What I’m finding with my re-dedication to this blog is that I absolutely must set aside a block of time every day for writing posts - if I don’t my job, other business ventures, and personal life will quickly take over and leave me with no time to sit back, compose my thoughts, and write something meaningful.

I’d love to hear how anyone who reads that isn’t a full-time blogger manages to organize their time so that they are consistent in putting out quality posts on their blogs.

In working on my calendar, I’m putting down general categories for certain days first…  For example, the first Monday of each month might be an earnings report (all the big boys do it and it seems like a good way to bring people back to read in the future to see how I’m doing) and every Wednesday might be put down as a review post.

Of course, you have to leave some flexibility for spur of the moment posting or the like, but I’m thinking my new editorial calendar is going to make my blogging life a little easier, especially as I add new niche blogs to my blogging schedule.

My job requires me to enter notes and other information into our centralized customer relationship management system, which can only be accessed through our corporate VPN.  So, while my laptop is off getting worked on, I have no way to do any of these required tasks.

Oh well, maybe my boss will just give me the week off without making me take vacation!

The earnings potential for this blog appear to be pretty high, but I’m at a crossroads in debating the ethical dillema of whether or not it is the right thing to do this.

From one angle I realize that fiction writers do this every day - pick up any piece of literature and you’ll find hundreds of pages written about people who never existed.  The difference is that readers of fiction KNOW that they’re reading about people who aren’t real - the whole idea of this blog concept is to use the learned authoritative knowledge and experience of a fictional person to build up a reader base and possibly make money.

I’d love to hear what others think about this sort of blogging or the kind of results other people have had doing this very thing!

I ‘get’ the whole idea of being able to post little blurbs about what I’m doing and all, but am struggling with the idea of how to integrate as a legitimate extension of my blog and business.

Frankly, like many people, I just don’t have time to stop and post on Twitter all day.  I’m in my car a lot during the day for my “regular job” and really don’t like the idea of twittering away while driving down the road (you probably wouldn’t like the idea of me doing that, either!).

So, the question of the morning is “How do you use Twitter in your blogging or business?”.  Do you use it for a source of ideas to write about or just as a way to stay close to your friends and readers?

What did I discover when I looked at my stats for today?  Only 4 unique visitors today so far.  Talk about motivation to keep my blog updated!  The past few days, despite the fact that I hadn’t posted since Christmas had pretty consistent traffic - not huge, but 15-20 unique visits a day.  To a big dog like John Chow, 20 readers in a day would be cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth…  for a relatively new blogger just getting off the ground, having 20 a day for the first 3 days is cause for celebration.

So, today’s Amazing Discovery is that, yes, Virginia, if you post on your blog regularly you will have visitors who read what  you post…  if you don’t, nobody will show up.

Marketing is defined as the systematic planning, implementation, and conrol of a mix of business activities designed to bring together buyers and sellers.

Advertising is the paid, public, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by a sponsor of a product or service existing or potential customers.

The key thing, as internet marketers, that we must realize is that advertising and marketing are not the same thing.  Marketing encompasses all of the activities and planning that you do to promote a product or service.  Advertising is just a segment, a large one, of the overall marketing plan.

Really, the whole point of this post is to differentiate the two concepts and illustrate the fact that being good at internet marketing, or any sort of marketing, is about more than just putting together a good ad in Google AdWords and directing traffic to a web site containing some affiliate offer or your own products.

With a good marketing plan, you’ll know how to tie all your efforts - advertising, mailing list broadcasts, blog posts, articles, niche sites, and more - into one cohesive strategy to make yourself a lot of money, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

One very important thing that I’ve learned in life is that, no matter what you’re doing, setting good goals is incredibly important.  Whether it’s planning out what you want to do with your house or growing your own business, goal setting is the first step to ensuring success.

Whether we think about it or not, we all set goals constantly in our daily lives - your daily todo list is really just a type of very specific, short term goals.

But, in internet marketing, like any business, having a set of written goals for your business is vitally important to your long term success.  Why?  Because without setting those specific goals for how you want your business to grow you have no direction and will end up floundering.

So, what makes a good goal?  Obviously, that depends on your specific case and business…  but, there are a couple general rules I follow in any goal setting session:

• A good goal is a SMART goal - more on this in a moment
• Set goals for the short term, intermediate term, and long term to guide your business decisions.

