Determine & Set your New Website Goals!
I know that MANY of you are waiting patiently to start developing this new type of website, believe me, I am too! Jumping over to our Hostgator account and loading up the site is likely one of the biggest mistakes we could make at this point though, and we first need to plan it out! Incidentally, I am just as guilty as anyone else for just jumping in and shooting from the hip!
Changing Our Affiliate Way of Thinking
Assuming your earnings can be the same, ask yourself one question… Would you rather spend 80+ hours a month on 80 websites you know very little about, or 40 hours a month on just 1 website, you are somewhat passionate about?
In the past, there was not a whole lot of goals or planning put into developing our affiliate websites with Build a Niche Store. We stumbled onto a niche, did a minimum amount of demand research, then we immediately started building the site based off search metrics alone. Why not… all we cared about was attracting very specific BUYERS who were ready to plunk down a credit card and make a purchase! Chances are pretty good that some of those sites have already been dropped from search indexes… if not, we have learned from both Google and the ePN folks, they are on borrowed time!
While we definitely don’t want to forget about those visitors, we also don’t want to develop our new site based solely on them! After all, most buy-right-now type visitors are NOT going to come back to your site again, unless they need to buy the same exact thing a second or third time right? With our new site, we want to foster a ”Community” atmosphere, making people WANT to stay tuned and come back for repeat visits! Heck, we not only want them to come back via a bookmark, we want them to enjoy our information SO MUCH that they put their email address into a box and allow us to contact them with updates!
Start By Setting Your New Website Goals
In many of my previous posts, I’ve discussed setting goals. Your goals need to be broken down to the important details and tracked according to your efforts to achieve those goals! Get out your paper and start writing… I am actually going to put an earnings goal at the top of the list, just to get it out of the way, for us to concentrate on the more important and achievable goals first! :-)
As I complete these very simple goals, they are the exact figures I am going to use to measure the success of my DIY site! Remember, your website goals need to be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely!
First 3 Months to begin on October 1st, 2008
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Total Quarterly Earnings: $30 – Just enough for a family of 9 to eat lightly at McDonalds! From the dollar menu that is!
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5 Unique and Compelling content posts per week!
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1 Unique Top 10 list every week!
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1 unique “How-To” 5 page (+/-) pdf every quarter!
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25 New RSS/Email Subscribers Every Month!
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25 Inbound referral links per month!
Some of you are going to call me crazy… $30 for 90 days worth of work?!?! Mark – You’ve flipped your cap! Believe me, I would love to simply jack that up to $3k for the first three months, but let me ask you just one question. If you were a first time reader of THIS blog, and the first 25-50 posts you read contained nothing but affiliate links, would you keep visiting? I know I wouldn’t!
Earnings are not a Goal – They are the Reward of your Goals being Achieved!
As we strive to reach these VERY easy goals for the first 3 months of our new website being on the web… we want to create a relationship with our readers. We want them to trust our knowledge of the subject, and look at us as somewhat of an authority in that “We Know Jack“! Remember, we are actually helping others understand more about a topic that we ourselves like!
You will learn that after you get in the habit of reaching your easily attainable goals, your efforts will be rewarded with earnings! If you set out to “Make Money” as one of your primary goals, what’s going to happen when it doesn’t happen in a short amount of time? I can answer that… we will see the domain on the dropped list!
Example in Action!
How many posts of mine on this blog are saturated with ads? Maybe 1 out of 10 posts has an affiliate link in it right? In total, there are only 7 ad banners on this entire blog. Aside from that, most of what I do here is help others, or at least try to help others. In 2 Days, Sept 13th, I will reach the one year anniversary of this site being online, and without divulging the exact amount, I can tell you that this blog has been very rewarding to me in less than 1 full year!
Why? I provide content and help for you all first! That’s what we are going to do with our new websites… provide the content that people WANT to read and keep coming back for! Everything else… is a direct result of the effort we put into it!
Tomorrow – I may actually add more goals, but most importantly, I am going to talk about how I will ACHIEVE those Goals! If you are not subscribed to this blog, just punch your email address into the box in the upper right sidebar, and you will not miss a single post!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Planning a Strategy to Exceed your Website Goals!
- Step 1 – Set your Goals
- Determine if the Niche is Worth your Efforts
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I can honestly say that not one of my affiliate sites was planned. I just did them on the fly.
Right now I don’t have the time to follow along but I will, soon. Perhaps in another month. But reading your posts will force me to put my thinking cap on so I am ready when the time comes.
Rochelle
I’ll play.
