When you decide to start a new business, it is important to set goals from the beginning. The same goes for being an affiliate blogger.
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
Initially, your income will be very modest. It will take time for you to earn a comfortable living.
Once you have reached a plateau in your income, set a higher plateau and repeat the process.
Traffic Goals
You will have to work on your traffic every day. Indeed, no traffic means no income! So traffic must be one of your primary goals.
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 grove 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.
Other Types of Goals You Could Set
Here are some other examples of goals you could set for yourself:
- 1. Consistently make $xx,xxx a month with your blog (Income goal)
- 2. Consistently get X amount of visits to your blog a 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!
Keep this in mind: you must constantly set goals, work to achieve them, and then set new goals once you have achieved them.
Never stop learning, improving and earning more money.
And the most important advice: don’t be afraid to fail.
Every failure is another experience. If you fail, take time to reflect on why you failed, and then set new goals.
Tell yourself that every failure brings you a little closer to success!
And most importantly: never stop working on your blog!
Hi! I’m the proud owner of this blog. I started to take an interest in affiliate marketing in 2012, and over the past few years I have decided to take it seriously. My knowledge is not yet infinite, but I learn a little every day and I hope to be able to share with you my passion for this art: to earn money by writing about the things that we love!