This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk all about a practical, real-life application of the Align framework.

In fact, I'm going to tell you how I used the Align framework to create the Align framework. It's a behind-the-scenes look at using Align to create an actual mini course, a real-world application of the framework in action, and it'll be a blueprint for you for starting and finishing your own goals. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey. How is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where we're talking once again about the Align framework, which is now released over at alignproductivitycom. And the question for this week is how did that get there? I know a lot of you have probably dreamed about creating your own course or building your own website or starting your own business, and maybe you've even started a time or two, set some goals and fell off the wagon and not gotten those goals achieved. And I know for me personally, this was something that has happened to me time and time again over the years and it's happened to the people that I've coached time and time again, and so I saw a need to develop the Align Framework, which we talked about in the last couple of episodes. In episode 270, we talk about the framework and then in the last episode episode 271, we actually talk about the kinds of goal mistakes that people make that prevent them from achieving their goals and how the Align framework helps correct that.

Well, in this episode we're going to be talking about an actual real-life practical application where I actually used the Align framework to create the Align productivity course over at alignproductivitycom, and the problem was I needed the course because I was ready to take that to a broader audience. So I set a smart goal essentially to create a five-day mini course that I could use to reach a lot of people, and I wanted to launch it in 90 days, complete with a marketing plan and Facebook ads and landing pages and all of the things that you need to do good marketing. And then, in addition to that, I wanted to make sure that that course had this impactful scope that would actually help people achieve their goals, and, in my mind, my vision for the course was something that would last for years, that people would send me emails about and tell me how the application of Align Productivity in their lives changed everything for them. That was the vision that I had for the course and what I really wanted to do, and that's the A in Align it's getting in touch with what it is that you're really trying to accomplish. And for me, the bigger vision is not only building my business, which is important to me, obviously but also this idea that one of the things that gets me really excited is helping people. That's been part of my life since I was a little kid and the Align Productivity Framework was one way that I knew I had proven I could help people and I wanted to take that to a larger audience.

So I assessed my vision in using the Align Framework and that's what I came up with and it culminated in this SMART goal, this 90-day goal, where I wanted to deliver the Align Productivity 5-Day Challenge. So when I broke that down into kind of a set of steps, weekly milestones, like I teach in Align Productivity, obviously in the first couple of weeks I needed to outline the course, write scripts for the course or for me in my case, really outlines for the course or for me in my case really outlines for the videos and then record and edit those videos, and we'll talk about this in a little bit. But part of this also involved me kind of exercising some new platforms that I wanted to try and use and exploring a new space from some of the technical tools that were needed and that included in week six and seven, building out the course platform, moving away from Kajabi, which I was very familiar with, moving away from ConvertKit to Go High Level, which I'm using to deliver the course. All of that took learning and more time than normal. And then in weeks eight through 10, rolling out the course, testing it, improving it, making adjustments to the sales page, the landing pages and stuff like that, and then really start marketing in earnest in weeks 11 and 12. So those were the milestones that I set as part of the Align productivity framework.

In 90 days my vision was to have this completed course out there that was ready for people, that had everything done bonuses, all the things that you need to launch a course marketing sequences, landing pages, landing pages because you know after all, I'm a marketer Everything that I needed to make the course work in terms of return on ad spend and building my list for late night internet marketing and the Mark Mason brand. All of that needed to be complete within 12 weeks. So I set all that up as part of the L in a line. I listed the steps, the major milestones that I needed to complete, and then I was on to the I part of the Align framework, actually initiating action. And so what I did was I envisioned or identified at least three critical tasks every week.

I adopted, as I teach in the Align Framework, this habit of reviewing my work every week and doing the nightly review or really the more important one is the weekly Sunday review to see how the week has gone and what adjustments I needed to make, and my morning coffee where I plan my day, see where I am on my tasks and get a few days ahead on my week. And then making sure that every day, I tried to have at least one deep work session that lasted an hour. This is part of the Align framework, part of what I teach, and it's an hour of focused, distraction-free work. Now, a lot of times, when you're doing something like creating a course, an hour of deep work is involved in recording content or editing content, and so it's really easy to find these one-hour chunks of work that needed to be done. In fact, many times, these deep work sessions had the bonus effect of going on much longer than the hour that I had scheduled, which is really great, because it's one of those things where, when you start something, it becomes a snowball and you're able to get a lot more work done than you anticipated.

