How would you like to find more motivation for working on your internet business goals (or your personal goals for that matter)?

One of my favorite stories from Work Less & Play More talks about how the author, Steven Catlin, motivated himself at work. He taped giant pictures of money, the amount he earned after taxes, up in his office. He worked at a terrible job and was holding on just long enough to finish saving money and paying off debts. The huge pictures of money helped him focus on that goal. Now, if you hate running your internet business that much then you’re in serious trouble. But I still like the idea of making your goals crystal clear and in your face.

One of my personal goals, which is most of the reason for our business goals, did a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on me. We want to build up our internet income so we’re able to do lots of extended world traveling. Really a lot of budget travel so I guess you could call it backpacking. Even if we don’t earn enough to quit our day jobs for good, it should still help our trips last longer.

Anyway, I regularly take breaks to look through our copy of Lonely Planet’s Europe On A Shoestring, check airfare, read hostel reviews, etc. That dangling travel carrot used to motivate me but the first couple of months this year I really struggled getting enough work done because of the travel bug. Instead of researching niches and building up our websites, I looked at backpacks and other gear. Yeah, I even started calling it gear. Until a few months ago I didn’t even know people called it that.

The point is, between my day job kicking back into overdrive, for weeks I only had 1 to 2 hours to work on our websites before bed, and wasting the little bit of free time I had surfing travel websites, we didn’t make enough progress toward meeting the business goals. I tried embracing the travel itch again and using it as fuel at first. Failed miserably. I tinkered around and tinkered around and then accidentally found one thing that helped a lot.

An unopened Eagle Creek silk money belt sits right in front of my monitor. I originally bought it as part of our super slow prepping for an overseas trip next year. It stayed on the desk because I couldn’t decide between it and the Eagle Creek deluxe money belt. I kept it there as a reminder to possibly exchange it (either one should protect a passport, cash, and other documents just fine but I couldn’t decide which material would be best). Keeping it on the desk had an interesting side effect though. Every day I see it sitting there staring at me saying “increase your profits and take me to Munich!” I’m not kidding. It really says that I swear! I’ll start wasting time, glance down, it starts talking about ROI and gaining subscribers, and back to work I go.

Once I realized what was happening, I remembered a lot of things I’d read about using visual aids for your goals. Some people make dream boards or dream books or vision boards or whatever. I’m such a visual person that it’s amazing I forgot about this little trick.

We’re going to Mexico soon as a baby, baby trial run (backpacks, money belts, and all) for our bigger adventures next year. When we get back I’m taping a picture of us on the beach to the monitor too. I can already tell the picture and the money belt will have some crazy conversations. Maybe the picture will teach the moneybelt Spanish?

I’m a big fan of setting personal and business goals. I’d written down my goals, which I think is a critical step, but doing this too helped tons. So what are your goals? Can you find a small item or a picture to represent them?

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Needs to stop reading travel gear reviews.

Related articles:

1. Struggling To Set Business Goals For 2008
2. Starting The Right Small Internet Business For You – Part 1
3. Learning Spanish

Image courtesy of Stephen Barnett

Every internet business owner should eat a frog first thing in the morning. No, I don’t mean start your day by literally eating a hoppity-hopping living frog for breakfast. It’s a clever metaphor from a book called Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy. So what are frogs and what are the frogs in your budding internet empire?

A frog is any task that’s critical to your success, you’re likely to put off doing, and would have the most impact if you finished it. Frogs are yucky. Who really wants to wake up, roll out of bed, and munch on a slimy frog? Everyone needs to do certain things on their to-do list that are vital to the health of their internet business. A whole lot of other things are much more fun but won’t give you as much bang for your buck.

The frog is different for everyone and might change daily. Often for me, content and marketing both are frogs. Uh, oh. Without quality content people don’t have a reason to stay on our websites. Without good marketing people don’t visit our websites in the first place. Let me tell ya, those are some big, fat, juicy frogs. What do you do about your frogs?

• Don’t start your day by checking AdSense stats.
• Don’t start your day by upgrading WordPress plugins.
• Don’t start your day by poking around a webmaster forum.

Those things aren’t frogs. A bunch of other things, like checking email and Twitter updates, aren’t frogs either. Ignore them until after breakfast.

Start your day by doing the one thing that’s most important to making your internet business more successful. If that’s producing content then sit down and start cranking out the prose. If that’s marketing then start building links and creating buzz. Until you’ve swallowed the last bite of that poor little amphibian, everything else sits idle.

Eating frogs might be painful but it works amazingly well. Why? Those squiggly, little dudes force you to live by the 80/20 principle and become a more action oriented person.

A couple of frogs hopped around our place last Saturday. It took some willpower that morning, because I really wanted to do something else, but I ate them up. The rest of the day we got to goof off without guilt and it was awesome. Eating that frog took a lot less willpower than normal because I had just read an article about Elmore Leonard, the author of Get Shorty and Out of Sight, a few days earlier. Here’s one of the nuggets I pulled from it:

I began training for the writing life in 1951, getting up at 5:00 a.m. and writing for two hours before going to work at an ad agency. My one rule: I had to start writing, get into a scene, before I could put the water on for coffee. Two pages a day in the early hours allowed me to turn out five books, all westerns, and over 30 short stories in the next ten years.

Now that’s a man who isn’t afraid to eat a frog.

So here’s the funny part about this book. It helped me and I haven’t even gotten around to reading the whole thing. I read the first chapter or so, decided I’d try it right away, and started eating frogs for the next few weeks. It worked wonders for me and probably will for you too. The subtitle is 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by the way. Now I need to finish the rest of the book to learn the other 20 ways to get more done in less time

Are any of you frog eaters?

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Never sure which part of the frog to start eating first.

One of our goals for the last few years was to learn Spanish. We both had years of Spanish in high school and college but lost most of what little proficiency we had. I decided a few weeks ago that “wanting to learn Spanish” wasn’t a real goal. It wasn’t a real goal because I didn’t have a written plan with objectives, steps to execute, desired outcomes, and timelines. So I created one.

Step 1 – Research

We learned to speak and read English as children by hearing words, seeing things around us, and speaking. When we were taught Spanish it focused on the parts of speech, conjugation, and memorization. Since when do people learn the parts of speech before learning to speak their native tongue? They don’t and that’s the idea behind the Rosetta Stone software which I discovered during the research phase.

Step 2 – Purchase

I ordered Rosetta Stone Spanish (Latin America) Level 1, 2, & 3 from Amazon about a week ago, it just arrived, and we installed it today.

Step 3 – Study

Study it at least three days per week every week starting this week.

Step 4 – Practice

Practice with each other at least one day per week every week beginning this week.

Step 5 – Scrimmage

Converse with a native speaker at least once per month beginning next month (this month is half over already).

Step 6 – Game

Travel to a Spanish-speaking country (preferably Spain or Argentina) within the next year and speak Spanish with the locals more than english.

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Related articles:

1. Using Visual Aids As Motivation For Reaching Your Internet Business Goals