One way to set your business goals is to work backward from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. One key point of setting goals in life and business is to know why you want to achieve them in the first place.
For example, let’s say that you want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, this may run up to $600, which means that is the amount needed to add to my monthly bottom line.
Once you know how much money you have to make, you can start to think about different ways to do just that. You could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if you have a $10 eBook, you would need to make an extra 60 sales per month. Working backward then means that you need to add 600 subscribers to your list which in turn requires 4,000 new visitors to your site. If that’s your plan, you know that the daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month.
But that isn’t the only option! You could start with a higher-priced product or service which will require fewer sales but still lead to more money. For example, if you create or have a $100 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car.
Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be your own membership, or you could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions.
Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote. You will want to plan for new members on a continuous basis as some people may cancel the memberships. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover that.
Now you have a concrete goal to work towards which means marketing your membership so that you can get new signups. Your daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the membership. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the membership. You could even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel.
Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You could
- write some guest blog posts
- do a webinar
- go on a podcast or do an interview
By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take you long to get those signups to pay for that new thing you want or need and because you really want that new car, you are going to be motivated to get it done and grow your business by those extra $600 per month.
Chances are that you’ll overshoot the business goals by several hundred dollars and it’s something you can continue to grow month after month