I will say that in this process, one of the tools that I relied on the most was this automated scheduling tool that I've been talking about some I'll certainly be talking about more in the future called Motion, and you can find that tool over at alignproductivitycom. Forward slash motion, and that is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to combine the information in your calendar with your project management information and the tasks that you need to get completed by a certain time and when you can work on certain tasks what time of day you've allocated, for example, for your side hustle to combine all that together and tell you what to work on next literally what you should be working on right now. It's an amazing tool. We'll probably have another podcast episode about motion in the future, but I'm really enjoying that tool, and that was critical in helping me manage my actions that I needed to initiate for the accomplishment of this 90-day goal.

So all during this project I was really working through this four-part cycle as I gauged my progress. You know that's the G in the Align framework and of course, one way to gauge your progress is to understand whether or not you hit your 90-day goal. But by the time 90 days gets here, if that's when you're finding out that you didn't hit your goal, that's too late. So really, what you're trying to understand is every week, did you get done what you said you were going to do? And that's why this idea of the weekly review initially, I think, brought forward by David Allen in the Getting Things Done book is so critical. So for me, that's every Sunday night sitting down looking at what I accomplished in the week and just being honest with myself about whether or not I did a good job achieving my goals and where I am with regard to my project schedule. Now, this is another way that Motion is great. It shows me my calendar for the week. The tasks that I complete actually show up on my calendar. I get a visual representation of what I was actually able to accomplish during the week.

But also Motion, because of its inbuilt AI. It understands the impact of what I accomplished during the week on what will happen to my 90-day schedule. So my project is scheduled all the way out to the 90-day due date and if it slips in certain ways it can actually put the 90-day goal in jeopardy. Motion understands this relationship. Property Motion understands this relationship. It understands, for example, that perhaps delaying recording a lesson today will impact the editing, which will impact putting the course up on go high level, which may impact the actual delivery of the course, and it could this one choice that I make today. It can understand how that might impact the whole schedule. It understands the idea of dependencies so it knows, for example, that I need to record a lesson before I can edit that lesson and so I could every week understand whether or not I was going to be on target.

I think also during this weekly review I'm able to identify issues. For example, maybe I've got some energy challenges, Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep, or maybe I need to shift the time of day that I'm trying to do certain things. Maybe I've got some problems in my tech stack that are slowing me down, but I can look through the week and see if I didn't achieve my goals, what were the issues, what worked well, what didn't work well, and I can make adjustments accordingly in the next week. And that's a really powerful idea that's embedded in the G gauging your progress in the Align framework. And finally, once you do an honest accounting of what you did that week and celebrate the things that you got right, you can implement changes to help better prepare for the next week so you can get more and more things right and build up momentum as you proceed through the 90 days of work. So that gauging progress thing, it's really important and I find, when I'm teaching the topics involved in the Align Productivity Framework, that this honest keeping of the score and a willingness to evaluate it and understand what it means and what you can do about it without beating yourself up is one of the key missing things and that's why G is such an important letter in the Align Framework.

And then, finally, nurturing Habits, this idea of habit stacking. For me it was two main habits. The best example is I love to go down to Starbucks. In my building at my day job they have a Starbucks and I love to get to work way before I'm supposed to start working, sometimes at six o'clock in the morning, and go down to Starbucks and get a cup of coffee and sit there and plan my day. Some of that planning is the work I need to do for my day job. Other parts of that planning are work that I need to do for my side hustle and I'm getting that all planned out for the day and looking forward in the week, trying to do that every day.

That daily planning habit stack goes with the coffee. Not only is it a trigger for the planning, because after all, I'm sitting there in Starbucks with my laptop, but it's also a reward for doing the planning. It's like what do I get if I invest in the organization of my day? I get a fantastic cup of coffee from my favorite barista at Starbucks and then, of course, celebrating wins. I did a lot of that and one of the best ways that I celebrated was being able to tell my wife that I was making concrete progress on this project which she had challenged me to complete. So there's a lot of things there. There's this shared accountability, where she was kind of like my accountability partner for the project, but she also was goading me a little bit, because she's fun like that and, you know, kind of challenging me to see if I could do it. So whenever I made progress, I would. I was able to go up to her desk, which is upstairs, and claim victory, and that was really great. One of my favorite ways to celebrate wins was sharing those victories with my wife.

