Travis Thomas . Com

With my return to regular blogging and new mission to turn this blog into a profitable segment of my business, I sat down last night and started working on my goals for this site.

One very important thing that I’ve learned in life is that, no matter what you’re doing, setting good goals is incredibly important.  Whether it’s planning out what you want to do with your house or growing your own business, goal setting is the first step to ensuring success.

Whether we think about it or not, we all set goals constantly in our daily lives - your daily todo list is really just a type of very specific, short term goals.

But, in internet marketing, like any business, having a set of written goals for your business is vitally important to your long term success.  Why?  Because without setting those specific goals for how you want your business to grow you have no direction and will end up floundering.

So, what makes a good goal?  Obviously, that depends on your specific case and business…  but, there are a couple general rules I follow in any goal setting session:

• A good goal is a SMART goal - more on this in a moment
• Set goals for the short term, intermediate term, and long term to guide your business decisions.

SMART Goal Setting

If you’e ever read any time management or personal development books, you’ve probably seen this acronym before…  A SMART goal is:

• S - Specific
• M - Measurable
• A - Attainable
• R - Realistic
• T - Timely

A goal is specific when it sets a very precise outcome.  Being specific with our gols allows us to focus our efforts and clearly define what we are going to do.  Specific goals are the What, Why, and How of goal setting.  Ensure that your goals are specific, clear, and easy to understand - instead of setting a goal of “I’m going to lose weight”, set the goal of “I’m going to lose 20lbs by Christmas”.

Setting measurable goals is very important to having good goals for your business.  Simply put, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  When a goal is measurable, you can actually see the change or improvement.  In our previous example, “I’m going to lose weight” is not measurable - if you only lost 1lb, were you successful in achieving your goal?  You don’t really know since you didn’t put a measurable value on it.  Establish specific, measurable criteria for success with every goal you set.

The middle two letters of the acronym, attainable and realistic really go hand-in-hand.  The idea behind a good goal is to stretch your or your business’ performance, but to do so in a way that you can actually accomplish.  This doesn’t mean to make it easy, just don’t set such a lofty goal that you can never hope to achieve it.  For a beginning internet marketer, it’s probably not very realistic to set a goal of making $10,000 a month within 3 months - you’ve got too much to learn to realistically expect that outcome.  You may hit it, but the odds are you won’t.

The last part of setting goals is that all goals should be timely.  Setting timely goals simply means that you put some sort of timeframe on that goal.  If your time frame is too vague, there is no urgency to complete it or accomplish what you’ve set out to do.  The timeframe for your goals must be measurable, attainable, and realistic.

Let’s just take a look at a couple good and bad goals to show this in action:

• Have 300 unique visitors to my web site per day within 3 months - this is a good SMART goal.  It’s very specific, timely, and should be fairly attainable and realistic.
• Make money in affiliate marketing - Well, this goal is just not very good.  It’s not specific and it doesn’t put any sort of timeframe on it.  There’s no urgency and making 1 measly dollar would satisfy it due to it’s extreme vagueness.
• Have a blog online - This isn’t that bad.  It’s specific and sets a realistic and attainable desired outcome (setting up a blog).  Where it falls short is that it doesn’t put any sort of deadline on the goal.  
• Have a blog online by the end of the week - This is good.  It takes the same goal as above, but puts a very specific deadline for accomplishing the goal.

When I set my goals for this blog and any other business venture, I always set short term, intermediate, and long term goals.  Short term goals are ones that you accomplish within a week to a month.  Intermediate are those 3-6 month goals and long term goals are looking a year or more out at a time.  These goals should all work together and build on each other to help your business grow and thrive:

Short Term Goal:  Have consistent traffic of 50 visitors per day within 1 month.

Intermediate Goal:  300 unique visitors per day within 3 months.

Long Term Goal:  3,000 unique visitors per day within 1 year.

These goals are all very specific, set precise time frames, and have (somewhat) attainable and realistic objectives.  

The next important thing to do is to break down each of your goals into an action plan.  If your goals meet the SMART criteria, breaking them down to specific daily or weekly tasks to accomplish them should be no problem.

Good luck and have a great day!