My Goals for 2008 – (Yeah, I know it's mid January '08)

Ok, back again to this blog. I know it’s January 14th and I haven’t posted my goals for 2008 but it’s always late than never.

I want to use this post as a baseline in my life, something to compare against to in the future, months from now, to measure if I did real progress in my life. So, more than just posting a list of wishes for this year I want to be realistic and tell you how I plan to achieve my goals. The difference of a wish vs. a goal is that the first one doesn’t have a plan attached.

Because I’m about to lose my job in 17 days (My last day here at work is on Jan 31st), my ONLY goal for this year is this:

SURVIVE ( FINANCIALLY SPEAKING ) = $2,000 USD per month

Yes that’s true, I’m a father of two kids and I have a wife that just takes care of the kids at home, so that means that my only job is to bring food to the table. Whether I do it via a day-to-day job or a business, that’s secondary. (my wife and my kids don’t care). Of course my desire is to make it via a business.

So in order to accomplish my only goal for this year, I have two plans to make it happen:

PLAN A: Run an online business

My idea is to make use of my severance as a cushion to survive a few months without working on a job, meanwhile the business takes off. I know it’s risky but I plan to do it at the same time I look for a job (Plan B). If the business starts generating enough cash to survive, then there is no need to keep looking for a job anymore. If I first find a good job then I have no choice, and I will have to take it and run the business part time. I wish I was single, so I could take much bigger risks, but that’s the way things are and I need to manage the risk based on my current situation.

What kind of online business I intend to run?

My idea is to focus in only ONE niche and run a series of web properties around that niche to build a small network of sites around it. Those web properties include the following: Blogs, Squidoo Pages, Hubb Pages, 1 Social News site created by me and several others.

I also plan to grow this blog and create another Social News site around it.

Metrics to measure my success – Where am I now?

If I don’t know where I am now, I can’t define a clear path to the point I want to be and success needs to be measure somehow, so based on the experience and from what I’ve seen on other succesful bloggers here are the metrics I will use to measure my own progress and the numbers for my only web property (this blog) as of today:

How do I want my business look like in one year?

Although the final measure for the success is measured in US dollars, I mean, Revenue per month, I think that is actually the consequence of the result of two factors:

1) Traffic

2) Conversion

I could reach the same level of financial success with sites with different levels of traffic, but overall, I guess that Traffic comes first and Conversion second. So my focus needs to be on Traffic as my first priority.

How much traffic is a good target?

This is a tricky question but I will try to answer it from two points of view:

1.- Based on the “30 Day Challenge”: Ed Dale correctly states that in order to make one single sale or whatever action brings you money, you need at least 200 visitors to a page, which equals a conversion rate of 0.5% (half percent).

Let’s brake my target down, to measure the traffic needed to reach my goal:

Monthly Revenue Goal: $2,000 USD

( / ) 30 Days = $67 USD per Day

( / ) Avg. Revenue per sale: $20 USD

( = ) # of Sales per Day: 3 Sales

( * ) Traffic Needed for 1 Sale 200 Visitors

( = ) Traffic Neede for 1 Day: 600 Visitors

( * ) 30 Days in 1 Month : 18,000 Visitors

( = ) eCPM = $111

2.- Based on “John Chow’s Blog: In December 2007, John Chow’s blog, had 244,164 page views from 130,587 unique visitors, and he made $25k USD on that month, which translates into a eCPM of $102.56

From comparing two approaches I can see the following:

Ed Dales’ strategy is more precise and laser focused and thus requires less quantities of traffic, while a blog like John Chow’s requires writing a lot of content and bringing a lot of traffic as well, so he can make his ads more appealing to advertisers. Advertisers are after high traffic websites, so John provides that to advertisers and they happily pay John money for that. I don’t think that John really cares about atracting traffic to a certain page that makes him money, all he cares is about keep delivering good content (if it is controversial, the better), to keep RSS Readers and traffic growing so he can sell his advertising space at a higher cost. So what is a good traffic target to use as my goal?

I will pickup a monthly target of 18,000 visitors per “Key Conversion Page”, but I definitely need to use a combination of both laser targeted pages with massive content websites like blogs. The thing is that although blogs migh not be as targeted as these “Key Conversion Pages”, since these sites are updated seveal times a week, they atract spiders more often and drive traffic to “Key Conversion Pages” and tend to rank well on the search engines.

PLAN B: Find a Job and do other work to supplement my income

I hope that I don’t have to take this plan due to failure of Plan A, but if for whatever reason I get Plan B, I hope it’s because it’s a really good job that is worth taking.

I plan to run this plan in parallel with Plan A, because who knows if my plans for my Internet Business turn out into a success or not. There are many variables I can’t control and my familiy needs money ASAP.

Among the bad things of getting a new job are:

• Since I’ll be unemployed, then the chances of getting a job with at least the same salary level I used to have, are minimum.
• Due to this, I’ll have no choice but to take whatever I’m offered.
• Since, I’ll be starting from zero, then I’ll have to invest several extra time to catchup on the new job, which will affect any chance of running an online business part-time.

Other Non-Monetary Goals for 2008

• Build a new room in my house (kids are growing fast!)
• Finish my Tax Seminar
• Get a TOEFL score of at least 550
• Study a Posgrade in English – Spanish Translation