Do you use daily, weekly, monthly or yearly income goals?

I recommend "monthly", generally.

I suppose it varies from business-type to business-type, but I think online incomes often have too high a variability for anything less than that to be very meaningful.

I always wince a bit when I see people talking about "$100 per day", because "an average of $3,000 per month" actually signifies something far more realistic. (With some exceptions, I suppose).

"Yearly" is too remote and uncertain and unpredictable, I think.

I instinctively go for "monthly", anyway.

I don't really have specific targets for myself, at all, but my general long-term objective (which I don't quite always achieve) is for each month's income to be higher than the previous month's.

If you don't break it down to its simplest activity components
the money will never come. Focus on the activity and the money
is automatic... assuming your numbers are accurate.

Example... let's say I want to earn $100K selling widgets.

Let's also say that I earn $200 for each widget sold so I need
to sell 500 widgets to earn the $100K

After testing and tweaking my presentation and delivery methods
I determine that I need to present my widgets to 20 people in order
to make 1 sale so I need to present my offer to 10,000 people in
order to make 500 sales.

There are 12 months in the year so I need to get my offer in front
of 833.33 people each month.

There are 30 days in each month (keep the math simple) so I need to
get my offer in front of 27.77 people every day.

Assuming my clsoing ratio is accurate... 1 sale for every 20 presentations...
if I get my offer in front of 27.77 (28) people each day my $100K is GUARANTEED!

Focus on the activity... not the money.

When you want to earn more you just get better at closing or find a way
to get your offer in front of more people each day.

You can earn any amount you desire by following the formula and focusing
on the daily activity... PERIOD.

I go for monthly goals for short term but my long term goal is a per day value because I think about it every day when I say "Oh I made x today and my goal is y, I am 20% there!" and I think that almost every day.

I quit setting up goals, I just go with the flow.

Before I set goals and then I stayed stuck at a certain monthly income, when I threw those goals overboard my income doubled in the 6 following months.

Obvious coincidence but it shows that you don't need to set yourself money goals, just do the best you can and income/revenue will increase.

What makes me more productive is creating task / TODO lists as I have to do dozens of things and sometimes I forget little things or get some overload syndrom not knowing what to do first. With a task list you just work down the list or pick whatever task you like to do at that moment.

Once I finished the list completely I start to create a new list, that way you prevent yourself from adding to the list and keep delaying the nasty tasks.

I would never use yearly targets.

Why?

Think of it this way...

If you do monthly or even weekly goals...

You'll know if you're falling off track after a week or month.

When will you know that you aren't going to meet your yearly goal?

You won't. You'll just keep thinking "I still have time."

I say go with monthly but even daily would be better than yearly.

I prefer to make monthly goals. I don't have any specific reason other than, it's easy to monitor my monthly progress and I know exactly what needs to be done to increase my income each month.

I'm all about weekly and monthly.

First, it's a time frame that I can actually visualize and figure out. I have no clue what life will be in 12 months other than just a good guess.

The second, focus on units and numbers and not cash. You want to pay attention to traffic, traffic flow, conversion. Things that can be changed, controlled, and managed. The more people that get to your offer, the more will buy.

It's a numbers game

monthly...yearly is too long anything can happen

Over the years I've changed how I set goals and how I implement them. I separate them into 3 basic categories: personal goals, financial planning goals (retiremenet, asset protection, insurance, adjustments to estate planning, etc.), and business goals.

I keep all 3 very simple and can fit them all on one sheet (makes it easy to review when I get up in the morning and before I go to bed).

With business goals, I have a 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year plan. The 5 year plan is more of a big picture plan.

The one year goals are pretty specific and depending on the business (offline or online) they can get broken down into monthly.

I tend to plan my days the night before, even if it's not business.

I've learned that all human beings are different and that one approach for setting goals may not suit another.

Setting goals is only half the battle. On my Whiteboard I have them written down along with the WHY behind that goal.

Though I do have financial targets that I shoot for, my business goals generally start off with something like this:

1. "For my existing customer base of my dating products, how can I bring more value to them? You can bring more value with these ideas that you learned at seminar XYZ..........."

2. "Continue to improve best practices for my Aweber list which is specifically for prospects of my XYZ niche and segment them between demographic A and B to deliver more personalized content to them."

3. "Explore the idea of starting a publishing company that focuses on authors that are already established in the offline world, but have yet to publish on Kindle or need to boost their Kindle sales."

4. "Marketing funnel A and B are very close, take a radically different approach and create marketing funnel C and see how it stacks up against both in separate tests."

When I set goals for ways to improve the customer and prospect experience, the financial targets usually take care of themselves.

RoD

At present i am not working in IM ,so selling things is not am issue for me .I am selling my services through odesk ,so i make weekly targets.I put weekly target with me so i can concentrate on grabbing work and provide services to reach target.

