Every year I set myself a mix of personal and business goals. I try to make them realistic and achievable. I find goal setting helps me change bad behaviours, visualise what success would look like and get my priorities in order.
From talking with a lot of adult content creators I find most don’t have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. It’s rare I meet a creator with clear targets and a plan for getting there.
Goal setting is important throughout the year and should be done for every new project or activity you undertake. I find my annual goal setting to be the most productive and important. Every year I think deeply about what I want to achieve and every year I’m surprised when I hit all my goals.
How to set goals
There’s a lot of business advice on goal setting, many with detailed methods for getting the most out of the exercise. Personally I think if goal setting becomes a big project in itself then it can become demotivating.
And a complex process might generate a very long list of goals, which I also find super unproductive. If you can’t remember your goals then it’s gonna be tough to achieve them.
I like to set two sets of goals, personal and business goals. For many creators these goals may overlap but the way I like to think is that personal goals provide the motivation and hitting business goals is what gets you some of your personal goals.
Goals should also be a mixture of difficulties. Try to put a mix of goals you’d like to achieve by the end of the year, some in the middle and some in the first few months. I would also consider putting at least one super easy goal on your list, I find this makes the list look more achievable and it feels so good to get one done quickly.
Personal goal setting
Setting personal goals is the most fun. It’s a chance to think about where you want to live, what car you want to drive, what travel you want to do this year and other materialistic and altruistic things.
But go beyond this, think deeply about your life and who you are. Is there anything you want to learn? Are there any things you want to improve mentally or physically? Do you have bad behaviours you need to change?
Have fun with the list. Really think about what sort of person you want to be and what your life will look like at the end of this year. Don’t put anything unrealistic on the list and remember to write a few easy ones down for motivation for a quick win to set your year in motion!
Business goal setting
Business goals are a little trickier. It’s easy to focus on money and think there is nothing more to it. But I advise you to forget about money and instead focus on the business goals that will bring money.
Let’s break goals down into areas specific to adult content creators.
Image and brand
Are you happy with your image? is it consistent? Does it need a makeover or refresh? The beginning of the year is a great time to plan your image for the year. Try to look at everything you do as a neutral person, is what you do an accurate reflection of who you are and what you are about?
If not then you should set some image and brand goals. Don’t be afraid to get help from professionals. If your style sucks, hire a stylist. If your brand graphics suck, hire a designer.
Some example goals might include:
- Create a more elegant fashion style
- Focus my image on cosplay and casual cosplay
- Make it more obvious I’m a MILF
- Pick a consistent set of filters and looks for my photos and videos so my content has a unique identity
- Refresh my logo, graphics and identity
- Highlight my interest in healthy eating and yoga more to attract the right fans
Marketing
Marketing adult content can cover a huge amount of things. Maybe you only do one thing right now, in which case you might want to start growing new marketing channels this year. Or you might find that you are spread too thin and you need to focus more on what’s working.
Some of your marketing goals might be targets like grow my Instagram account to a target number of followers. While other goals might focus on activities that will get those followers like posting to IGTV every week. I find focusing on activity goals is particularly important if you are lazy. Setting a goal that commits you to an activity schedule can have a major impact.
When I set goals I set a target based goal if I am already doing an activity and I set an activity based goal if something is new to me and I don’t know what results to expect.
Example marketing goals:
- Post a preview video on the major porn tube sites every week
- Get at least one PR story in the media every 3 months
- Grow my Instagram/Twitter/YouTube/etc followers to 100k
- Create 2 original funny/meme posts each week
- Write a blog post every day
- Find 2 shout outs per day from micro influencers per day
- Get 10 backlinks per week
- Get 80 000 unique visitors on my site each month
- Read a book about pricing and special offers
- Hire a marketing assistant
Product goals
If you just have one product (e.g. your PornHub channel or personal site, etc) you might want to make goals that improve this or you might want to diversify your income.
As a rule I would always try to make one product great before you start a new one but it’s important to diversify your income because as we’ve seen with PornHub Premium, your income can be taken away at anytime in the adult industry.
For your products you might want to set specific financial goals too. But try to be revenue stream rather than platform specific as most platforms have more than one revenue stream and you should focus on the exact area that needs to improve.
Example product goals:
- Make 2 adult videos per week instead of 1
- Setup a FanXO.co profile
- Start selling polaroids or signed photos to fans
- Increase OnlyFans tip revenue to 8000 dollars per month
- Increase ManyVids clip store revenue to 3000 dollars per month
- Open an merchandise store
- Hire an assistant for posting/editing content so I can triple my content production
- Collaborate with 4 other content creators each month
Some adult content creators have a clear plan and don’t need this advice. They are probably already doing very well. But for the rest who are in the middle earning or just starting out, you will make a lot more progress much faster if you take some time to set some realistic goals before you start having fun creating and selling content.
If you need help identifying which areas you need to improve, feel free to contact me and I can take a look at your activity and give you some ideas for improvements.