Goal Setting as an Affiliate

Hey everyone – Kevin here from DropoutGotRich.com (or “KevinMcC” at the forums) back for another guest post.   My first guest post was titled One Money Making Tip That Most Affiliates Fail To Do and I highly recommend you check that one out if you haven’t yet.

In this post I am going to talk about the importance of setting goals to help you grow your business.

When I first started as an affiliate back about 4 years ago I never really knew if I’d be able to make any kind of money online.  I remember my first goal was just to launch a website and try and make my first dollar.  I ended up signing up a few friends for a poker room at got a few CPAs, but my first real website visitor that converted felt amazing.  Once that first dollar was made I started to realize that money could actually be made online.

In the beginning I wasn’t setting many goals, and I was more or less just going with the flow.  That was OK early on, but once I knew I wanted to start getting serious and try to make a full time income out of it I had to start setting goals.

I can’t remember exactly what my goals were back in the first year or so of being an affiliate, but I remember I would always set an income goal.  One month I’d set out to try and make $500, then $600, then $800 and so on.  If I wasn’t on target for my goal that month I’d either start working harder on my website, write a few articles, or sell a few advertising spots.  If I came up short I would get that much more motivated the following month and would work twice as hard.

I wasn’t the smartest webmaster or affiliate back then but I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to be and was always working towards getting there. Setting up goals and a vision of where you want to be will help you get there.

I have 4 main goals that I set, try and accomplish, and then re-set if accomplished.

I have my monthly task goals (which I now post at my blog).  These includes “to-do” types things such as: write 5 blog posts at Site A, do link exchanges with Site B, work on conversions at Site C, etc, etc.

I have monthly income goals.  This is just the amount I am aiming to make in the upcoming month.   With the affiliate business it is a bit of a roller coaster ride, so it is hard to know exactly how much you are going to make, but if you set a goal you can try and work hard to get somewhere in that area.

More important are my yearly income goals.  Month to month it doesn’t matter too much how much I make, but I like to have a big goal in mind for the entire year.  My goal is to grow my income by quite a bit each year.  Having a goal set out before the year begins helps me throughout the year as I can check up to see if I need to get my ass in gear and start working harder.

Lastly I have my “end goal” which is where I want to be down the road.  For me my end goal is to have a business that basically runs on autopilot with little work needed to be done by me.  My ideal life would be living at a cottage or on the beach somewhere for most of the year, signing on my computer for maybe an hour max each morning checking up on The Sports Geek with the rest of the day left to do whatever I feel like doing!

It doesn’t matter what type of goals you decide to set, but it is important to have goals within your business.  When you have goals that you don’t accomplish you will feel like you let yourself down, and that should motivate you to work harder towards your next goal.  When you do accomplish goals you will feel good about yourself, and that should help you continue to want to achieve your goals you set out for.

I like to make sure that I have some very realistic goals, so that I’m not always missing goals.  But I also like to set some goals very high, which gives me a really good challenge.  Don’t be afraid to dream big. If you set your mind to something and believe you can accomplish it – you will.

To wrap things up – setting goals can only help you, and if you are running your own business I highly suggest you start goal setting regularly if you aren’t already doing so.  Nothing is impossible… just remember that when figuring out where you want to be next month, next year, or 10 years down the road.