals and aspirations for your business. When you are starting out your business, it is important to also set some goals like these that you are able to achieve with certainty.

This may sound obvious to you, however, especially at the beginning, it is extremely important that the milestones you decide to work towards are relatively easy to reach.

Depending on your lifestyle and situation, try to set up a workflow and goals that are easy to reach and fit your specific needs. Good time management skills can help you become more organized and stay focused on your goals: 7 Essential Time Management Tips for Solopreneurs Working From Home

Start by identifying the easiest tasks you need to do in order to move forward with your business and set goals accordingly. Being able to cross out goals will offer you a great feeling of achievement and will incentivize you to take further action.

If you are just getting started with your online course or business in general, the first goal should be an easy one to achieve. So instead of setting unreachable goals such as "Get 100 sales in my first month", start with smaller milestones. These can be something like :

• Get your first email subscriber
• Interact with potential clients
• Create a lead magnet and start collecting emails
• Decide on the structure of your online course

Achieving these "easy wins" will help you set yourself up for success. The more goals you are able to write off your list, the better you will feel about yourself and more and more motivated to keep working towards your goals, as easy as they may be.

Conclusion

There are many ways you can reach your goals and keep your motivation high when you are launching your online business.

The tips described in this article can help you get started and find a process to stay motivated, take action and reach one goal after the other until you see the first results.

The is no secret pill to success, it takes hard work and constant motivation, and sometimes you can wait months before you see any results or you gain any sales. So it is important to find a way to keep yourself motivated through this process.

The key is not waiting for motivation to come to you, instead set yourself up for success by identifying a few easy goals to reach, setting milestones to force you to take action and launch your online course as soon as possible.