When it comes to starting an online business, you need to set goals for yourself, and that’s no different for people who want to be affiliate bloggers. Setting goals for your business can mean the difference between being successful and being a complete failure, so don’t skip setting goals! They are absolutely vital to your success!
The best way to get started with setting goals for yourself and your blog is to keep it simple but to also challenge yourself. Your goals will change as times goes on, but at the beginning of your journey make sure you keep things simple. You want to make sure that you’re setting goals that you can actually achieve so you get some “wins” in the beginning to fuel you to push harder. If you fail over and over again your motivation will take a serious hit, and you will end up quitting before you even have a chance to succeed.
To get you started, let’s first talk about the “categories” your goals will fit into as an affiliate blogger.
Tip: Make sure you have some kind of analytics on your blog from day 1. If you can’t measure your results, you won’t know if you meet some of your specific goals or not.
Income Goals – When you first get started your income is going to be very small. It takes a while to get to the big money, but once you reach one income goal, set another one and repeat that process to infinity.
Traffic Goals – Traffic is something you’re going to need to work on every day for your blog. If you’re not getting traffic, you won’t be making any money, so you want to have goals related to getting traffic.
Content Goals – There are all kinds of goals you can set for content. From creating it to how well it converts your readers into buyers, and everything in between.
Metric Goals – Your metrics will be shown to you through whatever analytics that you’re using on your blog. You should always work to raise your metrics. Things like conversions, clicks, bounce rates, time on your site, etc.
Productivity Goals – Focus and actually getting things done is one of the biggest problems that affiliate bloggers face. You should have goals that help you to be productive and get all of the different parts of your work completed.
Now having all of these goals is great, but you need to get them down on paper. You can either go “old school” and write them down with pen and paper or you can go digital and put them in a Word document or some kind of spreadsheet, but you must have them somewhere that you’re constantly reminded of them. The old saying “out of sight, out of mind” is true and if you’re not constantly reminded of your goals you will forget about them.
Here are some example goals to set when you’re getting started with your affiliate blog:
1. A timeline for when you will have your blog setup and ready for you to start creating content. (Productivity goal)
2. The creation of X amount of posts per week. (Content goal)
3. Make $100 in a 30 day period. (Income goal)
4. Getting X amount of visitors to your blog in a 30 day period. (Traffic goal)
5. Working on your business for X hours a day. (Productivity goal)
Those are just examples, and you can set any goals that you want, but you need some goals to get started to keep you focused and moving forward. Once you’ve gotten into the groove of things and you’ve gotten through the beginning stages of getting your blog going, then your goals will change. They will get bigger and be more specific.
Tip: As you start making money from your blog, creating a monthly income report post can really help you keep track of your goals. This is simply a post you make talking about how much money you made, marketing strategies you tried, traffic sources and how much traffic you got, etc. Do a Google search for “blog income report” and you’ll see that a lot of bloggers do this (depending on their niche). You could even keep this private just for you, but it’s a great way to help you achieve and set bigger goals.
Here are some examples of other goals you might set for your blog as you start achieving success with your blog.
1. Consistently make $xx,xxx per month with your blog (Income goal)
2. Consistently get X amount of visits to your blog per month (Traffic goal)
3. Decrease the bounce rate overall on your blog. (Metric goal)
4. Increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site by X amount of time. (Metric goal)
5. Update old content that is on your blog. (Content goal)
And of course, there are so many more goals that you will have, and you’ll figure those out as you go. Your goals will show themselves!
The most important thing as I said is that you are constantly setting goals, constantly working to achieve those goals, and setting new goals when you do achieve them. Don’t ever stop learning, getting better, or earning more money.
I recommend that you join some Facebook groups or forums on the topic of affiliate marketing and talk with others about goals that they set and how they’re achieving them. When you work with and learn from others, you’ll get more ideas for goals you can set and even achieve them quicker by seeing what other people are doing. Affiliate marketers are a great group of people and are always willing to “flex their knowledge” to help a fellow affiliate marketer succeed. Not only will you meet your goals, but you’ll be learning more too!
Here’s the most important thing though. Don’t be afraid to fail. Every fail is a learning experience and when you fail to meet your goals, step back and analyze why, and then set a new goal that you can achieve. After every failure you will be that much closer to success. Just don’t stop going after those goals!
Affiliate Marketer – Rookie to Pro is an eBook where I teach you how to set up an affiliate marketing business to operate from the comfort of your own home. I also give you bonuses to help you get traffic to your affiliate offers. Check out Affiliate Marketer – Rookie to Pro here!
>>> SIX FIGURE CONFESSION <<<
Mark Hess is one of the few “Good Guys” in Internet Marketing. I’ve purchased quite a few of his products because of the high-quality content and his honest approach to marketing. If you want or need more than an eBook to learn about affiliate marketing, then you need to get your hands on his Six Figure Confession video course.
