Today we will be discussing the concept of Key Performance Indices (KPIs) and their importance in measuring success. A KPI is essentially a measurable value that shows the progress towards a specific goal. For instance, weight is a common KPI for many people. However, the challenge with this type of KPI is that it is a lagging indicator, meaning it only tells us what has already happened, not what is going to happen. In a business setting, it is more valuable to use leading indicators, which are KPIs that predict future outcomes, in order to make adjustments and achieve our goals.
For example, as a solo entrepreneur, we may be most concerned with the amount of money our business makes, whether it be revenue or profit. However, once January is over and we know how much money we made, it is too late to make adjustments to achieve our goal of growing our business in 2023. That's why we need to be measuring things that are related to actually achieving the goal, not only measuring whether or not we achieved the goal after the fact.
One example of a leading indicator in a business setting could be using affiliate marketing as a way to predict and potentially achieve a goal. By closely monitoring the progress and success of our affiliate marketing efforts, we can make informed decisions on how to adjust and improve in order to reach our desired outcome.
In conclusion, leading indicators are crucial for predicting and achieving business goals. We hope you found this information valuable, and encourage you to look into more resources on KPIs and leading indicators to take your business to the next level.
Today we will be discussing the concept of Key Performance Indices (KPIs) and their importance in measuring success. A KPI is essentially a measurable value that shows the progress towards a specific goal. For instance, weight is a common KPI for many people. However, the challenge with this type of KPI is that it is a lagging indicator, meaning it only tells us what has already happened, not what is going to happen. In a business setting, it is more valuable to use leading indicators, which are KPIs that predict future outcomes, in order to make adjustments and achieve our goals.
For example, as a solo entrepreneur, we may be most concerned with the amount of money our business makes, whether it be revenue or profit. However, once January is over and we know how much money we made, it is too late to make adjustments to achieve our goal of growing our business in 2023. That's why we need to be measuring things that are related to actually achieving the goal, not only measuring whether or not we achieved the goal after the fact.
One example of a leading indicator in a business setting could be using affiliate marketing as a way to predict and potentially achieve a goal. By closely monitoring the progress and success of our affiliate marketing efforts, we can make informed decisions on how to adjust and improve in order to reach our desired outcome.
In conclusion, leading indicators are crucial for predicting and achieving business goals. We hope you found this information valuable, and encourage you to look into more resources on KPIs and leading indicators to take your business to the next level.
This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I'm going to reveal the magical secret that will help you achieve your 2023 goals, no matter what they are. And it's not what you think. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Hey, how are you doing? I am your host, Mark Mason. And this is episode 243 of the Late NIght Internet Marketing Podcast. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Because today we're going to try and change everything for you. We're going to talk about how you can achieve your 2023 goals. Now I've spoken a lot on the show in the past about setting goals and how to attain them. And in fact, last January, if you look at episode 226, 227, you'll find a couple of really good episodes. That are about creating great goals that you can achieve. And that's really the first step. You've got to know exactly what you're doing, why you're doing it and exactly how to know whether or not you've done it. For example, if you're going to lose weight, you want to say exactly how much you want to weigh, and when you want to weigh that way and you need to know why. Your going to lose that way is can't really be for somebody else. It really needs to be an intrinsic reason that's for you that that really motivates you and make you go. And I talk all about that in episodes from about a year ago. 2 26 and 2 27. And you know, that part of the process is really the part where you can't get where you're going. If you don't know what your destination is, right. You've got to understand your destination and you've got to understand why you're headed in that direction. What I'm here to tell you today is that that is not enough. There is some secret sauce that I've been using for the last 30 years that I haven't really talked about. And I guess it's because. In the corporate environment in which I work, it's just become such a part of the way I do things that I haven't really ever thought to talk about it. And that is the use of key performance indices. K P I. Now, if you're not familiar with this idea of a key performance index. Cause exactly what it sounds like you are measuring something that is critical to your success. It's a key performance index. And what I think is very familiar to people is like the weight goal you think of, well, weight is the key performance index for that goal. I want to weigh 243 pounds or 212 pounds or whatever. And I'm going to measure that every day, I'm going to weigh myself. And in fact, I personally do that. I have my own key performance index for my weight. And I have a fancy wifi scale and I weigh myself every day and I have my weight every day, going back for 10 years because of this wifi scale, it's a key performance index for me. The challenge with that kind of key performance index is that it's a lagging indicator. It doesn't do anything. To help me understand what I'm going to weigh next week. For example, it doesn't tell me that this weekend I'm going to go to a blowout party, eat a bunch of hot wings, drink a ton of beer. Consume a lot of salt. And on Monday I will have put on five pounds.'cause. I don't know that I did that until I actually weigh myself and I see. Oh, I added five pounds. So what we really want are not these indicators that tell us what already happened. Lagging