Do You Have A Financial Goal?

August 23, 2008

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Lot’s of people aspire to making a full time living online. Many people see Internet Marketing as a means of supplementing their incomes. Other, and I fall into this category, are looking to boost their portfolio so that they can retire from full time working completely.

One thing that many people fail to think about is setting clear financial goals.  Let me explain why it’s important…

Unless you know just how much income you need to make, you can’t possibly know how many sales you need to make each day. If you don’t know your sales target, you won’t know how much traffic that you need.

So, let’s assume that you want to earn $30,000 a year.. a reasonably conservative target. Let’s assume that the $30,000 is after all your overhead costs such as hosting, autoresponder, domain name renewals, etc.

$30,000 is the equivalent to $82.19 per day.

Now, we have a clear daily financial target, we can work out what we need to do each day to achieve it.

Let’s assume our income is derived from Adsense, then to make $82.19 per day you will need approximately ten sites each making about $8.50. That level of income would typically require around 300 unique visitors to each site each day. 3,000 visitors per day from organic search results will require a fair investment in link building, content development, article writing/distribution and other promotional activities. However, once that initial work has been completed, it will require very little maintenance work.

If, however, our income was coming from affiliate marketing, the typical price was $37 and we were earning a 50% commission we would need only 5 sales per day to achieve our target. The average sales conversion rate is reported to be 1.87% and, therefore to get 5 sales we would need to generate 268 unique visitors. Again, this is not a difficult daily target, especially if we have our own blog with a regular readership or, better still, a list of subscribers.

And finally, what if we were selling our own product? Assuming we were selling a $37 product and we were paying our affiliates 50%, then similarly, we would need 5 sales. But this time it’s our affiliates who would be driving traffic to our site.

Is that worth thinking about?