How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals

Today I want to share my thinking process for setting smart business goals with you. I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, I need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and I am seeing that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new car. 

 

Once I know how much money I have to make, I can start to think about different ways to do just that. I could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if I have a $10 eBook, I would have to make an extra 60 sales per month. From there I can work backwards. If I know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, I need to add 600 new subscribers to my list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to my site. If that’s my plan, I know that my daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month. 

 

Of course that’s not my only option. I could also create another information product or eBook each month and sell it to both my existing and new subscribers. I could create a higher priced item so I need to make a lot fewer monthly sales to reach my $600 goal. For example, if I create a nice $100 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car. 

 

Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be my own membership, or I could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote. For me, one option could be to create some content around content marketing and promote a PLR Membership like this one form [affiliate link to either biz or self-help membership]. It’s a $67 per month subscription with a 50% commission. That means I can expect over $30 in commissions each month. Let’s say it’s 30 to keep the math simple. I only need 20 members to pay for my car. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover that. 

 

Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 20 people to sign up for the membership. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the PLR membership, a short report about using PLR to build a targeted sub lists of people interested in using PLR in general. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the PLR membership. I may even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel. 

 

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could approach other writers to see if they would be interested in writing some guest blog posts, answering some questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would of course promote the membership. By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take me long to get those 20 signups that pay for my new car payment. Because I really want that new car, I’m going to be motivated to get it done and grow my business by those extra $600 per month. In fact, chances are great that I’ll overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars and it’s something I can continue to grow month after month. 

Increasing Traffic, Subscribers & Customers To Boost Your Bottom Line

To grow your income, you need more customers. That in turn means you need more people to sign up for your list. Where do these new subscribers come from? You get them by increasing the traffic to your site. Some of the things you want to do and track then are: 

 

• Get more traffic from various different sources. This should always be a priority and something you work on regularly. Track your growth as you move along and keep an eye out for fresh new ideas to boost your traffic. 

• Your next focus should be getting more subscribers. As you start to get more traffic, your list will start to grow, but don’t stop there. Tweak your opt in-forms to increase conversion. Create a new lead magnet to get the attention of a different sub-group of your target audience. Set up a few dedicated opt-in pages and start driving traffic to them. Do what you can to continually grow your list and pick up speed in the process. 

• The third piece of the puzzle and where things get really interesting is turning those subscribers into customers. You want them to spend money with you either by buying your products and services, or through your affiliate links. Offer more products. Raise your prices. Find more attractive offers you can promote as an affiliate. Work on your funnels. There’s a lot you can do to grow your bottom line once you have traffic and subscribers figured out. 

 

The real power of this approach becomes apparent when you start to look at how these three things work in synergy. By getting more and higher quality traffic, while improving your opt-in rates, and creating higher prices products with sales funnels that convert well, you can quickly make a huge difference in your bottom line. Each of these elements alone will help, but by combining them, you will start to see exponential growth. 

 

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you start out with 100 new visitors per day. 10 percent of them sign up for your mailing list, which comes out to 10 new subscribers each day. One of these people buys one of your products at $10. 

 

Now let’s see you double your traffic. With nothing else changing, you go from making $10 per day to $20. But what if you can also improve your opt-in forms and get to a 20% conversion. You also create a few more products and each of your customers ends up spending 3 times as much as before. When we add all that up you go from making $10 per day to 40 new subscribers each day which means 4 new customers. If each of them spends $30 shopping around in your shop, you end up making $120. That’s a pretty big bump from $10 while still only requiring you to double your traffic. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? 

You Have To Know Where You’re At Right Now To Measure Growth & Figure Out What You Should Be Working On

Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great. Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now. 

 

Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now. 

 

Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information.  You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture. 

 

Traffic – To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from. 

 

List / Subscribers – Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers. 

 

Customers – Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates. 

 

Income & Expenses – Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis. 

 

Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. 

 

Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years. 

Why Business Planning Is The Secret To Success For The Coming Year

Do you set aside time regularly to plan what you want to do in your business? If it’s not something you currently do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it for the remainder of this year as well as the one coming up. Setting aside time at the end of the year, to plan out what I want to do and more importantly what growth I want to achieve in the coming year has been crucial to my own success. Over the next seven days, I want to share some of what I’ve learned and what I’ve found helpful with you. 