indicators, lagging performance indices. What we really want in our business is indicators that tell us what's going to happen. So typically in a business, the kind of indicator we would be interested in, especially as a solo entrepreneur, would be the amount of money that we make after all. That's typically the thing that we're the most concerned about is did our business make money or not? And whether it's revenue or profit, we're trying to understand whether or not. We made enough money. The problem is once January's done. You made however much money you made in January. That's a lagging indicator of what has already happened in your business in January. So if we've got goals around growing our business in 2023, well, we really need our key performance indicators that will help us make adjustments and predictively achieve the goal. And that means we need to be measuring things that are related to actually achieving the goal, not only measuring whether or not we achieved the goal after the fact. So, what does this look like? I mean, how can you do this? And the good news is that this assessment of leading indicators, leading key performance indicators. Is part and parcel of actually deciding how you're going to achieve the goal. So let me give you an affiliate marketing example. This is a. You know, an easy one to understand, let's say you're an affiliate marketer and your goal is to make$10,000 a month. So one of the key performance indicators, obviously that you're going to measure is how much money did I make this month, but that's a lagging indicator. And so that doesn't really help us make adjustments along the way. So one simple. Leading indicator that you could use in this case. Is linearity to your monthly goals. So let's say that your goal is to make$10,000 this month. That probably means, depending on how your business is structured, that you need to have made$5,000 by the 15th because that's half of$10,000. And that can be a little lumpy and maybe it won't quite be linear because you're doing promotions that are on a particular schedule. But in general, you can add checkpoints along the way to let you know if you're headed in the right direction. Hey. If you're driving from point a to point B, you should be at the halfway point. When about half the time is gone. That's basically what we're saying here. So that's one kind. I have sort of simple minded indicator that you can add to your businesses. How far off track are you? Are you on pace to hit your goal? But I'd like to suggest something better. I mean, in order to make$10,000 as an affiliate, we know we need to do some things. For example, let's say the affiliate offer that we're promoting. Pays a hundred dollars. So we know that we need to sell a hundred of these in order to make$10,000. we need to close a hundred affiliate sales in order to hit our goal. So. How do we do that? How do we close those sales? Well, we send traffic to the offer and we know that, let's say one in every 10 people that we send to the offer buys the offer. So our conversion rate is 10%. So that means we need to send a thousand people to the offer. In order to get our a hundred sales this month. So one leading indicator here is how many people have we sent to the offer, because if we're not sending enough people to the offer, that's something we can do something about, and that is going to affect our goal. So that's one leading indicator of this affiliate marketing goal is are we sending enough traffic directly to the offer? So now we have to ask, where is that traffic coming from? Well, probably if you're doing affiliate marketing in one of the many ways that I teach here on the channel, you've got some kind of landing page or opt-in page that also has a conversion rate. You've got something, a blog post or something that receives traffic. And some of that traffic clicks on the link and it represents traffic to the offer. So you've got that initial conversion rate and Let's say that's also 10%. So really, if you've got 10% of the people clicking through to your offer, and 10% of those people actually seeing the actual offer, then you need 10,000 people to make a hundred sales. And so one question you can ask now, another key performance indicator, that's a leaning indicator in your businesses. How many people am I sending to my landing page? So we can ask the obvious next question, which is where are those people coming from? Where. Is the traffic to that landing page come from, is it paid? Are they coming from social media? If they're coming from social media and you're measuring the number of visitors to that page, and you find that you don't have enough visitors, what does that mean? It means you need to adjust your social media strategy. Maybe your looking at posting to social media three times a week. You can understand that for every 1000 views you get 10 clicks. And maybe if you post four times a week, you'll get more views and more clicks and you can see where this is going. You can have key performance indices around how many times a week you post to social media. You can have key performance indicators on the number of views, and that can tell you things like if you're not getting enough views on a post, maybe you need to boost it or add on some paid advertising. Or maybe you can understand that if your conversion rates or cost per click on. On your paid advertising are too high or you're not getting the right conversion rate or right. Click through rate for paid advertising. All of these things can be turned into key performance indicators that predict. Whether or not, you're going to achieve your monthly goal. And if your monthly goal is critical for you to achieving your 2023 goals, then this key performance indicator is what we'll make sure it's the secret to making sure that you achieve your 2023 goals holding yourself. Accountable to these indicators. And you can do that in a number of ways. You can have some kind of accountability partner. You can actually just track it yourself and put in a reward system. If you hit your metrics for the week or the month, you can reward yourself in some way. And if you don't hit those metrics, you don't get that reward. You can assign someone, maybe you've got a VA. You can assign a VA to collect these metrics and present them to you. To help hold you accountable. So that VA is putting these metrics, like number of opt-ins number of subscribers, amount of traffic that you've got to go out and collect. You can do that in a way that makes