Making Goals For 2008
January 5, 2008 by Adam
Filed under Personal Development
In my last post, I wrote about how I managed to break most of my goals for 2007. These occurred out of hard work and continued perseverance online (despite a slow down over the past couple of months).
In any case, I think that it’s really important that everyone makes goals - and not only yearly ones. These goals should be as frequent as you like, and should incorporate every aspect of your life, to make sure that you’re not focusing solely on one of your potentially many routes.
Last year I wrote a post called Resolutions and Targets for 2007, and because it gave me so much joy to break those goals, I thought that it would be wise to write up some goals here for the blogosphere to see (and to keep me on track). However, whilst reading Maki’s post on 2008 Goals, I found an interesting paragraph that I wanted to share with you.
Goals are pathway markers and destination points. But they are also simply thoughts, conjured up and made concrete in one decisive moment. You can change them as easily as you flick a light switch. It takes less than five seconds. Try it.
I found this really thought provoking, and actually started to wonder about the benefits of making goals in the first place. So I came up with some reasons to support the notion of me jotting down some targets.
The Advantage Of Making Goals
- It keeps you focused
- It concentrates your brain energy on a few important targets
- It helps to influence and improve other areas of your life indirectly
- It can lead to greater efficiency when working
- It will inevitably cause you to be more organised - something which can make you feel less stressed out and more relaxed
Are there any more that I’ve missed out?
Without getting to deep, I wanted to list down some of my own personal goals for the coming year, so that maybe I can look back in a year’s time to see how well I’ve progressed. Please bear in mind that these goals are all to do with the online world - I’m yet to decide on some offline targets!
1. Increase blog earnings to $1,000 per month
This is my first goal, because it’s probably the easiest to measure (given that I have an income spreadsheet which I update every month). At the moment, I make $600 per month from my web efforts, which include blogging, consulting and a tiny bit of affiliate marketing. However, I know that I’m leaving money on the table, especially with this blog.
Therefore, I plan to increase my monetization efforts (like how Tyler Cruz has done), and initially lower advertising rates to increase demand for the blog advertising space. I think that within a year, and with continued blog growth, I can be pushing $1000 per month solely from this blog pretty easily.
2. Increase PPC Affiliate Marketing earnings to $500 per month
Whilst I expect affiliate marketing income from this blog to increase by a big margin, I also want to become a reasonably good Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Marketer using Adwords, Yahoo and MSN Adcenter. I’ve only dabbled with these so far to produce minimal profits, but I can see this becoming a fun way of earning some more money. I would suggest reading forums like Wickedfire to really gain some knowledge in this area - I’m sure it’s a topic that I’m going to talk a lot about this year.
3. Build RSS readership on Blogtrepreneur to 1000 readers within 1 month and 2000 readers by the end of the year.
Reaching 1k in RSS readers shouldn’t be too hard considering that I’m on around 930 readers at the moment - but it will definitely be great to finally reach that 4-figured marker. Gaining an additional 1000 readers on top of that will be a good challenge, and I’ve got several ways of accomplishing this, including using the true power of virality and social media to gain readers quickly.
4. Build an email list of 500 double opt-in subscribers
Again, lots of people like Yaro have explained the benefits of having an email list - especially when it comes to monetization and affiliate marketing, and I think I can use this blog as a means to gaining these subscribers.
Possible software programs I might use in this could be Aweber, GetResponse or iContact (which is run by a fellow young entrepreneur named Ryan Allis).
5. Continue to build small niche sites
I think that there is a lot of potential for these smaller niche sites (which can be monetized through affiliate programs) if you have the right SEO knowledge. Fortunately, using Wordpress has allowed me to get an insight into what’s needed to gain top rankings in Google for certain keywords and keyphrases.
Teenage Entrepreneur is a great example of a site that’s achieved some awesome rankings, and I think that this strategy can be repeated with a more popular niche that can drive some good traffic.
6. Continue to meet people online and share knowledge
I know that this is a repeat from last year, however this is one of my most important goals for 2008. In 2007, I met some great entrepreneurs all over the world, and they’ve provided me with sources of inspiration and determination. I would like to give everyone who’s been in touch with me some linklove, however that would take up at least another blog post, so thankyou if I’ve spoken to you or emailed you.
I really want to do more of the same in 2008, as I feel that there are a lot of people on the net who have great ideas, some great skills and a real entrepreneurial mindset. Sharing knowledge is also very important to me - as it will allow others to reach the stages I’m at now in a shorter time frame. Hopefully Blog Consulting will help me achieve this.
Whilst these are 6 goals, this is definitely not the end of my list. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it’s important to keep re-examining your position and to adjust your goals appropriately in order to get the most out of your year and to become an efficient worker. Meeting goals at the end of 2008 is the best part, as it really allows you to reflect on how far you’ve come, so go on and write some targets for yourself.
Like before, I want to open this post up for discussion - what are your goals (both online and offline) for 2008?
