How do you know when you’ve succeeded in your business? In your affiliate program? You may think you’ll know success when you see it, but it’s hard to know why you’ve had success or what to strive for next if you didn’t set goals. Setting goals may seem like an obvious thing, but many people fail to set them, resulting in an ineffective strategy or business moves that don’t make sense. Learn how setting goals leads to success by designing your goal path, achieving them, and then moving forward.

What are You Trying to Achieve?

Goals are important to success in business, not just because they give you something to strive for, but because they give you focus. Perhaps you open a pizza shop and you think it’s obvious that you want to sell pizza, but how? Do you want to sell more pizza than any other shop? Do you want to sell more pizza at the lowest price around? Or do you want to sell the highest quality pizza around, regardless of price? This is a simple example, but it applies to all business. You may think that just by starting a business or affiliate opportunity that your goal is obvious, but it’s not. What do you want to get out of starting that business or affiliate program? Now you’re on your way to setting goals.

Measuring Success

Part of what makes a good goal is the ability to measure it. Putting numbers to goals can be intimidating and many people avoid it because, what if they don’t hit those numbers? The important part of creating measurable goals is to just start. Say you’re that same pizza shop owner and you want to set some goals for how many pizzas you sell next month. Will the number you set as a goal be too high? Too low? It doesn’t matter in the beginning. Pick a goal and then start measuring your progress toward it. After those first few months, you’ll be able to see what is a reasonable goal, what is a reach goal, and what is setting the bar too low. Then adjust your goals accordingly and you’ll be on the right path to achieving the right goals.

Reset Your Goals

Once you hit a goal, what do you do next? Set a new one, of course. Often times this will mean setting a new higher goal in the same category, like last month you sold 300 pizzas and this month you want to sell 400. But new goals can also be subsets of your bigger goals. Maybe you want to sell 400 pizzas next month and make sure the customer doesn’t wait more than 20 minutes for their pizza. Or you want to sell 400 pizzas, but 100 should be for take out so you can get more cash into your business without taking up space in the dining room. Adding these qualifiers onto your goals help to guide your business better and identify what you need to improve and what doesn’t matter. Think how you can refine your goals each month.

Filing Your Goals

So you’re hitting your goals, setting, and refining them. How do you ensure continued success? Don’t forget these goals. Have a system to file your goals and information so you can look back on them to find what led to success or just compare numbers. While the goal of your business is to keep growing, it important to have information from previous months and years to give context to your growth and success.

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