 

Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success. There are a few different factors that come into play here. The first is efficiency. When you go in with a clear plan, you can focus on what’s most important. Instead of spending time trying to figure out what you should be working on, what pieces of the puzzle are missing from your product funnel, or what you need to do to break through to the next income level, you know exactly what needs to come next. 

As we’ll explore in a future blog post, with a clear goal in mind and a plan for the year, it becomes easy to walk backwards to create effective and efficient daily to-do lists. Work on what needs to get done each day and you will reach your goals. 

 

Next, setting a big goal for yourself helps you think outside the box. If you don’t believe me, try it. Decide on a big income goal for the coming month. Write it down. Keep it in front of you. Then get to work and start to notice what happens next. You start to think of things that didn’t occur to you before. You come up with creative ways to get more traffic. You decide to run a fun promo that adds dollars to your bank account. The same happens when an important deadline comes up unexpectedly. Think back on that time in college when finals rolled around, or the last time your in-laws told you they would stop by later in the day. You got very creative about studying and cleaning respectively. 

 

Last but not least, let’s talk about the subconscious. So far, we’ve been focused on what we are actively doing to make progress by making a plan, setting goals and following through. There’s another dimension to all this and that’s what’s going on in our subconscious mind. While we are busy plowing through our to-do list, cooking dinner for the family, and even sleeping, our subconscious mind is working towards those goals as well.

 

In short, planning and setting goals is important because it helps you grow faster. That means you end up with more money for yourself and your loved ones while spending less time slaving away at your desk. 

Create A High-Ticket Item You Can Sell Again & Again

One of the quickest and easiest ways to double your income is to come up with a high-ticket item that you can sell to your customers. One of the most popular models to do this is to offer one-on-one coaching or small in-person workshops at your house. While that’s certainly an option and a great way to justify asking for several thousand dollars per ticket, this model has one big problem. It isn’t scalable because you’re limited in how many you can sell by how much time you’re willing to spend on these meetings in any given week or month. 

 

Let’s look at some options that allow you to create one of these high-end products, without this limiting factor involved. In short, we’re going to look at some high-value products you can create that you set up once and then sell over and over again. First though, why is creating a high-end product such a good idea? After all, the majority of your subscribers and customers won’t buy them. The reason is because you don’t need to sell a lot to be profitable. Let’s look at an example. 

 

Let’s say your average product costs $27. To make $5,000 per month, you need to sell an average of 185 of them. That’s a lot of new customers you need to find each month to reach your income goal. Now let’s say you have a $97 product. You only need to sell 51 of them. Last but not least, let’s go crazy and say you come up with something you can sell for $497. You only need to sell about 10 of those per month. 

 

Now let’s circle back around to the idea of doubling your income. Sure you could come up with another $27 product, but you’d have to do double of what you’re doing now to generate an extra 185 sales. But what about that $497 product? It could become the last piece in your product funnel. Not every single one of your customers will buy it. Only the ones that need the extra help and are serious enough about reaching their big goals will pick it up. But that’s ok. You don’t need a lot of them to buy it each month to seriously increase your profits. 

 

There are a lot of different ways to create these products. Your main goal will be to offer a lot of value and to make a real difference in your customers lives or businesses. For example, this could a comprehensive guide with workbooks and open office hours where customers can ask questions. In the guide you walk them step-by-step through each part of the process of reaching their goal. Or maybe it’s an interactive video course that allows them to pick and choose lessons specifically on the stumbling block they are facing next. Or maybe part of it is access to your own team of people who can help them create covers, set up websites etc. Or maybe it’s yearly access to your membership site where they get help, motivation, advice, and interaction with like-minded people. Get creative. Think about what you would have wanted when you were in their position. What would have helped you get to where you are now faster. Create that and then don’t be afraid to put a premium price on the product. 