My first real affiliate/niche site is just coming online. I have a few articles and have done some good research. The big thing for me is time. With that in mind here are my initial goals for the site:
1. 3 unique content posts per week
2. 1 in-depth ‘how to” post every two weeks
3. 1 contest each month to build subscriber base
4. 5 new inbound links each month
4. 10 new subscribers each month
5. $25 in revenue in the first 90 days
Pretty modest goals but I have nowhere to go but up :-) The biggest challenge for me will be the link building aspect. I have struggled with that in the past.
Maybe you could devote a post or two to that?
Mark
Is this the “Big Idea” you’d been talking about? Looks interesting! I think the success of this style of “blogging for money” depends on the depth/breadth of the niche’s appeal coupled with the skill of the owner in writing interesting stuff about it. Mark you’re a great writer who makes reading about the most mundane thing interesting, and the DIY niche is huge so I predict this is going to kick ass!! Thank God you picked an actual topic to build it on besides the ubiquitous “make money online”!!
I, however, am having trouble thinking of anything I’m passionate about that has enough depth/breadth to develop a big readership. Or that I know enough about to keep the content flowing and the readership growing. It will be fun watching you get this off the ground!
@ Rochelle –
I am right there with you!! I have been dumping knee-jerk domains for 4 months!!
@ Mark – GREAT initial set of goals!! The great part to starting small is that you will feel a good achievement when they are reached, and the second set, can be set much higher!
@ Alice -
Cmon now… where does that link you use in your posts lead to? I could very easily see you using your OWN site for this!!
Provide people who are interested in content, content management systems, seo content, etc etc with reviews of the good, bad and Ugly of what they can find on the web!
There are hundreds of e-books, applications, services, etc out there just waiting for a professional review and guidance from someone!!
:-)
Mark
@ Alice –
I forgot to say… This is NOT my big idea! It has been somewhat put on hold as I await 2-things.
1 – Legalities, I want to be sure I stomp on no toes, and
2 – I want a bit more experience of my own first! it WILL be THAT big when it goes live…
To date, the only 2 people I have spoken to about it are a friend and an attorney friend of mine!
I DID however apply and receive pending trademark approval!
Mark, this is great and I like the SMART idea, I heard that the other day, great advice and is completely realistic for those of us who are skeptical. My goals are to just follow along with your ideas and build the site I got from you yesterday, Home-Servers.com, let’s see what happens, thanks!
Dan
Mark,
This series will be excellent I’m sure.
I was just saying yesterday as I was unsubscribing from another internet marketers RSS and email feed(who was not living up to these goals)that what people need most is not one product after another thrown at them. Not one idea after another whipped out so that they can feel overwhelmed and react in an unfocused, random way.
What they need is do this,then this,then this and keep a record of all of it so you are accountable to yourself AND you know what you are accountable for.
This series will change the business outlook for anybody that is willing to take action and adapt the plan to their own goals.
Kudos!
Jeff
Sounds like a plan for an authority site if I might say so myself!
Man, a 5 page “how-to”pdf per month is brilliant!
Adding that to any site on a consistent basis would make for a great “bonus report” at the end of the year with all 12 pdf’s plus some exclusive “secret weapons” added on top…
You’ve got my brain going… which is great considering I’m about to flip my first site today. Thanks!
I need goals…. going to print this out and try to do it with my sites :)
thanks Mark.
I can honestly say that all but two of my sites are ones about which I know very little. I think this approach would force me to be much more careful about which directions I was putting forth my effort.
I think that one of my problems with writing is that I write at two extremes: 1) Written with fact after fact, short and to the point, and deadly boring (a result of years writing in medical charts) or 2) Downright folksy, maybe too folksey.
My concern is that with style number 1, I will never attract readers. And my concern with style number 1, it is not appropriate with all subjects. And beyond that is the issue of making a decision about subject matter for posts.
So, that’s my dilema. Find the right balance, and hone a focus on subject matter. Yael
Excellent post Mark.
I have to be the worst one when it comes to actually sitting down and setting goals. I kind of keep things in the back of my mind but never make them concrete.
I have a few of my sites that do alright but I know I would do so much better if I wrote my goals down and focused on them.
thanks again Mark, keep feeding us
Ok, here are my goals:
1. 3 unique content posts per week
2. 1 in-depth ‘how to” post every two weeks
3. 5 new inbound links each month
4. $20 in revenue in the first 30 days
…not sure about the whole “subscribers” thing yet. Dont we need a program like aweber for that?
@ Eric -
Aweber is not required for managing feed subscribers – I use feedburner. When it gets to a point that your site is doing very well and you get large numbers of subscribers, you can always convert to a mailing list app like aweber.
Someone will say Use AWeber 100% of the time – I would wait to see what your niche and traffic turns into first.
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