I know what you’re probably thinking… “what the heck man, I came here to learn about making money stuff?”

What are SMART goals?

They are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely.

Rest assured that setting short and long term goals and then tracking said goals is one of the most important things anybody could do for their business and we’re going to go over the how’s & why so tuck those pants into your socks because we’re treading in high-water with this one folks.

Let me just get this out of the way right now by saying that goal setting for a business is different than pretty much most other types of goals. When you set goals to reach milestones within your business you’re ultimately creating a system which you can then fine-tune for repeat results- this means we’re not just “setting goals” but also building a system for success in the process. In short, goals and systems go hand-in-hand.

Don’t believe me? Check out the contrast between these next few points:

• If you coach a sports team then your goal is to win a championship- GOAL
• What your team does on a daily basis to practice for that championship is the- SYSTEM
• Maybe you’re a power-lifter and you want the new world record for the bench press- GOAL
• A proper diet, the right amount of sleep every night along with heavy lifting is your- SYSTEM
• If you’re an affiliate marketer you no doubt want to make a business & live the dream- GOAL
• Finding products, setting up funnels and pushing traffic to make sales and achieve with your -SYSTEM

These things all go hand-in-hand as I mentioned before; you really can’t have one without the other if you want either of them to work. They support each other, your goals and systems form a powerful synergy which is why it’s the topic of this article. That said, let’s talk about a few goals you can use to help set up a powerful marketing system to boost profits with your marketing efforts.

Getting Real About Your Goals

I know it’s romantic to hold all these great ideas in your head as you think about how rich you’ll get in a year from now because you’ve seen some other guy on YouTube talk about how it happened for him.

Well I hate to break it to you but unless you have the proper system in place which is backed up by solid and realistic goals you’re probably not going to see more than a few hundred dollars in your first year of affiliate marketing.

Making your first few hundred bucks online is a lot easier than you might think but the issue is doing it over and over again like clockwork, that’s where things get tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you’re starting out from the absolute bottom then you need to accept that and work according to your level- there are no cheat codes in real life but there are power-ups and they come in the form of a solid system backed by proven methods… Powerhouse Affiliate offers such a thing but we’re getting ahead of ourselves so we’ll get back to that later.

Long-term Vs Short-term

Long term goals are necessary as milestones for any business to thrive. These should be the really big points which will act as footholds to steadily progress things forward. Doing things like:

• Having a net worth of $1,000,000
• Creating a magnificent product you’ve had brewing in the back of your mind.
• Becoming a full time affiliate so you can quit your day job!
• Clearing up more time for your family by automating things as much as possible.
• Literally anything that feels like a big goal which can’t just be achieved in days or weeks or months.

Short term goals are like the little stepping stones on the path to your milestones. They’re equally as important but are often accomplished with more ease and in much quicker timeframes than your macro-goals:

• Building a website, or learning how to create a landing page so you can earn money.
• Making $100 per day.
• Building a marketing funnel so you can create an email list.
• Learning about a new sources of paid traffic and testing them by setting up campaigns and then running them.
• Short-term conversion boosting, example would be a goal of 5% per month increase.
• Launching and testing 2 or 3 new campaigns in a month.

The general idea is to first identify your goals then split them up into short vs long term goals as your short term goals will feed your long term goals.

Identifying these goals will allow you to put together a clear plan of action to achieve these goals over the allotted time which is another point to consider.

Setting goals is important but being very specific on your expectations/results  and deadlines is critical to keep you focused, and puts a real fire under your rear-end to keep you motivated.

Without putting a definitive deadline (or at least some time frame you’d expect to reach these goals) you’ll find it much more difficult to keep motivated as you stand a higher chance of putting things off and then just forgetting about them as there’s no tangible mark to reach for.

Put It Down On Paper!!

This part seems obvious but you’d be surprised at how many people absolutely hate writing stuff down only to wind up just forgetting about it later.

• Write your goals down, both long term & short term and divide them up into categories if you can.
• Make a clear list of your individual goal objectives; what do you need to ‘do’ to reach these goals?
• Jot down the benefits of reaching your goals to keep you motivated to move to the next step.
• Give a reasonable date of expected completion for your goals.
• Put all this into an action plan and you’ll wind up with a step by step formula to follow.

Once you have your formula it’s basically just a matter of performing the steps and marking them off the list or adjusting the list as needed as you go. There is no doubt that sometimes unexpected things will happen so deal with them as they occur you’ll find that dealing with these headaches aren’t as bad as they potentially could have been thanks to your plan. It’s so much easier to just deal with things and put them in their slot as you’re running down your list and putting your plans in action.

A Few Things to Keep Track Of

Keep your costs in mind. The phrase “it takes money to make money” doesn’t exist for no good reason. If your goal is to make money without spending money that’s fine, just be aware of the fact it’s going to take much more time as a trade-off. You’re going to need to account for expenses.

Things like sales letters, domains, web-hosting, wordpress plugins & themes, your email autoresponder, all these things typically come with some sort of expense so calculate them and work them into your overall equation.

What is your revenue goal? If it’s something like “as much money as possible” then your head is probably in the clouds. Remember creating smart goals is important which means you need it to be measurable and realistic. When you say “I want to make $100 a day” then you have something you can actually work with.

You’ll be able to calculate how much you’d need to make to recoup expenses and earn that specific income figure. If you’re not reaching it right away you can then start to look at all your data and make educated decisions on what needs to change to help increase the amount of money you’re making. Then, once you reach that first goal you can bump it up and repeat the process and just keep climbing up to higher & higher income figures over time.

Traffic is important. If you don’t have people looking at your offers you can’t get any conversions! Testing different sources of traffic, comparing costs to run traffic through any particular source and keeping track of how it all performs for any particular offer is imperative to any affiliate marketer’s success. Just because one traffic source fails to perform well with one offer doesn’t mean it’ll perform like junk across the board. It’s a good idea to test different traffic sources for various offers and keep track of your winners then go ahead and ramp up with those.

Become A True Powerhouse

It isn’t enough to just know what to do; you need to know how to do it too if you want to see any long term success. Powerhouse Affiliate offers you a FAST START step by step affiliate marketing training program! Follow all of our steps and SUPER-CHARGE your success rate. Join forces with the rest of the members in the premium member’s area where you’ll get access to exclusive training you simply won’t find anywhere else.