Embrace Paid Advertising To Grow Your Reach

Do you know what your only truly limited resource is? It’s time. We all end up with just twenty-four hours per day. What does that have to do with getting traffic and growing your reach? It’s simple. You have two options when it comes to reaching more people. You can spend a lot of time creating fresh content, posting on social media, reaching out to podcasters, bloggers, and vloggers. Or you can get in front of your ideal customers through paid advertising. 

 

Yes, paying advertising can seem a little daunting. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll make your money back. The good news is that it’s easier and more affordable to get started than it has ever been. You can start small with as little as a few dollars per day and scale up as you learn more about what you’re doing. 

 

A great place to start is with Facebook ads. You see them all day long. Pay attention to the ads you find yourself clicking. Maybe it’s an interesting tagline and a pretty cover for a new book. Maybe it’s a new pair of shoes, or a planner that promises to help you stay productive throughout your busy day. Think about that ad. What made it so appealing? What hooked you. 

 

Once you’ve figured this out for a few of the ads that have grabbed your attention, it’s time to give it a try yourself. Start with your best-selling product, or the lead magnet that draws in new subscribers like crazy. Why do people buy or download it? Are you solving a problem? Do you tackle a hot topic? Try to zero in on what’s making this such a big hit for you already. Then craft a Facebook ad that reflects this. 

 

Next, it’s time to do a little homework. Read through some blog posts about getting started with Facebook ads. Watch a few tutorials. Go through the one that Facebook provides and go through the steps to set up your account. Make sure you have your pixels installed (it’s a Facebook thing… those tutorials will explain), so you can track what’s working and what isn't’. Then create that first ad.

 

Create at least two more ads that are similar to the first so you can start to test. A great place to start testing is with images. Pick three different images, but leave everything else the same. Launch this first set of ads with a limited daily budget. If you want to spend just $5 per day, that’s fine. If you can swing it, go up to $10 or even $15, but keep your bids as low as possible. This will get you data faster. Let them run until you get a feel for which one performs best.

 

Keep that add and start changing something else. Maybe it’s testing an add with little text against one with slightly more text and one with a lot of text (maybe an entire article or blog posts). Maybe you test different headlines. Or different calls to action. Keep testing and tweaking until you find a profitable ad that you have a hard time improving upon. 

 

From there the sky's the limit. Invest some of your profits into running more ads. Create ads to different products and opt-in offers. Branch out into Instagram and WhatsApp ads or cross over to different social media platforms, or even Google Adwords. Keep buying ads and keep growing your reach and your profits.

Focus On List Growth And Sales

There’s so much you can do on a daily basis to grow your reach and make more sales. The list seems almost endless, doesn't it? You could be writing a new blog post, creating a series of videos, posting on various social media platforms, writing guest posts, publishing kindle or print books… the more important question you should be asking yourself is what should you do if doubling your income is your goal? The answer is much simpler and the list much shorter. 

 

You should focus on just two things. Growing your list and making sales. Does this mean you stop doing everything else you’ve always done? Not necessarily. Think of it more as a mindset shift that can help you become much more profitable. You could still write that blog post. But the goal of the post would be to either turn the reader into a subscriber, or warm them up for the offer you’re going to email them about in a couple of days. You’ll record that podcast interview, but your main goal will be to convert the podcasters audience into subscribers to your list. Do you see how this works? 

 

Why is focusing on subscribers and customers so important? Because it takes some time before someone is ready to buy from you. They have to know, like, and trust you first before they hand over their credit card, or log into their PayPal account. That’s why your number one goal when you reach a new audience should always be to get them on your list. That gives you a chance to build a relationship before you make an offer to buy. Of course, the benefit of a list doesn’t end there. You also get a chance to make offers for other products. These could be your own, or something you’re promoting as an affiliate. The end result, in either case is more money in your bank account. 

 

A list of subscribers is valuable and something you should always work on growing. The only thing more valuable is a list of customers. Customers have proven that they trust you and like you enough to hand over their hard-earned money. If you deliver a lot of value and help them solve a problem, they are more likely than anyone else to buy something else you offer or recommend. 

 

As you go about growing your business, focus first on growing your list of email subscribers, and then on converting these people into paying customers. Make that the main goal for everything you do online and you will quickly see your income grow.

