One of the first things I always tell people starting out is to set realistic goals for themselves early on.
It doesn’t matter if your ultimate desire is a full-fledged business for yourself, or just making some beer money each week online, setting reachable goals, like steps on a path, from day one will improve your chances of sticking with it.
Goals shouldn’t be seen as your final destination, they’re points of success along the way to your final destination.
By thinking and planning in this manner it makes it easier to measure your path to success, and also to give yourself reachable points at which you can say, “hey, I’m really on my way to where I want to be”.
Frustrations and minor set-backs cause more people to give up than anything else I’ve ever seen. You have to be prepared for them along the way and take them in stride. See them as valuable learning and experience.
As Thomas Edison said after taking over 2000 attempts at making a working light bulb, “I did not fail, I found 2000 ways not to make a light bulb.”
The great thing about setting reachable goals along the way to your final destination is that as you reach these steps of success you are encouraged and inspired to continue moving forward, and those minor set-backs along the way won’t seem as grave.
A friend whom I helped in the past to start her own online business so she could leave a low paying and inconvenient job to spend more time at home with her children and still pay the bills is a prime example of this.
The first real goal we set after she decided on what she would do online to make money was for replacing her weekly wage from her job. This wasn’t too hard as she was earning minimum wage at the time and only getting part-time hours. It’s been a while, but I believe the first financial goal we set was for about $200 per week. That was the minimum she needed to be able to leave her part-time job.
From there she set incremental financial goals for herself all the way up to earning $1,000 per week.
The important thing was to first have a target of desperation, that first goal where she could leave the inconvenient job and give more time to her children. I call it the target of desperation because it was the goal she had to reach, the subsequent goals were points she wanted to reach.
The beauty of planning in stepped goals like this is you’ll fight and scrape to reach that first one because it’s a target of desperation, but once you reach it you’ll be encouraged and inspired to work towards the next, and reaching that will encourage you on to the next after that.. and so on.
I think what blocks a lot of people starting out, beyond trying to go too far too fast and becoming frustrated, is that with all of the information out there in eBooks and forums and blogs (like this one) it’s easy to over-complicate things.
I try to point out here from time to time that there isn’t a whole lot to making money online with affiliate marketing. You’re promoting products for sales and commissions. You just need to place those products before people already looking for them, or looking for the answer to some problem they’re having.
Let’s say that like my friend your first goal is to reach $200 per week in revenue. If you’ve got just 2 affiliate products to promote that each pays about $20 per sale in commissions then that’s a matter of making 1 sale per day of each. That’s really not that hard to achieve and can be done without making things too complicated for yourself.
Let’s assume the 2 products are a Registry repair program and a Spyware remover (because there’s tons of these to promote at Clickbank and the commissions are around $2o to $25 for several I know of).
You could build a single blog with product pages for each of the 2 products giving specs, maybe some reviews (search forums and Google to see what folks say about the programs).
Then make daily postings on the blog targeting keywords of people who would need these products fast, I call these “buying” or “desperation” keywords. Think about it, someone with registry problems is desperate because their computer has become a paper-weight on their desk. They need a solution, they’re ready to purchase it. The terms they’re searching are going to be things like “registry repair instant download”, “spyware removal instant scan”, “windows [version] registry fix” and so on.
So, your daily blog postings are going to target those terms and link to your product pages where the visitor sees the product specs, maybe reads a few reviews assuring them the product works, and then follows your affiliate link to the product sales page.
Think about it, once the blog is setup with the product pages posting to it is going to take maybe a half hour to an hour per day since you’re promoting 2 products I’d say you should post to each one every day, so you’d be writing 2 daily posts at about a half hour each (give or take).
Then add in a little link building for your blog via social bookmarking, article marketing and etc. and in a few weeks you should easily have a fair level of traffic coming in, much of it from search engines which is where your buyers are, and you should be able to see how reaching that 2 sales per day from this growing targeted traffic is not rocket science. It’s just putting a needed/wanted product before desperate buyers.
You don’t have to even really presell the products at all, just talk about them honestly in your postings. Talk about what they do, and also what they don’t do-just keep your postings focused on the products and the problems they solve.
Keep this going over time and your search (or organic) traffic will continue to rise. You’ll reach your 2 sales per day goal, then you’ll start seeing 3 sales per day, maybe 4 sales per day. There will be a max point you eventually reach, there’s only so much traffic for any given product per day to get. But then you can add related products to the blog and build postings and traffic for them too… or start a new site in another market for different products.
The only hard part about this is focus. Staying focused and committed to making your daily postings and giving the search engines plenty of fresh content to pick up every day. Which is really easy with a blog thanks to scheduled posting capabilities. My friend I spoke of earlier didn’t want to take more time away from her kids every day when starting out because she was still working her part-time job, so instead of posting every day she would write all her posts on Sundays when the kids were with their Dad and just schedule the posts to be published daily through the week.
As I’ve said here before, all the stuff you’ll find here or on other sites about SEO, and special methods and tools for marketing online and across social networks is usually good stuff to know, but it’s all accessories to the gown.
I’ll use my Prom analogy again because I like it: a young woman can have the fanciest shoes, a designer purse and a million dollars worth of jewelry on, but without the prom gown she’s still just naked.
Your site that puts a product before buyers… this is the gown of online marketing, everything else is just accessories you can worry about and add on over time.
Image source: Symlinked @ Flickr
Used under the Creative Commons Attribution License
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