And then, finally, one of the habits that was interesting that came out of this was sort of a discovery for me was this idea of buffer time and planning for setbacks, and it's actually not setbacks so much, but one of the things that I found was that a lot of the tasks, particularly video content creation and editing, took longer than I expected, for whatever reason. I guess I was really trying to get things right. I did a lot of editing, I did a lot of retakes, I tried to put as much quality into the course as I can and of course I'm no newbie at creating audio and video content but it just everything that I thought was going to take an hour took an hour and a half, and so I had those kind of setbacks, and so I had to constantly reevaluate the schedule to the point where planning some buffer time became a habit where I was sandbagging a little bit because I started recognizing that when I was honest about keeping score, I wasn't able to do things as quickly as I thought I would do them. So the recap of this looks like this I got really clear about my vision for this course, about who it was going to help and why I wanted to do it and why I wanted to do it. And I set myself a clear and compelling goal to get this large, heavyweight lead magnet essentially a self-liquidating offer lead magnet out into the wild in 90 days. And then I did some careful planning. I actually used ChatGPT pretty heavily to help me list out the 12 milestones in a 12-week plan, just like I teach in Align Productivity, so that every week I knew exactly what I was working on. And then in the initiate action phase I was as rigorous as I could be. I had as much integrity as I could muster about executing those plans week by week, day by day, and I used this amazing tool called Motion to help me get things scheduled and keep me on track and alert me when I was falling behind. Really in love with that tool. Definitely recommend that you give it a free trial. Try over at alignproductivitycom forward slash motion.

And then I gauged my progress. Every Sunday night I sat down, I assessed where I was and I tried to be honest about what I needed to do to do better next week without beating myself up too much. And then I built some habits along the way and some of them involved coffee. And you know, dave, ramsey would not like me spending $3.50 every morning on coffee instead of putting that in my Roth IRA, but for me that was my reward for staying focused and staying on track and I think for me the ROI of that was much higher than what Ramsey would have you do with the money which is put it in your Roth IRA. I'm joking, dave, I know you listen to the podcast and I'm just pulling your chain a little bit, buddy.

So a call to action for you is to go check out Align Productivity, of course at alignproductivitycom. I would love to see you inside the course and as a listener of this podcast. For a limited time you can use the coupon code APFREE25. That's Alpha Papa Free 25 to get the course for free, the base course, absolutely for free and check it out, see what you think. If you choose to do that, I would love if you could repay me with the kindness of some feedback in the form of a review or a criticism or anything that you feel is appropriate. Send me an email, let me know what you think about the course and, of course, you can reach me at feedback at latenightimcom. In any case, that coupon code will be available for a short time After that. The course is still very affordable. I'd like you to try it yourself and see if you can apply the Align framework to your business and let me know how it goes for you. So that's what I have for you this week with regards to the Align Framework.

Next week we're going to get sort of back to normal. I was reminiscing with a friend of mine about how I first heard about Zig Ziglar. That's a great story I'd love to tell you, and I'd like to tell you about the three most important things I learned from Zig 40 years ago that I still think are absolutely critical today. That will help you in your life, in your business journey. Until next week, I am Mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas. Ciao, you can do it right when it's late at night.

You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit LNIMpodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time, hey. So thanks so much for listening.

I would love it if you get a chance to go over and check out the Align Productivity Framework Again. If you do that quickly, you can use the coupon code APFREE25 to get the course for free. I would love, if you do that quickly, you can use the coupon code AP free 25 to get the course for free. I would love if you do that, because you know I'm using a whole new tech stack over there. I'm using go high level, which you can check out. I I'm really loving high level. You can check that out over at mark Masoncom forward slash, g, h, l and you can get an amazing free trial and check out go high level.

If you're like I am and you're using a thousand legacy things WordPress hosting, a landing page tool, an email tool I use a convert kit, which I actually love, kajabi, just all of these different tools A tool for forums, a tool for scheduling, zoom meetings, you know, I mean it's just on and on and on. You can just go over to markmasoncom slash GHL and get everything you need pretty much in one spot and it works. It's a thriving tool. It's interesting. The tool is really built for people who want to build software as a service marketing agencies because you can buy the $297 or $497 a month package and host as many websites and have as many sub accounts with as many clients as you want. So if you're a web services business and you're building websites for clients and those clients want to be able to log into their backend and follow up on leads and do all this kind of customer relationship management stuff, it does all of that and it's amazing. At the $97 level you get all of that for three accounts, which is enough to run almost any online business.

So, of all the things that I've seen, for people like us that want to have landing pages and websites and blogs and deliver courses and conduct surveys, have an email autoresponder All of the things that we need to do in a normal business Go High Level is just amazing for that and I encourage you to try that out over at markmasoncom forward slash GHL.

Anyway, we got off on that topic of GHL because everything is new. So if you do check out Align Productivity and you have feedback on the look and feel, how the emails are, whether or not all the buttons work and so forth the checkout page, anything that you see or have problems with, whether or not the coupon code works right, any kind of little ticky tacky thing that you'd like to give feedback on, I'm very interested because this is the first time I've really tried to do a sizable launch on the GHL platform and I'd love to hear your feedback. So that's it for me today. I hope you have an amazing week that's incredibly productive. I'll see you next week when I tell you all the stuff I learned from Zig Ziglar. Ciao,