Create A New Product For Your Existing Customers

Listen up, this is important. It’s one of the most powerful marketing concepts out there and something that could become a game changer for you. It’s much easier to sell ten products to one customer than it is to go out and find 10 buyers. In other words, it’s much easier to create a second product and sell it to your current customer base than it is to go out and market to new people. 

 

That’s why one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase and even double your income is to create a new product. Find out what your audience needs next. What else are they struggling with? What’s the next step they should be talking to reach their goal? Talk to your customers and do a bit of research in your niche. I’m sure you’ll come up with all sorts of fun and creative product ideas. Pick one and get to work. 

 

You’ll find that it’s much easier and quicker to create that second product than it was to work on the first. You know what you’re doing now. And guess what. It will get even easier the third and fourth time around. Plan to create a whole series of products that help your customers reach their ultimate end goal. When you start to run out of ideas on what they should be doing next, think about related topics. For example, once you’ve taught your tribe everything you know about list building, branch out into social media or copywriting. If you’re teaching them about container gardening, consider branching out into composting, or food preservation for example. 

 

Finish that product and get it up for sale. Then email your list of existing customers about it. Don’t be surprised if the majority of them will buy from that one email. That’s right, you’ll start seeing quite a few sales from that one email. Compare that to all the work, effort, and time it took to find those customers in the first place. Doesn’t that want to make you get to work on the next product? 

 

Of course, the benefits of adding a new product don’t end there. Start promoting the second product the way you did the first. Send an offer for it out to your list of leads. Mention it on social media. Link to it from existing content on your blog. Mention it in guest blog posts and podcast interviews. People who weren’t interested in your first product, end up picking up this new one, resulting in even higher profits. Try it and see for yourself.

Raise Your Prices & Rates

Are you up for a little math? I promise it won’t be hard, but it will open your eyes to the possibility of doubling your income by raising your prices and rates. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of the best ways to double your income is to charge more for what you do. When we first start to work online, we tend to undervalue our worth. We are anxious to get clients or make those important first sales. Starting out on the low end is actually not a bad idea. Without experience, testimonials, and social proof, starting with low-end products and services is a great way to get a foot in the door. But it isn’t where you want to stay. 

 

How do you know that it’s time to raise your prices? When you start to make quite a few sales. If you’re a service provider who’s constantly booked, you should be raising your prices. When you hear your customers rave about your products and share how much value they’ve gotten from them, it’s time to raise your prices. 

 

But what do you do when you’re not there yet? It may sound counterintuitive, but the reason your sales pages aren’t converting may be that you’re not charging enough. Think about it. You come across a course on running an online business that offers a ton of content for $7. What’s your first thought? It’s probably that it can’t be very good if the person is selling for so little. Your customers and clients may feel the same way. 

 

Often, we’re reluctant to raise our prices because we think we’ll lose customers. While that can happen, it also opens a lot of doors. Other people may not even consider buying what you have to offer until they see a price that they associate with high-value. Plus, when you increase your profit margin, you don’t need to sell nearly as much as you did before. 

 

Let’s dive into that math. Let’s say you have a product that you sell for $20. To keep the math simple, let’s say you sell 100 of them each month and that there’s no real cost associated with the product. With an information product like an eBook or course, there really isn’t and let’s ignore those pesky payment processor fees for this exercise. In that case, you’re making a $2,000 profit per month. 

 

Now let’s say you go crazy and double your price. You start charging $40 for your product. Because it’s such a great value and because the higher price reflects that, you find you’re making just as many sales as before. By doubling your price, you’re doubling your profit. You’re not bringing home $4,000 per month. 

 

But it doesn’t stop there. Because of the higher ticket price, an affiliate marketer becomes interested in promoting you. You set up a 50% commission and he sends an additional 100 customers your way. That’s another $2,000 in profits after you’ve paid the affiliate his or her share. 

Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. You don’t have to double your rates if that seems like a bit much. Play around with the numbers. If it doesn’t work out how you’ve hoped, you can always go back down, bundle products at a lower price, or offer a coupon. Play around with pricing and find the sweet spot for your audience and your products that nets you the biggest profits.