Everyone has their own way to set business goals, and some goals are set for different reasons than others. I have business goals that are to do with creative impact, or leaving a legacy, as well as financial goals. When it comes to setting financial goals though, I find this particular process can really help you get a clear picture of what needs to be done.

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It can be really helpful to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It starts with an income goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to take a trip, and I know the cost 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 bottom line this month.

This works for an ongoing expense as well. Want to join that new spa, gym or yoga studio, but know you need an extra $75 a month for the membership? Again bump it up ($100 should be about right) and put your plan in place. Once that’s done and you’re seeing that level of extra income every month, you’re ready to sign up for that membership.

Once you know how much money you have to make, you can start to think about different ways to do it. You could find more customers for one of your existing products, get one more regular freelance gig or coaching client, or launch a new product. For example, if you have a $10 eBook, that you sell direct with no commissions or expenses to pay out, you would have to make an extra 60 sales to hit that extra $600 for your trip. Still aiming for the spa membership? You just need to sell 10 extra copies a month, consistently.

From there you work backwards. If you know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, you need to add 600 new subscribers to your list to pay for your trip, which in turn might mean attracting 4,000 new visitors to your site. If that’s your plan, your daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up traffic by an extra 4,000 people.

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

And if you’re still aiming for the spa membership? Well, that’s an monthly outgoing, so it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be your own membership, or (my favourite way to make money) affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote.

For me, one option would be to promote a PLR Membership like this one from Piggy Makes Bank . It’s a $67 per month subscription with a 50% commission. That means I can expect $33.50 in commissions each month. That means I only need to have 3 members sign up to pay for my monthly spa membership. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members each month going forward should more than cover that.

Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing just 3 people to sign up for the monthly membership. My daily tasks could include things like creating content that includes an offer to the PLR membership, a short report about using PLR to build a targeted sub list of people interested in using PLR in general. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing my subscribers 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 the nice owners of Piggy Makes Bank 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 probably won’t take me long to get those 3 extra signups that pay for my new membership. Because I really want that spa membership, I’m going to be motivated to get it done and grow my business by that extra $100 per month. In fact, chances are great that I’ll overshoot the goal, because that may be the minimum needed but there’s no point in stopping there, especially once you’ve put an affiliate marketing strategy in place.

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