The dream of quitting your job and counting your millions of dollars seems to be the common dream that people have when starting internet marketing. Making money on line with nothing but a laptop, DSL account and a few hosted domains is pretty sweet, but we need to keep our dreams somewhat contained, so we can focus on gradual constant success. Let me say this again “Gradual Constant Success”.

When I set goals, I work with two sets of goals. Short term and long term goals. Just like everyone else, I think it would be cool to be a millionaire from internet marketing, so I keep that as a long term vision goal. But for the short term, I break that into one year and five year goals. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wanted year one to be more of a learning year, a year spent to understand the ‘game’ and to potentially find some productive niches and affiliate networks. But I did have a one year “lofty” goal of 10k gross for 2007. It looks like I’ll fall short, reaching 8k, but I’m fine with that. I also had a ‘side’ goal of never dipping in the red in 2007, and I met that challenge (this was done by diversifying niches, and forms of revenue generating sites).

I think for short term goals, it’s good to look at percentage of your yearly income. What seems realistic? 1% of your yearly income, 10%, etc. This will set the bar to see if you can reach that number. Once we’ve calculated a number at the end of the year, you can use that as a stepping stone for the following year. So I’ve made 8k in gross revenue from internet marketing in 2007. I feel that if I don’t do anything different, no new sites, etc, I should hit 8k in 2008. If I double my sites, and assume that all of my existing sites from 2007 will be better ranked in 2008, I could double or triple that number in 2008. So 2008 will start the five year cycle. Basically, I want to double my gross revenue every year for the next five years (lofty again).

This business takes a lot of patience, since returns might not fly in initially. It also takes a lot of persistence and awareness to understand where you stand in the big picture. I literally think about commissions all day long and try to figure out new ways to expand and get more commissions.

So let’s set some goals and focus on achieving gradual constant success.