Are You Setting AdSense Goals?

This thread is semi inspired by the thread I just posted about My Success with AdSense in 2006 and partly inspired by the fact that 2006 is quickly drawing to an end and well what would a New Year be without some New Year Resolutions and why not get an early start with some AdSense goals.

Part of my success in 2006 I can’t help but feel was in part due to my fairly regular goal setting, so I’d like to follow in Dominic’s footsteps and get some DP members writing down some firm and quality goals. But before I get into my own goals I’d just like to clarify some things and rehash on what Dominic was trying to achieve in his goal setting thread of 2005.

When creating successful goals you need make sure you articulate them, write them down and announce them to those around you so that you now are accountable to achieving them. Why do we need to do this? Because unfortunately we as humans generally find it a lot easier to let ourselves down rather than others. Why do we do this? Because for the large part we have spent most of out lives letting ourselves down, telling ourselves we will do something then not following though on it, we are used to it, but letting someone else down still involves that embarrassment and feeling of true inadequacy – and this fear motivates us to achieve the goals we publicly set and then the success gives us the confidence, passion and motivation to continue succeeding with our future goals.

Now if you are looking to set successful goals you need to make sure they are SMART, which is an acronym for goal that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic with a timeframe. So when setting you goal you need to make sure that it is you are stating exactly what you are aiming to achieve. Eg - $100 in a month, or $15/day or maybe a 20% increase in earnings over a specific period for a specific site and that you can reasonably expect to achieve your goal with hard work. When it comes to setting realistic and attainable goal I’m often reminded of an old saying, “good goals are within sight, but JUST out of reach”. Probably the most important aspect of a goal is setting a date in time by which you need to achieve your goal by.

In addition to this I also think it is important you set out some form of “action plan” that maps out just how exactly you plan to get to your goals. Then hopefully in a month or two you can check back to this thread to see how you went.

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OK with that said I guess I will post my goals for the start of 2007:

Short Term: To earn over $4500 for the month of January.
Medium Term: To earn over $5500 for the month of February.
Medium-Long Term: To earn over $8000 a month in April.

OK so my December earnings looking like finishing up around the $3500/month mark. This means that I’ll need about a 30% increase in earnings in January which I think will be interesting to see if I can achieve. Basically the major gains I will make in January I believe will be made from apply the somewhat similar technique that was mentioned in My 2006 AdSense Summary where I basically will be writing more articles that are well SEOed for some of my other sites, but that said I am leaving in the middle of January for about a month so a great deal of progress will need to be made in first two weeks of the New Year if I’m to have any chance of achieving the goal.

The same applies for my February goal which will largely be based on the work that put in during the early parts of January because I won’t be back home until mid February which won’t leave me much time to make any drastic changes or content development to help achieve my February, but in the later stages of the month I imagine I will be catching up on backed up work and then working on developing some content for some of my already established sites.

My medium-long term goal of $8,000 in April is quite ambitious, but I definitely have the tools and knowledge to make it happen if I work hard, but it will require a lot of work on my “partially finished” sites and projects that have been very stagnant. I will also be looking to launch one or two new related sites to help boost revenue sources to help reach this goal. On the plus side I will be deferring my uni studies temporarily and I’ll be cutting back on my sporting commitments so I will have a lot more time to dedicate to my online ventures so this should hopefully help in with my sites’ development.

Wish me luck, and post your goals for 2007.

 

I've always found it difficult to set goals when it comes to Adsense earnings, or web-related earnings in general - it just seems like there are too many things that are beyond your control: CTR, Cost Per Click, SERPS, etc.
I agree that goals are good, but it can be frustrating/difficult when you don't have direct control of these things.

.

 

Some good points there Burta, especially about the 'letting yourself down' part, well here are my adsense goals:

Earn $100 per day by August, mainly off one site

 

Yeah I know when working with AdSense some of these things can fluctuate - but in my experience the fluctuation isn't too drastic. They are stable enough that you can definitely set firm goals. Alternatively you could set goals for each of those specific things so that if for example your CPC bombs for whatever reason, if you have goals set for the number of clicks, or CTR, or SERPs you can still achieve those goals even if your don't achieve your overall goal. So you if you are worried that one of the many factors will turn your goal into a failure whilst making progress in all the other you can just set individual goals for each criteria.

So how to you plan to go about achieving the $100/day by August. Where are you at the moment? Do you have any shorter term goals?

 

My AdSense goal:

Reach a point of $200 a day in AdSense revenue by April 2007. I will be graduating college in May, and I would love to have to not get a "normal" job.

