Getting Ready for The New Year

745 followers

10 years ago

Compliments of the Season to everyone at Wealthy Affiliate

Well Christmas has rolled on by for another year and everyone is gearing up for New Year and setting our resolutions for 2014. While Christmas is not that big an event here in Japan, it was nonetheless enjoyable and filled with Christmas spirit with there being a seemingly endless supply of Christmas Illumination locations and events to enjoy. I think it is the longer nights of a Northern Hemisphere Christmas that makes it seem more surreal than our Antipodean Summer Christmases, where we have to wait till about 9:30pm to take the kids out to see the festive lights as opposed to being able to see them in their full glory from 4:30pm onwards here. Our kids wagged school to enjoy a traditional roast pork lunch on Christmas Day, which was enjoyed by all.

Anyway now it is time to put 2013 behind us, and for us personally it wasn't a great year, the only redeeming factor being that we managed to see 8 countries in the past 12 months, while living in Moscow, Helsinki and now Tokyo. I guess in life just as in business you have got to take the good with the bad and enjoy the good times while they last.

Now is the time to be setting our goals for 2014 (if we haven't already set them), determining what we want from our Online Businesses and more importantly how are we going to achieve it.

There are two ways of setting our goals for the year ahead;

Work back from an Income target. - This is where you work out how much money you want (or need) to earn on a monthly basis, and then work out how many sales you need to achieve to get there. Say your goal is to earn $1,000 / month from your business, you will need to divide this by the WA commission of $22.50 per month to find out how many Premium referrals you need (in this case 45 Premium members signed up under you). Now deduct the amount of current members you have signed up and you know how many new Premium members (x) you need to find this year. Next you would need to ascertain when you want to be earning your target income by (y months from now). Divide x by y and you will have a resulting number of Premium Member signups (z) you need each month to achieve your goal. Now you need to take z and multiply it by about 10 (assuming you are getting a 10% conversion rate from initial prospects) to come up with the number of prospects you need to be getting each and every month. This is the most important figure of them all, as this is how many people you need to get, to at least cross the line and take a look at WA in the expectation that 1 in 10 will sign up for a premium membership.
Work forward from your expected sales - In this method you work from knowing the number of sales you are going to be signing up each month, based on the size of the audience you are reaching. Say you are managing to successfully get 20 people to view the WA opportunity each month, with a 10% conversion factor, that means you are probably getting 2 signups per month, which gives you $45.00 per month from the end of the first month and increasing by the same amount each month so by the end of 2014 you could be at $540 per month income from WA.

Now you have a starting point for your income calculations, you can now factor in additional income sources or ascertain that you need to investigate these further to increase your income if the resulting figure isn't up to expectation.

Once you have worked out how many prospects you need to attract, you then need to work out where you are going to attract them from. Obviously if you are following the WAU training you will be getting some organic traffic via a good SEO strategy. Maybe this is enough and will provide you with the required prospects, if not then you need to plan additional strategies to build your site traffic. Look at your social media platforms and see how you can utilise these to increase traffic flows, also consider newsletters to keep yourself in front of your prospects, and what about offline marketing strategies (just because it is an online business doesn't mean you are restricted to looking for new members online only...).

Lastly you may need to review if your niche is narrow enough to provide value for your visitors, remember they will come and keep coming back if you are giving them something of value (i.e. good information, great deals, etc) they won't keep returning if all you are is another shopping mall with no real Unique Selling Proposition. Treat every visitor to your site as valuable and make sure that they are going to go away happy and they will return. Nowhere have I seen this concept of valuing a sale no matter how small better demonstrated then here in Japan, where no matter how insignificant your purchase is they treat you with the utmost respect and reverence. With regards to your website this means helping your visitor find the information that will help them easily, guide them to the right places, with great articles and posts, don't just throw a whole lot of affiliate links in front of them and tell them you are making their shopping experience easier, even then they still have to do a lot of searching.

Good luck to everyone for 2014, and remember this is just like any other business and will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to become successful, it is not something you can (or should) expect to produce results quickly, just because it is an online business, you still need to put in the hard yards, so don't give up as you never know how close you are to the finish line.

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