Aim both high and low? What on earth am I talking about?
I'm talking about setting goals for your online marketing efforts.
It has often been said that too many people are scared of making money! It sounds bizarre, but it's true. They have been brought up to believe that if you work hard at school, you will get a good job, and if you work hard in your job, you will earn a good salary. This is so deeply engrained into peoples' minds that if they find a way of making a lot more money with less effort, they don't believe that they deserve it. This creates a feeling of guilt and as a result, they don't put in the required effort and they fail. They go back to their day job, thinking that they have proved that they can't do it and that it's not for them.
I have a different view of all this. I know I can succeed online. My problem is that I do have a day-job, and I have a family. These both put demands on me and I find it difficult to find the time or energy to concentrate on my online businesses.
So that I don't lose faith and interest in what I am doing, I set myself some goals. I have long-term, medium-term and short-term goals. Here are some examples:
Long-term goal: To become financially independent within 3 years.
Medium-term goal: To match the salary I get from my day-job in online earnings within 2 years.
Short-term goal: To earn £10 per day online.
My long-term and medium-term goals sometimes look hard to achieve, but if I aim lower, I'll be depriving myself of my true desires.
My short-term goal is a lot more modest. I could earn £10 (about $15) per day just by selling one item every day, or a higher priced item every 2 days etc. That sounds relatively easy to achieve, so that is what I am working on.
Multiple Goals
You don't have to have just one short-term, one medium-term and one long-term goal. Here are some more of my goals (in no particular order):
Short-term: To buy a better car before the end of the year.
Medium-term: To be driving a new, top-of-the-range Alfa Romeo before the end of next year.
Long-term: To pay off my mortgage.
Medium-term: To cover my mortgage payments entirely by income from Google AdSense. (Don't you just love the idea of Ads by Google paying your mortgage?)
Another View
I live a long way from my place of work, and it costs me about £10 per day in petrol (gasoline) to drive to and from work. So if I can earn £10 per day online, that has paid for my travel expenses. (Ok, if I factor in the tax that must pay on my £10 per day earnings, it's not enough to cover my costs, but in general terms it is a lot easier to think of it as covering it).
Some time ago I sat down and worked out how much I need to earn each day to cover various expenses, such as car insurance, utility bills, local taxes. It's easy. Just take your bills for 1 year, add them up and divide by 365. Then you can think of your online income as covering that bill, or more than one of them.
Reaching a Goal
When checking to see whether a goal has been achieved, you have to be careful. Just because you earned £10 every day for a week, it doesn't mean you've reached the goal. The next week, you might not make any sales. On the other hand, the week after, you might make £30 per day.
Furthermore, sales are NOT going to be that regular. I might sell 3 items on day 1, not sell anything for 5 days, and then sell 4 more items. The point is that you know when you have reached the goal when the amount averages out to your target figure.
Updated Goals
Once you have reached a goal, there's no point in resting on your laurels. Remember you have more ambitious longer-term goals to achieve. You use the short-term goals as way-points or milestones towards achieving those longer-term goals.
So as soon as you are confident that you have reached your short-term goal, aim at a new, higher goal. But don't just change it to "Earn £20 per day online". Now that you have experience and know how to earn that original £10 per day, you should be able to do much better by duplicating what you have done several times over. So make your next goal considerably higher. How about £50 per day? One that I like to use is a factor of 7. Why? Because I like the idea that I can earn the same amount in 1 day that I used to earn in one week.
Setbacks
Everyone gets setbacks in their online marketing efforts, especially beginners. Modify your goals accordingly if you really think they are too ambitious. Go down to £1 per day, but keep the higher goals in the back of your mind.
Basically, what I am saying is that you need to have real goals otherwise you'll end up bumbling along or giving up. Write down your goals and stick them on the wall over your PC screen. Paste photos of things you desire onto the paper. What do you want? An Aston Martin car? Set a goal and stick a picture up to remind you. A vintage 1962 Fender guitar? Set a goal and stick a picture of it up to remind you. That house with the expansive garden you drive past every day? Set a goal and stick a picture of it up to remind you.
Build Up To It
Yes, you want the money and the fancy lifestyle as soon as possible, but in reality, you're not going to achieve most of it this year, next year or the year after. It takes time to become financially independent, and the journey there is actually more important. If you won millions on the lottery, you wouldn't know what to do with it. The majority of big lottery winners end up blowing the lot and after a few years of decadence, they're back where they were before they started. Sometimes they end up worse off; their homes and cars are repossesed, they end up in debt, and all their friends have disappeared.
By building up your income gradually, you ease yourself into the higher lifestyle bit-by-bit. You appreciate the value of your efforts and the value of the money that you've made, and you're less likely to squander it.
By setting goals, I now have a vision of where I might be in 1, 2 or 3 years time, and a route map of how to get there. There may be several diversions along the way, but I'll get there eventually.
If you follow this blog, you'll see if I'm achieving those goals as I report on my progress.
For now, my short-term goals are:
- To release 2 sellable products by the end of 2010. (I'll be releasing my first soon)
- To earn at least £10 ($15) per day.
Now, go away, sit down in a quiet place, take stock of your life, decide what you want and what you need to get it, break it down into manageable chunks and set some goals. You'll be glad you did. It makes planning your online marketing strategies a lot easier.