The best of luck with your goals Adnan, you are definitely on the right track at this point, keep it up and there’s no stopping you
Alan Johnson
Those are quite ambitious targets you have there, hope you manage to achieve them. I think mine are going to be a bit more modest, when I eventually get round to writing them all down (several of mine are offline targets though rather than being based on websites).
@ Alan: thanks for dropping by mate and for the warm words. Hope you do well too with your site.
@ Paul: lol you’re the second person to say that they’re ambitious - I thought they seemed relatively easy (I’m having second thoughts now though
).
Good luck with your 2008 - incidentally, I havn’t spoken to you in absolutely ages! How are things?
Your goals seem ambitious but achievable. Goals should push you a bit. I think they are easily within range.
Great to see you setting these goals, I can see you’re back on track now.
Am I correct that you are working on updating your advertising offerings and prices?
Thanks Aaron - I too think they are within range if I can pull my socks up and really crank up the content here.
@ Dave: thanks man - it feels good to be organised and back on track once again with a fresh set of goals to be broken.
And yes you are correct. I’ve actually just been implementing a new advertising plugin for Wordpress which I should have a review up about tomorrow - and after that - you should be seeing a post on advertising changes and prices.
Hopefully that should help me achieve me $1k earnings goal!
Good decision Adnan, you should never be shy when it comes to monetizing your website as long as you provide useful content on a regular basis (let’s face it, people don’t visit a certain website based on the number of ads it has, they visit it in order to have access to useful information).
Alan Johnson
Great decision adnan! I can’t wait to see the future of blogtrepreneur.
Making, and sticking to goals is absolutely paramount in ensuring you maximize the possibility for success in my opinion. Excellent post.
Justin, there are sadly a lot of people who neglect your second suggestion, make goals, feel motivated for a relatively short amount of time and then give up. Lack of determination is definitely something which ruins things for a lot of people with great potential.
Alan Johnson
Your goals that you set for this year seems very easy to achieve, if you are passionate about blogging you will definitive surpass your marks, great site you have here !!
Good post….u look very focused and organized….keep up….wish you the best in 2008..
I loved what you wrote - and you’re very brave to make your goals public. Now I guess you’ll have to reach them!
Over the past few years I’ve learned to appreciate the value of goals and how to use them more effectively. A method that works for me is to break my yearly goals into 90-Day Goals complete with action steps that move me towards my One Year Goals.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Victor, I agree 100% that Adnan will not be facing any issues with achieving his goals, especially if he continues posting great content on a regular basis like he has been doing recently
Alan Johnson
I’m not sure why anyone would say these goals are too much. As I stated before I think they are easily attainable. It’s not unreasonable to have 1k-5k RSS subscribers if you work at it. I mean John Chow got 3k in his first year. That obviously took a lot of work but he did it.
@ Alan: you’re right in theory - people do visit a page for the content for the most part - but having an abundance of ads does take away from the content, in that it becomes hard to read and generally quite off-putting. That’s the boat I find myself in whenever I see a piece of text with Kontera In-Links in them or something similar.
@ Josh: thanks man, and loving your new redesign!
@ Justin: thanks dude and yeah I would definitely recommend making goals (although you don’t have to make it public like I’ve done).
@ Victor: hehe yeah, the hard part is trying to stay motivated in achieving those goals which is something that Alan touched upon too - it seems like January is all the rave when it comes to making goals, but the rest of the year becomes a time when all is too easy to break them again.
@ Azeem: thanks!
@ Andrea: hehe exactly, I’ve got my whole readership looking at me now and scrutinizing my every move (joke
). 90 day goals is actually a very good idea. As I mentioned in the post, you shouldn’t just make goals at the beginning of January. If possible, making daily goals is the best way to increase productivity and to hold yourself accountable for targets that you didn’t hit.
@ Aaron: lol - yeah. I would say to everyone that goals are easier to achieve when you put your mind to it. Obviously, making ridiculously hard goals would be demoralising and you wouldn’t make the most out of them - but simply putting down ambitious goals is never a bad thing and always keeps you on the front foot - especially whilst blogging.
I think in my opinion it is important to make goals, whether you break them later or accomplish them is separate. Unless you don’t make goals how will you ever accomplish them be it of any number.
Adnan, that is definitely correct, any kind of advertising which affects user experience in a negative manner can make a certain article hard to go through.
While you should definitely never be shy when it comes to making money from your website, it is important that you have a common sense approach as far as ad placement is concerned.
Alan Johnson
Making goals is deifinitely something that every blogger should do, only then you will know how much you have improve & in which area you need to put in more effort. Hope you can achieve your goals Adnan!
-Edward
Only $1k per month? Come on mate, you can do better than that!
I agree that it is not much compared to the potential this blog has but it’s a first step. Once that goal is reached, some higher ones are definitely in order
Alan Johnson
Hey Adnan, I have been following your blog for a while now and actually started my own. Following your suggestion I have made my goals public.
http://www.technogumption.com/goals-and-targets-for-2008/
Best of luck for 2008.
Tom Beaton