Start With the Financial Goal
A way to develop your operational goals is to start with a specific financial goal. For example, let’s say you want to buy a new car with a monthly payment of around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be sure to cover everything, let’s bump the goal up to $600. What this means is you will need to add an extra $600 (or more, which is always better) to your monthly bottom line to make this purchase.
Think How to Earn the Money
Once you know how much money you’ll need, strategize different ways to earn it. For example, you could find more customers for one or several of your existing products. Let’s say you write and publish an ebook to sell for $10. To reach the goal, you’d have to make at least 60 sales of that product per month.
With that information, you work backwards to figure out how to reach your goal. For instance, if you know that in your business, one out of 10 of your email subscribers will buy the book within the first month of signing up, you will need to add 600 new subscribers to your list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to your website. If that’s the plan, that means your daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up your traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month (that’s why we talked about building your traffic in Step 3).
Of course that’s not the only option. Another idea could be to create another information product or eBook each month and sell it to both your existing and new subscribers. Or you could create a higher priced item requiring fewer monthly sales to reach the $600 goal. For example, if you create a nice $100 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car.
Consider an Ongoing Form of Extra Income
Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into creating a product that requires recurring payments such as a monthly membership. Or, you could promote affiliate offers that give recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there are plenty things you can promote. For example, find an affiliate product that sells for at least $60 monthly and pays a 50% commission which gives you $30 in commissions per sale. Now, you would only need 20 sales to earn the car payment.
When you reach that number, you would only need to work on getting one or two new members onboard each month to balance out cancellations.
A Concrete Goal
Now, you have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 20 people to sign up for the membership. Your daily tasks will include activities to attract a targeted sub list of people interested in the membership offer. Then, start driving traffic to you content and opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the membership opportunity. You could even write a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel.
Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. By thinking of additional ways to bring in new income and putting in some time and effort up front, it won’t take long to get those 20 signups to cover your new $600 car payment. In fact, chances are great that you will overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars.
Continue to Grow Income
Plus, that’s just the start, you can continue to grow your income month after month to be on the way to online business success.
Tomorrow will be Step 5 in this business building series. We’ll look at the importance of writing specific goals to follow.
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