 

wish you a wonderful new year and good luck burta. you are a great motivator. thanks for sharing!

 

My goal is to earn $200 a day in adsense earnings, by making my websites popular and getting lots of visitors, and make them optimized for maximum ctr and search engine ranking.

 

Making goals are easy, its making the plan to get there that's hard. What is everybody's plan to achieve their goals?

 

How will you make your site popular without any cost?

 

I set a lot of mini-goals in order to reach my short/medium sized goal. For example, mine my mini goal is to make atleast $1.00 a day consistently for one month. Then move up to $5.00/day consistently.

My short/medium goal is to earn $20.00/day from it. This would give me a good amount of extra money.

Now my long term goal is to make enough money a day where I can quit and just keep picking up the check from a tropical island.

 

No, not currently. Because I want to explore that how much it is possible for me top earn from adsense.

 

My goal is to make $5 a day at the end of januar. Currently, I'm not even close, but I plan on launching a big new site, and improving the old one with more articles.

 

He disn't actually say he was going to make it popular without anys cost.

 

my short goal is achieve stability in my 2 "adsensed" sites with more fresh/unique content, more "keyworded content" etc, And also no more up and downs everyday: short goal is to stable at 20€ day.

medium goal: launch a world target site (i´m workin on it) to full target and maximize earnings

long goal: never, ever, have a mail box google bomb: you´ve been banned.

Final prayer for 2007: have YPN or others in Portugal so i can have another font of revenue.

 

woaw burta, sure you love writing, and it also sure seems you read a lot of stuff from steve pavlina

current earnings, between 25 to 35 bucks a day with one site, my previous goal of a thousand bucks monthly by 2006 year end has not been reached but quite close, with a month way other the threshold (1400$ or something, due to sudden traffic peak), so, not so bad.

my goals : consistently continue working on my sites, including my prime revenue maker to achieve :

medium term : consistently above the 1000$/month mark by march
longer : above 1500$ for each summer month (good months for me)

another goal, long term : find a convenient legal solution to earn that money, as my current contract with my employer prevents me from having another source of income, which forces me into a legal but tricky solution.

real long term goal : earn as much money or more from my websites or other web biz with as much free time as my full time job provides me with, and then get rid of that full time job

and i know i can do it

 

That's a big goal - how do you plan to go about achieving it? Where are you at currently? Exactly how much of an improvement doyu need to make to reach such a goal, and what specific actions are you going to take to reach this goal? What's your action plan?

Thanks. I find that trying to motivate other people is what actually gets me to motivate myself because I'm then accountable to others and other "expect" me to achieve my goals because I'm out there trying to get them to achieve theirs!

$200/day is a really big goal - and whilst you may be on your way to that I think you will find that you will get there a lot quicker if you take 5 minutes to write down exactly what you need to reach this goal. Like do you need to write more content, build more links to your site? If so how much and how often are you going to do it? What's your action plan? At what rate are you going to make progress? Do you have any short and medium term goals, something that gives you little successes that lets you know you are headed in the right direction with the overall goal.

EXACTLY!

Great goals! Best of luck and you and me will both be prayer for the same thing! Come on YPN go international.

I don't mind writing when it's things I'm passionate about. But to be completely honest I haven't read a lot of Steve Pavlina's work - but I have read one or two things and at first glance it would appear that we have very similar perspectives on things.

Great goals? So what aspects do you need to work on in your sites to see an improvement in earnings?

 

My goal is to make €300,- a month with my site (not limited to AdSense) a month, by the end of the year. I have the following plan:
January: Complete Design, write a few main pages (index, main themes, etc.)
February-April: Write all main pages, and write more content for my site.
May-July: Write more content, start fully promoting my site through directories, link exchange, etcetera.
After the summer: Write even more content, keep SEO up, possibly start a forum with an article submission/review part for my readers.

 

Thanks for the invite Burta

I cant really remember what my goals were way back then, but adsense is only a part of my income these days, but still a substantial one.

Okay for 2007 my goals for Adsense will be:

1. To get over the $1000 us by March 2007
2. Finally work out why having double the traffic Im getting the same $ as b4
3. Pay for all the software and scripts I purchased in 2006 by June 2007

well thats about it for now, but this will be an interesting thread

 

Great set of goals! They are very specific an include an action plan which is all in a timeframe.

Your goals back in July 2005 was "for august is to beat the $150 for this month. Oh yeh my cheques are going towards my xmas pressie "a new boat" so I can go fishing!"

So how did you go? Did you get your boat?

 

ahhh okay. Yup I got the boat. Been out twice and got heaps Hey burta you an ozzie as well?