What Do You Want To Achieve Online?

There are many reasons why you want to create your own blog or website. You may be one of the many who would like to earn some extra income, pay off debt or replace the income of your day job for the freedom of your own online business. Or you may just want to create a blog as a creative outlet with no real thought of earning money (at least in the short term). The question is what do you want to achieve online?

 

what do you want to achieve online

Ask yourself  what and why? Why online? Is it money problems or wanting to increase your income? Do you want to have more control of the hours you work? Are you burnt out with your current career and looking for something new, something you have more control over?

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Whatever your motive to creating a blog or online business is, to make a success of this you will want to have some goals or plans in place to create a successful site. Success means different things to different people, for some it may be a certain level of revenue, for others it may be hitting a certain level of viewers knowing their message is making a difference. Make sure you are clear what success for your website or business means to you.

With your online planning and goal setting, the first thing I would suggest you do is to get clear on what you want to achieve online. In most cases this will involve money. Whether it’s one website providing a certain amount of monthly or annual income or if it is several websites most major online goals will revolve around money namely a target that you will have in mind.

How you get to that target will differ from person to person. Everyone’s circumstances are different, everyone’s learning curve and knowledge base are different. Also, the budget each person has will differ.

In theory the more money you can put towards your online business the quicker you will be able to grow however you do need to make sure that you don’t waste money.

1. What is your main goal for your blog or online business?

For example, for many it will be to earn a substantial annual income, i.e. earn $50,000 US per annum from my blog or online website.

For others it may be tied towards amount of traffic, i.e. to have at least 100,000 visitors to my site per annum.

Write down your main goal or goals in the section below.

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With this large goal you can look at breaking this down into a smaller goal. That $50,000 per annum goal could be broken down into earning $5,000 in the first year or having 5,000 visitors for the first year. If those amounts are too high and you wish to break them down further how about setting a target such as earning $100 from your online activities or getting your first 100 readers to your website. 

2. What is your budget? How much funding can you devote to your online venture?

Setting a budget is highly recommended. Not just for your online ventures, look at what your lifestyle budget is!

I would suggest if you haven’t done so recently, to create your own budget or at least know what your current lifestyle expenses are. Is this too high, are you saving any money, can you cut back on any of these expenses and look at using some of these funds towards your website or online business?

Go through your loans, credit cards, insurances compare these to the market, can you get any savings by switching to another provider?

When going through your budget, I also suggest you break this down into three sections:

Minimum lifestyle expenditure (i.e. the absolute minimum you could live on to cover your living arrangements, food, clothes and basic computer/phone equipment) Current lifestyle expenditure (i.e. currently after reviewing budget, switching providers, etc)

Luxury lifestyle expenditure (i.e. expenditure when living the life, you want on your terms)

This exercise is particularly useful for those who are looking at replacing their current day job income with income from their online venture. Now do the same for your online venture budget. I know that most of you will only be in the beginning stage of your online ventures, however look to get an idea of how much of your budget you wish to set aside for equipment, for online help (ie building a website, content creation or SEO), etc. 

3. What is your blog or online business going to be about? For some of you, there will be a lot of ideas. For others it may be a bit harder to come up with that idea. I’ve covered this topic here about finding your idea so if you don’t have an idea now, don’t stress, have a read through my post about finding your idea and see if you can come up with something. Failing that give me an email and we will see if we can come up with something.

If you have several ideas in mind, I would select the idea which you have more of a personal enjoyment or interest in. Make sure that this is carefully chosen as building a blog or online business requires quite a bit of hard work in the short term with little to no return on your investment and it’s a lot easier to stick with something that you have an interest in when you aren’t getting much feedback or return from.  

4. What is your time frame and how much time can you devote to your online activities?

The more time you can devote, the more content you can create, the quicker your learning curve will be and in all like hood the quicker you are generating more traffic and income.

Though you need to keep in mind that life needs to be balanced. If you are going to go all in with your spare time for your online business, then make sure this is only for a finite time frame and that you have planned time off. Don’t neglect family and friends, work all this into a schedule. Work smarter not harder. 

Point 2 about the budget is also a factor here, the larger your budget the quicker you can scale however each person’s situation is different, just do what you can and work to your own pace. Don’t compare yourself to others, just focus on you and your site.

5. Are you prepared to put in the initial hard work with little to know rewards in the short term?

What is going to keep your online fire burning when you haven’t had the traffic or readers that you hoped for or that your first piece on online revenue still hasn’t appeared after 6 months’ worth of content publishing, outreach, etc

Keep remembering what your why is as I can assure you there will be times when you will be asking is this worth it?

Jumping into the online world is a massive leap of faith. Expect to put in a lot of hard work within the first 6 months with little to no revenue and very little traffic levels. Keep consistent, work with your budget and with your time management and you will start to see results. 

Sure, there are examples of websites hitting it out of the park from day one however these are rarer than most. Plan for the worst and if you are one of these ones that breaks the code early on, fantastic!

So, know what is drawing you to creating your own blog or online business?

Summary

Know your situation and having realistic expectations will put you in good stead in the long run. Plan for the long term, expect that it will be 6 to 12 months before you see results and hope that you see some good results earlier. 

Don’t expect to be earning thousands as soon as you launch, good websites take time to rank, earn and establish authority or at least a prominent position online.

Start with what you can control. Create a good site that is set up for SEO. Create great content that will attract readers and viewers, make sure this is set up to take advantage of SEO. Leverage off your own contacts, build up new ones. Learn from online authorities or at least authorities in your niche or topic.

If you are looking to build an authority site and one which you plan to build over years I suggest you don’t go the easy way and chase the dollars, build something great. However don’t be put off to inaction by expecting to create an amazing website or blog straight away. Just start and slowly add to your website or blog. Keep staying consistent, keep producing great content and stay the course. 

If you are trying to build a niche site where you are chasing the affiliate income or advertising income, then buy all means target revenue as soon as possible though the same principles apply. Great content in nearly all situations matters!

Find what works and focus on that. If it’s a traffic funnel you’ve stumbled upon, scale this! If you’ve found an advertising source that offers your great margins, build on this!

Also, don’t try and take on too much too soon. You are where you should be. With experience and the right education, you will be where you should be.

In my experience you also need to go through the steps. If you have no experience in setting up or running and online business and you are gifted or purchase an established and money-making website, there is a very high chance this ends badly for you. You need to grow your experience to then grow your website.

Once your online business is revenue positive, by all means look at re-investing in your online business, scale this, find what’s working and invest more time, money, etc but don’t fall into the trap of using this increase in revenue as a way of getting caught into the personal expenses cycle of buying a more expensive car or more expensive clothes or a more expensive house just because you have more money. Invest in yourself and your business, invest into other asset classes, enjoy life and be smart with your money.

Stay fit, healthy and maintaining balance in your life. Sure, have a focus or dedication towards your blog, website or online business but don’t neglect your friends and family. Keep that balance.

The truth is there are successful people online making a very nice living, however the path to their success is different for all of them, as it will be for you. So what do you want to achieve online?

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