Do You Practice Specifics?
July 10, 2008
Practice specifics continually in your business.
This applies to daily operation of your business, goal setting, and copywriting. The more specific you are, the easier it is to pinpoint issues, reach your goals, and convince others to buy from you.
Here’s a quick example from my coaching program. This exchange is modeled after several recent ones, but is not word-for-word from any of them so all the guilty can stay nameless. If you’re a client reading this, it is the other client I’m talking about. 
New Client: My product isn’t selling well.
Me: Ok. What do you mean? Is the conversion rate bad? How much traffic does the page have?
Coaching Client: We just don’t have many sales.
Me: What’s the conversion rate? How many visitors did the page receive last month and how many people purchased?
Coaching Client: I don’t know. It’s just bad.
Completely Frustrated Me: OK, let’s install something simple such as Google Analytics to at least track the traffic the set a “goal” on the customer thank you page. Then we can get some specific numbers to base our decisions on.
For someone whose site isn’t do well, it could be that they have 2,032 visitors and no one bought their product. Either the traffic sucks (this is totally possible), the offer sucks, or the ad copy sucks.
In other cases, I’ve found out they were converting 4% of their visitors into buyers, but they were only getting 32 visitors a week. So the problem is we need more traffic to the site.
If we don’t get down to specifics, we can’t pinpoint the right problem.
Be specific when you’re taking notes about the daily operation of your business. If you’re writing down how much time you spend on email each day, it’s not “about an hour.” I’ve found “about an hour” sometimes equals 3 or 4 hours. Your website averages 2.3 sales per day and converts at 3.23% percent over the past month, not “a few sales each day.”
Being specific forces yourself to be honest with yourself in your business.
Specifics in Goal Setting
What are the goals for your business? Hopefully it’s not simply to earn a six figure or seven figure income someday.
Exactly how much do you want to earn this year?
How much time will you invest each week to do this?
What are the overriding goals you need to reach this?
How many subscribers will you need?
How many customers?
What is the monthly, weekly, and daily steps you must take to reach this goal?
Be specific in your goals in every area.
Here’s an example outside of business. I decided I wanted to exercise more. That in itself is way too general. So I signed up and paid for a half marathon on September 20th. That gave me an end goal to run 13.1 miles on that day. Since I signed up I’ve been following a half marathon program with specific distances every day until then. So far my longest run has been 6 miles. Yes, ouch.
About half the time I start off each run by thinking what in the world have I gotten myself into, but I’ve been doing it because of the end goal. I’m about as slow as humanly possible, but that doesn’t matter. Without that deadline already set, I would have skipped at least 1/3rd of my workouts.
Specifics in Advertising
Specifics are much more believable than general statements.
For example, You didn’t lose about 20 pounds in the last 30 days. That sounds way too general, like you rounded up, or you just made it up. You lost 19 pounds in the last 29 days. That’s much more specific and believable.
Look for places you can be more specific in your stories and in your examples.
What if you really did lose 20 pounds in exactly 30 days? I’d probably drop it to the 19 pound mark and figure out how many days that was still (obviously if you lost 20 pounds there was a point where you had lost 19 pounds).
Sometimes you might even throw in a specific just in passing. Notice how I told you the half marathon is on September 20th. I could also add it is the yearly USAF one in Dayton, Ohio so no one has to ask.
Be specific in everything.
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7 Responses to “Do You Practice Specifics?”
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Where did you get your blog layout from? I’d like to get one like it for my blog.
Dan: This is Revolution News from http://www.revolutiontheme.com (I have the developer pack so access to all of them).
Terry,
I was always wondering how you got such a professional website like that. Now I know.
Looks very good.
Tal
I can certainly relate to what you write. It could be frustrating. I prefer a higher level of problem than this.
I also use Revolution Theme, they offer impressive theme at an affordable price.
This is one of my biggest problems. I tend to make general goals and think “that is good enough”. I have found when I am specific I am WAY more likely to actually accomplish my goals.
Great post.
You made several points about being specific which I agree with especially setting a specific amount of time reading emails. Before I would spend two hours now I’m spending 30 minutes max. I am one that needs to really hone my goals down to specifics so that I can succeed in my first internet marketing campaign. Three elements to this formula that I can add to are focus, commitment, and patience. Without the focus of having that goal staring at me every morning when I wake up I’ll get sidetracked before I remember where I wrote down my goals. Commitment means that I’ll stick with my goals until I reach them, one at a time. Patience is that I’ll get all of my specific “ducks in a row” then set a start date.
Great article, Terry.
For a while, I’ve wanted to read an article like this, but taken to the next step-
That is, showing the practicals of “measuring” a website.
There’s the technical side- Google Analytics, multi-variate testing, etc. but I think people get stuck on how to THINK about this.
For example, you metioned testing the pictures on your website, finding which converts better. But there are seemingly endless things to measure, (headlines, images, offers, price points, Google adwords, etc) and multiply that by having a several websites… how does one keep track of it all? All this could contradict the “Work Less” part of your mantra.
I’d consider writing this myself, but I’m just not there yet. Love to hear from an expert!
My $.02,
Dave