it easy. So that's another tip here is that. I find that key performance indicators that are hard to collect hard, to get my eyeballs on. They don't work very well. Let's say, for example, your podcast, as part of your traffic strategy. I would encourage you to use statistics that are readily available inside your podcast statistics software that you can just pull easily. Don't make it difficult to pull the statistics, if you've got to do a lot of work in order to get your KPIs so that you can look at them, eventually you won't, it's gotta be easy. It's gotta be right there in front of you. There are softwares out there that you can use that make dashboards and they can pull data from various platforms. I don't typically use those kind of software. I usually use a Google sheet to be honest with you. And I usually ask my VA to collect those numbers for me every Friday or every Monday, whatever makes sense for you and the way you run your business. And she puts them in there and I take a look at them. And if I see. That I'm not meeting my numbers. Then I try to take action that week. That will fix that for the next week or the next month and so forth. You know, Peter Drucker, the world's most famous management consultant, maybe. Is often quoted as saying that which gets measured. Gets managed. And there's two things about that quote that which gets measured gets managed. One is. There's a lot of debate about whether Peter trucker ever even said that it's attributed to him. Even in places like Harvard business journal, but I think the Drucker Institute says he never said that. The other thing is no one ever talks about the second part of the quote, which is that which gets measured, gets managed. And it's something like, even if it's bad for the company, right? So if you have bad. KPI's. If you have KPIs that drive the wrong behavior, you will get, uh, stuff that you don't want. What would be an example of that? Well, let's say that your KPIs, just revenue. And you're an affiliate marketer and maybe that drives behavior inside of your company. You're pounding on people to get that revenue no matter what. And that drives behavior maybe with some shady marketing practices or marketing practices that. Maybe almost, but not quite violate FTC guidelines or something like that, because you're just so focused on the metric that you get the wrong behavior. So you need to be aware of that. I think. I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine where we were talking about this in terms of costs. If reducing cost in your company. Is your most important metric. You may reduce costs to the point that you start to impact top line revenue, which is not what you want at all. Right. What you want is not just. Uh, measurement of the cost of doing business, but the efficiency at which you use money, we call that ROI. So maybe it's okay to spend money. If you're making more money in return, that's about ROI or the efficiency at which you spend money. So we got to think about our metrics and make sure they're driving the right behavior. Getting back to our previous example, if your metric is how many times you post to social media, But that's driving you to post stuff when you don't want to. And therefore the quality is really bad and it's actually taking your brand in the wrong direction. You need to rethink that KPI, maybe in terms of engagement, you need to think about not only having a post per week KPI, but also a metric of how engaged people are with those posts. And maybe that's about making sure that you reply to a certain amount of people's comments on your social media. You can come up with these KPIs. Having said that I would say another risk that you will run is making your KPIs too complex. We don't need 50 key performance indices that flies in the face of the word key. Key means the most important handful of indices. For your business that you can really use. So here is my challenge for you. If you've got a business that you've got goals for and you should, and if you don't, I encourage you to go back to the January 20, 22 episodes that I put out about how to achieve your goals, both in life and in business and how to set them and how to use something like the 12 week year to get that done. And add to that, this idea of KPIs and I mean, maybe. Uh, two or three or at the most five KPIs for 2023 or for the current planning period. If you're using 12 week year, And focus on those maniacally and see where that gets. You identify three or five goals and focus on that and see if that helps you get where you're going. I'm telling you. I've been doing this in corporate for 30 years. On the podcast for 10 years, this is the magic. Holding yourself accountable to KPIs is the magic that will get you from point a to where you want to be. Point B. Thanks so much for listening. I am Mark Mason. This is the Late NIght Internet Marketing Podcast. If you think this would be helpful for someone else and you want to send them. The link to this podcast. That would be great. You can just send them over to L N I M podcast.com and they can check it out. If you've got feedback for me, I'd love to hear from you. Send me feedback at Late NIght, Internet Marketing dot com and. Most of all, if there's something I can do to help you let me know. I'd love to know what you're curious about. I'd love to know what you'd like to see on a future episode of the Late NIght Internet Marketing podcast. Ciao. Man, I'm crazy excited about 1, 2, 3 profit. The door's closed this week. And by the time you hear this, they will have been closed. I, I see that, they sold a bunch of, this is going to be a big cadre of students. I think you guys know, I told you I'm, an insider in the program and I have access. To some coaching there and I'm really excited about. 1, 2, 3 profit and building a new income stream or building an income stream that I had 10 years ago and bringing it back. I'm really excited about that. And I'll be keeping you posted on the podcast. So that's what I'm going to be. Working on this week, in fact, Friday of this week, which I guess would be the 20th. again, by the time you're hearing this, it will be done, but the 20th of January is the first class and I'm just super pumped about it and really excited. I love learning new things or in this case, Learning the latest information on an old thing, and I love building stuff. So I'm excited to build this and I'll be telling you about it in a future episode. Have a fantastic week. Go get some crazy stuff done.