I am a bit of a self improvement fan – I read as much as I can about it and listen to CD’s on all sorts of subjects from living in the now to the law of attraction, setting goals, positive thinking and everything in between. One of my favorites in this arena is Tony Robbins. Most of you I am sure have heard of him but if you haven’t Tony Robbins is a leader in personal development with numerous books and CDs to his name.

Just before starting this blog post I was listening to a disk from his Personal Power program where Tony talks about the Ultimate Success Formula. He also devotes a whole section of his book – Unlimited Power, to this formula for those of you who may be interested in reading about it in more detail.

As I was listening to it, I figured that this could be applied to blogging just as easily as it applies to other aspects of life. It is a simple process and really we all know it deep down inside but most of us fail to implement it. But since we are just about to hit another new year and I am sure we are all keen and eager to make some worthwhile resolutions, I figure now was the time to get us all in the right frame of mind to make this year a success. And if you have already reached a level of ‘success’ then hopefully this will help to make it even more successful than the last.

What is the Ultimate Success Formula?

The Ultimate Success Formula is made up of 4 steps:

1. Know Your Outcome

This step basically means getting clear about what you want. So setting goals is extremely important here. And believe me, I have seen the power of writing down your goals. Wanda and I use butchers paper when we are planning anything to do with our business. The other day I looked back on some of the old pages and noticed a goal we had set to make $12,000 from Amazon for just one of our websites in November 2009. We had written this some months before when at the time this sort of goal was way out of our league. I remember that Wanda suggested we put down that amount – but I was thinking of something a little more conservative and felt a small knot in my stomach when she mentioned it. But I thought what the hec, let’s just put it down on paper. Well, as any of you who have read our blog post on how much we actually made in that month you will know that we beat that figure and some.

So don’t put off writing down your blogging goals for the year and be bold with it. The best types of goals are those that are a good way beyond what you really think you can accomplish.  So if $100 a day is your goal then triple it and make your goal $300 a day. You want that goal to create a knot in your stomach like the $12,ooo goal did for me.

But just writing down your goals isn’t enough. Tony recommends ‘knowing your outcome’ in everyday situations as well. So for instance, if you have an important meeting you need to attend then decide beforehand what you want to happen. Tony suggests engaging all your senses to describe the results you want. As Tony says, this ‘enpowers your brain to create your desire’. This is something I haven’t tried before but I am going to make it my mission this week to try this out in different situations.

2. Get Yourself to Take Action

I must admit that I have difficulty in taking action. It’s not one of my strong points. Fortunately however Wanda is an action person so although I might have the ideas, she is definitely the one that gets things going with our online business. Ideas are useless without some action behind them. But even so, I have made it a goal just recently to take action more often and you know, it’s working. And the reason it’s working is because of something Tony Robbin mentioned in one of his CD’s. What he said was, the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is that those who succeed take action. This just stuck in my head. I mean just think about it…those who suceed are those who take action…it’s such a simple concept but it is so powerful.

So if you want to get your blog to the level you desire then you need to take action and more specifically, ‘consistent action’. You need to regularly add content, you need to regularly leave blog comments and network, you need to regularly write product reviews and so on. Consistent action is the key to success with anything.

3. Notice What Is Working and What Isn’t

This is where you need to step back and see if what you are doing is getting you closer to your goals. This might mean assessing your progress on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending on the goal you are trying to achieve.

For instance, if you have a traffic plan for your blog that involves leaving 5 blog comments a day and tweeting 10 times a day then at the end of the month you should stop and see which has resulted in the most traffic. In this way, you can see what is working and whether it is worth continuing the process. If the comments worked well then it would be worthwhile increasing it to 10 comments.

4. If You Aren’t Reaching Your Goal Then Keep Trying Until You Do

What this means is that you keep trying until you succeed. It’s like the baby analogy…if a baby gave up after it’s firt attempt to walk then it would never walk. This is the same with you and your online business. You can choose to give up after the first attempt or the second or even the third…or instead you can keep trying until you do succeed.

We literally could have given up hundreds of times but funnily enough, it never even occurred to us to do so. We got depressed and disappointed many a time and often wondered whether it was even possible to make a decent income online. I even remember us deciding that the only people who made money online were those who taught other people how to make money online.  So yes, we could have given up again and again but we never did. For some reason, in the back of our heads we just knew that we had to keep going and we would make it in the end.

So if something isn’t working for you, then change the way you are doing it. There is no point doing the same thing over and over if you aren’t getting results. Focus on what is working for you rather than what isn’t and put all your efforts into it.

Modelling

Tony Robbins finishes up by saying that there is a way of speeding up this entire process and that is through the process of ‘modelling’.  in other words, finding someone who is already a success at what you want to do and modelling off them.

This is something we have consistently done in the past even when we didn’t have much money to invest. We saw it as a way of speeding up the process so we have been students of James Martell, Yaro Starak, Kyle and Carson from Wealthy Affiliate and various other gurus through their ebooks and guides. If we only get one really good piece of advice from each of them then we feel it is worth it.