Online Beginners - Smart Targets Help You Make Money

Smart targets help you make money by highlighting what needs to be done to ensure that you can turn a profit in the near term as well as the longer term. Setting targets requires intuition and business skills - pulling figures out of the air doesn't work and can seriously mislead you. No amount of  faith alone can produce a good living on the Internet - you need to be realistic but imaginative.

A realistic target is difficult  to arrive at if you're new online - so many established Internet Marketers will 'promise' you fantastic earnings that you can get just by signing up to their course or buying their ebooks or their consultancy service. Even $1,000,000 a year is sometimes mentioned! No doubt a few achieve this as earnings on the web seem to be almost unlimited but is this profit or just turnover? How much do you have to spend on support staff, organizing conferences, pay-per-click etc to get a decent bottom line? Or does this fabulous money in  reality come from selling courses and ebooks that promise the earth?

As a newcomer, setting goals that are far too high could soon make you demoralized.

On the other hand, the dangers of a target that is too low are more subtle but almost as bad. I'll explain. Suppose you decide that you'll start by aiming for $100 a month which you plan to put up to $250, then $500 when things start to take off. If you're going to be selling physical or digital products, to get a $100 profit, you only need to find cheap, possibly low quality, items to put on your website and maybe the website doesn't have to look great either. This might be OK up to, say, a $1000 a month and if you're happy with this, fine! But what if you are really set on making a proper living online rather than just some pocket money?

Let's look at some simple arithmetic. If you really wanted to get to $2500 a month consistently and your profit per item is, say, $20, you'll have to make 125 sales each month. If your conversion rate is 5% of visitors to your site actually buying your product, you will need 2500 visitors each month - around 80 each day. Possible - if you've got a good Google ranking or you're getting free traffic from other sources. But if you want $5000 per month, then everything doubles at $20 a sale. So what about pay-per-click? It could cost you $10 for every sale you make, then what happens to the figures?

Looks like you've got to get better products that sell at a higher price so you get more commission - $40 a sale would be good. But do these new products sell to the people in the niche you've developed so far and what about your website ? Is it upmarket enough to give visitors the confidence to spend a lot of money with you? It could easily be that you've almost got to start again if you really want to make that step up to $5,000 or maybe even higher.

Let's see what happens if you start by thinking that $10,000 a month may be high but it's worth looking at because it's definitely achievable. Doing the same arithmetic again, means you need 10,000 hits on your website each month for a $20 pay out per sale. And a lot of these have to be new hits unless you can get a stream of different products for your niche. This looks pretty unlikely, so you need to look at a new business model.

If your basic website was making $1000, keep it and get a second website for your higher priced lines. A pay out of $40, straightaway halves the number of hits you need and pro rata for higher priced items. Plus a good looking professional website is going to enable you to put decent quality Google Ads for example on your site. A potentially good way to generate ongoing income is to promote membership sites to your list. If you choose those which pay for each month the member continues to subscribe, that can become a good passive income stream.

The important point I'm trying to illustrate is that setting high (but not ridiculous) targets literally broadens your horizons and stimulates your imagination and inventiveness. It puts clearly into focus that, as in every area of business, the money is out there - your job is to figure out how to get it!