I cannot go for monthly or yearly because they can affect my target a lot.And daily target is not a solution for me as it is very unpredictable whether i would get work for today or not

I guess weekly target can really help in setting goals ,optimizing services and organizing yourself

I go with monthly goals. I'm erratic in my life and i have a million and 1 things going on all at the same time. The site is on autopilot, but at the end of the month i analyze my results and look for ways to improve my site to make more money.

I set my goals based on making more per day.

Of course, I also take into consideration how much I make per week and per month, but I care about earning a significant amount everyday.

I set monthly goals, but like to break it down. For example let's say I want to make $3,000 a month article marketing.

Divide that by 30 days and we're down to $100 a day. I'm selling an affiliate product that makes $50 a sale so I need 2 sales a day.

In the past month I've had 1 sale out of every 100 visitors so I need 200 visitors per day. Each article sends about 50 visitors so I need 4 articles per day.

So instead of saying "My goals is to make $3,000 this month through article marketing". I instead say "My goal is to write and submit 4 articles per day so that I can make $3,000 this month from article marketing."

Much more clear and precise of a goal, and makes you actually believe more that you can do it since you've done the numbers.

I never set monetary goals.

When I was having success ranking pages in Google I went by the number of pages I was getting search traffic to. Then I went for first page, then #1 results.

At that time # of pages equated directly to income generated so I guess in a round about way they were monetary goals after all.:confused:

I personally think that money-based goals (no matter if weekly, monthly, yearly, etc) are pointless, because it does not help you in any way to achieve those goals.

Instead, focus on project-based goals, as in for example:

• My goal for this month is to create my product XYZ.
• My goal for next month is to get the marketing material, website and at least 100 affiliates signed up for the launch.
• My goal for the following month is to launch the product and fill up a minimum of 4 webinars to boost sales.
• Etc.

THOSE are the type of project-centered goals that help your business grow, not wishful thinking "I want to make $X this month".

I agree with Tsnyder,

Instead of focussing on money goals, I'd focus on goals that would increase the chances of me making money. In the end, you'll have no control over whether people buy or don't buy your stuff. It can get frustrating if you take money as an expectation.

So best thing is to check out which actions will make/made you the most money (this is a process of trial and error, what works for you) and then make goals of doing more of those things.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

My 2 cent is set a realistic goal 90 days from now.

Worry about the "Why do you want to achieve that amount"

&

Triple that same worry on "How bad do you want it"

Don't worry about what method you going to use or how you going achieve it. I know it sounds weird but it will come to how bad do you want it.

An example: If a family member had cancer and the ONLY way to get rid of it is if YOU make $20,000 within 90 days. Are you going to go all out? Are you going to commit to making it happen no matter what? Of course you will, I know I will.

Man, putting a thought into words could be so hard sometimes.. lol hopefully this made sense to some people.. lol

The key is HOW BAD DO YOU WANT IT???

I think you should go with a delivery of value... the earnings will come with it (and usually much more than you originally hoped for). Deliver a value, and over deliver

I don't recommend to outline daily "income" goals (as you will be depressed if you don't reach your goal - and if you are depressed daily, you may stop working in your project). You should put daily work goals and try to finish it before EOD.

Plan for monthly income goals (be realistic) and work daily in terms to achieve it.

Im going to guess that your just throwing out random numbers there. Since each time frame increases your goal amount. For example Daily = $100 , Weekly - $1000 (or $142 per day)

Daily is no good. So what you have a bad day does that mean you missed your goal? What about those really good days? If you in this for a long term business then you should be thinking more long term than just 1 day.

Yearly is to long. I mean what if you make little money for 10 months does that mean you should expect to make up the rest in the final 2 months. Not likely. In fact at that point most people will assume they will miss there yearly goal. In which case they are really rating themselves monthly anyway.

Monthly is the best of the choices. Not to short that your going to freak if you miss it once or twice and not to long that you head is always in the cloud.

When I first started out making money online my very first goal was to reach 1 sale. Period. I didn't set a date for it, just the number. One sale in X amount of time.

When I suddenly got my first sale, I aimed for 2, within the same time I got the first one. After about 5 sales within the same amount of time as the first one, I'd set up a monthly goal.

How much you earn depends on several things. If you have a weekly goal of $1000, that could be 2 sales for $499. (+$2 you find on the street.) It depends on what you're doing and how you do it. Since I'm still a rookie I go for X amount of sales instead of X amount of money, but if I where a PRO I'd go for 10K a month. (That's my dream ^^,)

Cheers,
inyourway

It's good to have goals, I find though it is easy to sit down and write some projected goals instead of doing something productive in itself.

I set monthly goals usually, although I do occasionally aim for the odd weekly goal. I make sure to have a to do list every day though for my IM projects, but I wouldn't say these are goals. I've tried daily goals in the past but it's hard and it's really disheartening when you get an off day and don't make that much. Monthly has worked the best for me.

I set my dayly goal at $200/ days. It's easy to walk step by step.
Regards,
Thomas

I would do weekly goals, and monthly goals. That's how I would do it. If I need to I would do daily goals, that would really help out a lot to keep you motivated.