Money Online

In my next series of posts I will try to adapt some basic principles of marketing and organizational psychology to the actual requirements of an online business. Because of the fact that the term “online business” can be too general, I will just focus on adapting those principles to make a blog successful in terms of generating income.

The first thing that I will try to discuss is “Establishing your goals (or objectives)”

SMART OBJECTIVES
This is actually the starting point for every business plan. No matter how simple this may seem at a first glance, setting up your objectives in the correct manner may prove crucial for the success or failure of any kind of business (blogging included). How do bloggers set up their objectives by the way? I have seen a lot of them who state loud and clear that their goal is to “make money on the internet”. That’s a start… but if you leave it like this it would be to impossible to follow.
How much money do you want to make online?
Is this really an attainable goal?
How long will it take?

These questions represent the basis for defining your goals; which in the are known by the name of S.M.A.R.T objectives. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.
Following these questions, a better way of putting it would be: “I want to make 1 000 000 dollars from ONE blog this year“. It is specific, measurable, time bound, but is it attainable?

For some of you it is, for some it isn’t, depending on how much you are willing to invest in advertising, work force, etc. However, one of the most common mistake is to set your objectives way too high. Don’t get me wrong, setting them just a little higher than you actually think it’s possible, is a good thing, especially because it motivates you to work hard and triggers the urge of self improvement, but setting unrealistic goals will make you loose your enthusiasm within a short period of time. Further more, higher goals involve a lot more work to be done, so if you don’t have the means to do it, you will either quit or come up with low quality products (or content, since we are talking about blogging) which will eventually translate in failure.

Divide your main objective into smaller, more specific ones
So we have talked about specific, measurable, attainable and timely, but why did I leave “Relevant” in the end?
Actually it has been some debate around this part. Some say the R stands for “Realistic” and some say it stands for “Relevant” In my opinion it should definitely stand for “relevant” since nothing that is already “Attainable” could be unrealistic. But how should we translate the term “relevant” into our discussion? Well, an achievement of a specific objective needs to contribute to an achievement of a bigger objective.
So, assuming our main objective would be to earn 100 000 dollars (I know, I have cut a “0″ in order to make it attainable:) ) from ONE blog within a year, we will have to analyze what smaller objectives we will need to accomplish for that. You must take into consideration absolutely everything, starting from registering the domain and buying a hosting package (unless you plan to use some free services) to designing the blog, driving traffic, earning objectives for each income source (contextual advertising, selling advertising space, etc). All these small objectives are relevant to the main goal.
You might have to go through them several times because you will find out that one may be attainable or not, depending on a choice you have made for another. For example, if you choose a cheap web hosting package you will only have a rather low bandwidth limit, so you will not be able to make your blog visible for the amount of readers needed to accomplish your main objective. Although there is always the possibility of upgrading, make sure you anticipate as much as you can, so at least you will have an idea when the upgrade will be necessary.

A million dollar journey starts with a cent
For better planning, at least at the beginning the best approach would be to set up smaller specific goals to be achieved within shorter periods of time, goals which are relevant to the main objective. In our example about blogging you should concentrate on setting a “schedule” of objectives for generating traffic to the blog, since it is probably the most important and the most relevant. You can start by setting goals for week 1, week 2, week 3 and so on. You will also have to decide when you will start to implement sources of income to your blog, what type you would go for, and what impact they will have on your visitors.

Don’t be scared to make changes along the way
During a project, if you realize that your objectives are either to high or to low, don’t panic, and don’t be too stubborn to follow the initial plan. You can always tweak your goals along the way taking into consideration how well things are going at a certain time. Most bigshot executives do that also (in some cases). Keep in mind though, that if things don’t go as you have planed (no matter if they are different in a good way or a bad way) you have probably not taken into consideration all the factors that influenced their evolution, so try to do a better job each time you make adjustments.

All this may sound a little complicated and/or useless, but if you manage to pay attention to setting up your goals in the correct way, you will have higher chances to succeed. Blogging for income is actually a business, and since every successful business starts with setting up objectives, there is absolutely no reason for you not to treat this part seriously. Once you get the hang of it, you will realize that it proves very useful.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, business blogs, setting objectives for blogs

Related Articles:

• SWOT analysis for successful blogging
• Blog for business