SMART Goal Setting

If you’e ever read any time management or personal development books, you’ve probably seen this acronym before…  A SMART goal is:

• S - Specific
• M - Measurable
• A - Attainable
• R - Realistic
• T - Timely

A goal is specific when it sets a very precise outcome.  Being specific with our gols allows us to focus our efforts and clearly define what we are going to do.  Specific goals are the What, Why, and How of goal setting.  Ensure that your goals are specific, clear, and easy to understand - instead of setting a goal of “I’m going to lose weight”, set the goal of “I’m going to lose 20lbs by Christmas”.

Setting measurable goals is very important to having good goals for your business.  Simply put, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  When a goal is measurable, you can actually see the change or improvement.  In our previous example, “I’m going to lose weight” is not measurable - if you only lost 1lb, were you successful in achieving your goal?  You don’t really know since you didn’t put a measurable value on it.  Establish specific, measurable criteria for success with every goal you set.

The middle two letters of the acronym, attainable and realistic really go hand-in-hand.  The idea behind a good goal is to stretch your or your business’ performance, but to do so in a way that you can actually accomplish.  This doesn’t mean to make it easy, just don’t set such a lofty goal that you can never hope to achieve it.  For a beginning internet marketer, it’s probably not very realistic to set a goal of making $10,000 a month within 3 months - you’ve got too much to learn to realistically expect that outcome.  You may hit it, but the odds are you won’t.

The last part of setting goals is that all goals should be timely.  Setting timely goals simply means that you put some sort of timeframe on that goal.  If your time frame is too vague, there is no urgency to complete it or accomplish what you’ve set out to do.  The timeframe for your goals must be measurable, attainable, and realistic.

Let’s just take a look at a couple good and bad goals to show this in action:

• Have 300 unique visitors to my web site per day within 3 months - this is a good SMART goal.  It’s very specific, timely, and should be fairly attainable and realistic.
• Make money in affiliate marketing - Well, this goal is just not very good.  It’s not specific and it doesn’t put any sort of timeframe on it.  There’s no urgency and making 1 measly dollar would satisfy it due to it’s extreme vagueness.
• Have a blog online - This isn’t that bad.  It’s specific and sets a realistic and attainable desired outcome (setting up a blog).  Where it falls short is that it doesn’t put any sort of deadline on the goal.  
• Have a blog online by the end of the week - This is good.  It takes the same goal as above, but puts a very specific deadline for accomplishing the goal.

When I set my goals for this blog and any other business venture, I always set short term, intermediate, and long term goals.  Short term goals are ones that you accomplish within a week to a month.  Intermediate are those 3-6 month goals and long term goals are looking a year or more out at a time.  These goals should all work together and build on each other to help your business grow and thrive:

Short Term Goal:  Have consistent traffic of 50 visitors per day within 1 month.

Intermediate Goal:  300 unique visitors per day within 3 months.

Long Term Goal:  3,000 unique visitors per day within 1 year.

These goals are all very specific, set precise time frames, and have (somewhat) attainable and realistic objectives.  

The next important thing to do is to break down each of your goals into an action plan.  If your goals meet the SMART criteria, breaking them down to specific daily or weekly tasks to accomplish them should be no problem.

Good luck and have a great day!

I’m starting back up with this post and plan on getting back into a regular blogging routine.  My intent with this site had always been as a personal place to vent and talk about my web business ventures.  My new goal is to plan carefully and grow this blog into a profitable little venture on its own.

I’ll be posting some this week about how I’m going about the process of setting my goals, planning, and more.  Along the way, I’ll toss out some interesting things I’ve found on internet marketing and business in general.

Then, we all hear about the oddball ideas and websites that sell for Eleventy-Billion dollars and we all just stop and say “Why? or “Why the hell didn’t I have that idea?”. 

Seriously, who would have ever thought until it happened that a site like eBaumsWorld would sell for over $20 million?

Now, we see crazy apps for the Iphone generating tens of thousands of dollars a day.  It sometimes makes me want to just throw together some code and a website for every dumb little idea I have…  Maybe one of them will strike it big for a few weeks.

The lesson from all of this?   I guess the lesson has to be to follow your gut - no matter how crazy or “dumb” the idea sounds, float it out on the market and see what happens.  Maybe you’ll have the next iFart and make $10,000 a day.