I’m going to hit you with a pretty hard truth. Are you ready? Brace for it, because here it comes… You aren’t going to achieve the dot com lifestyle overnight. Hopefully, you’re not too surprised by this. Realistically, you really shouldn’t be all that stunned at all. The appeal of the so-called “get rich quick” scheme is understandably alluring, but it’s a myth.
Unless you win the lottery, you’re not going to be rich overnight. And even if you do, it might not last. You’ve likely heard the stories of how some lottery winners end up declaring bankruptcy just a short time afterward. Why? If you’re bad with a dollar, you’re going to be that much worse with a million dollars. You have to realize the “typical” kind of person who would buy lottery tickets in the first place. But I digress.
The long and the short of it is that if you want to achieve any sort of long-term, sustainable success, you need to be prepared to play out the long game. Absolutely, you must adapt and adjust to short-term trends and challenges, but it is paramount that you ultimate vision is much longer term than that. What can you do today to succeed not only today, but also tomorrow and years into the future?
And to this end, you really ought to be setting long-term goals for yourself. It’s up to you what sort of timeline you want to set: one year, five years, ten years down the road. But when you look at these sorts of long-term goals, they can be intimidating, daunting, overwhelming. Where do you even begin?
Remember the concept of SMART goals? SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. And the mindset from which you should begin taps into all five of these elements. The strategy that you need to undertake is to understand what your long-term goals mean on a daily basis.
You need to break down that big, lofty, long-term goal into something that you can measure daily, weekly, or monthly. This means the goal has to be specific and measurable (not “I want to make more money”), it needs to be reasonably within reach, the actions you take need to be relevant, and you need to set a deadline because some day never comes.
So, what does this actually mean? Allow me to illustrate with a couple of quick examples.
- Let’s say that you want to make $100,000 a year. That works out to just over $8,300 a month, just under $2,000 a week, or about $275 a day (if you work 365 days a year or about $400/day if you work five days a week for 50 weeks a year). At the end of each day (or week or month), you can see how your progress aligns with your overall income goal for the year.
- Let’s say that you want to double the conversion rate that you get on one of your landing pages. If you’re currently getting about 5% of page visitors to convert on your affiliate offer, then you want to get that up to 10%. If that’s the case, you probably can’t expect to make that leap overnight. Break it down into something more meaningful and manageable. If we use a monthly cycle for simplicity’s sake, then you’ll need to gain about 0.42% each month. If you start on January 1, then the conversion rate should be 5.42% by February 1, 5.84% by March 1, and so on.
You’re going to have some days (and weeks and months and years) that are better than others. You’re also going to have some that are much worse. That’s the natural ebb and flow and expected inconsistency that comes with running your own online business. What’s more important is that you keep track of your numbers and work to ensure that the numbers are trending in the right direction.
When you’re making precisely zero dollars today, it can feel completely overwhelming to say you want to make $100,000 this year. But it sure sounds a lot more manageable when you say that you want to figure out how to make $275 a day, don’t you think? One step at a time.
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