As promised, here's my 90-day goals for my new business - complete with my chicken scratch and highlighter fun.

Setting goals

I've you don't know what I'm talking about, go read about it here first, otherwise, this will make no sense at all.
It's so tempting to make goals you really have no control over, especially when launching a micro business. I had an idea of what I would like to make in my first year to consider it a success, but I can't make it a goal because that wouldn't necessarily be SMART. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

With this in mind, I set out to make SMART goals.

TW is an abbreviation for Tailwind a tool I recognised very quickly I wouldn't be able to do this business successfully without. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I don't think I can do it. Tailwind allows me to batch my work and still have my pins be posted at the optimal time. As someone who lives in a timezone far from the majority of the Pinterest users, I'm marketing to, I decided that I either had to invest in this tool or forget about the business.

Having made an investment will hopefully make me more motivated to keep on once the newness wears off. Research has shown that people are more likely to act when they've invested money into something - in this case, I hope it holds true.

Setting up a long-term plan

Besides coming up with a bunch of short-term goals, I made an outline of where I would roughly like to be in a year. I'm a big fan of the slow and steady approach, as you can see.

Week by week

After making these two sets of goals, I needed a weekly plan to make sure I would hit some of those larger goals from my 90-day list. I broke it down week by week so I could make sure I would do all the regular pins and affiliate pins I had planned to. As I mentioned, one aspect that appeals to me about this business is that you can put it somewhat on autopilot. That's why one of my 90-day goals is to get one full month ahead on pre-scheduled pins. This plan allows me to get there just before April and keep my sanity.

Measuring progress

Finally, I wanted a way to measure progress. To keep track of those things that shouldn't be goals for me because I have no control over them. Most important for me was of course income and followers as the two are often linked. It makes me so motivated to see that I've already hit a couple of milestones since making the plan last week.

That's it for this post people. Remember keep your hands busy and your hearts quiet.