Reward Every Success No Matter How Small
Every blogger has his ultimate goal, whatever that may be. The goal is usually something big and will takes quite a bit of time to achieve. Let’s say the goal is to have your blog make enough money to quit your job and when that is achieved you plan to reward yourself with a new car or a month long vacation or whatever it is that you really want.
You put everything you got on achieving that goal. Time passes, frustration sets in because you’re no closer today than you were six months ago. When this venture started, it was fun. Now it seems like a chore. What went wrong? While it’s great to keep the end goal in mind, you have to remember to stop and smell the roses along the way. It’s not the destination that is important, it’s the journey.
Here’s To The Journey
One of the ways I keep things fun along my journey to world domination is to remember that success is cumulative and every success, no matter how small, should be celebrated. What I like to do is have a bunch of mini goals that accumulate up to the final goal. I don’t just celebrate at the final goal. Instead I celebrate with the achievement of each mini goal. This keeps thing fun and keeps me motivated to keep moving forward.
For a new blogger wanting to quit his job, a set of progressive goals may look something like this.
- Register a domain name
- Set up Wordpress
- Make two to three posts per week
- Get 100 RSS readers
- Get approved by an ad network
- Make first $100
- Insert about 50 more mini goals here
- Quit job
Now, you may think that registering a domain name or setting up Wordpress isn’t much of a goal but for some, it is an achievement that should be rewarded. The point is to reward yourself with the achievement of each mini goal. The reward should be proportional to the goal – you shouldn’t reward yourself with new car for getting approved by an ad network. For example, when you make your first $100, you might take the family out for a pizza night. When you make your first $1,000, go on a fine dining night. My rewards usually involve my family because they’re on this journey with me.
As the goal gets bigger, so does the reward. Because the rewards are getting bigger and because the next goal seems a lot more achievable then the final goal, you are far more motivated to keep building. Doing it this way is a lot more fun than just trying to reach the end.
Remember, it’s not the final destination that is important, it’s the journey. Enjoy the journey and reward yourself along the way. Now I just need to negotiated with Sarah about that ZR1 reward.
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- Posted in Make Money Online, Ramblings
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Trackbacks
- Your Financial Goals for 2008 - December 21, 2007 at 8:55 pm
- Clogging Beggings | Clog Money - December 22, 2007 at 6:53 am
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- Speed Linking #2 this Sunday : Link attack on fellow Bloggers at Tech | Freak , One stop for all your latest technology news and updates - December 22, 2007 at 12:08 pm
- entrepreneur-hut.com » Blog Archive » Goals until 2008 - December 22, 2007 at 3:19 pm
- Here we go | Binar Space - December 24, 2007 at 5:53 am
- The Best of the Blogosphere: December 28, 2007 | Super Blogging - December 28, 2007 at 1:17 am
- Happy New Year 2008! | John Chow dot Com - January 1, 2008 at 12:00 am
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- Happy New Year 2008! | Calvin Harvey dot Com - January 5, 2008 at 5:21 am
- Make Money Online The Easy Way - Jays Tips » JaysTips Is Off To A Good Start - January 7, 2008 at 11:24 pm
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Take this as a B L O G G E R!
B uild Community
L ink to folks, who take time to comment, in a biweekly post
O pen to ideas and additional research
G row as a techie
G ain in ranking
E nergize readers and myself through thoughtful content and questions.
R evitalize blogroll
I like how you represented “BLOGGER” with meanings for goals for bloggers to do
Yes, that was helpful!
Thanks John for another great post. It’s amazing how you can pin down exactly how I sometimes feel! Your advice is excellent. Mini goals are the way to go.
Exactly, There is nothing in the post which don’t know or which we don’t follows (can I say that) but see how beautifully he scripted this post. He is really a master blogger. Simple, Sweet and so encouraging post John. You “earn” a Hats off here.
Exactly, There is nothing in the post which we don’t know or which we don’t follows (can I say that) but see how beautifully he scripted this post. He is really a master blogger. Simple, Sweet and so encouraging post John. You “earn” a Hats off here.
awesome
Cool way to look at B-L-O-G-G-E-R. I had recently writtten a post on B-L-O-G-G-I-N-G in a similar way. If you are interested how I defined BLOGGING you can click on my name and take a peek at the post if interested.
I really like the “Insert about 50 more mini goals here”.
I think that’s great advice to set small goals along the way. Small goals are so much easier to achieve and provide more frequent satisfaction than one big goal.
MY mini goal is to get to 50 visitors a day. In three weeks, I’ve gone from 2-3 visitors to 30 a day. I think this goal is achievable.
I remember setting a goal similar to that. It was a huge achievement to me. Now I am aiming for 5000 per day which I hope to pass next month.
Never stop is the key! Just keep working away (smart working) and the goals will be achievable.
It will be achivable.
My mini goal is to get 50 visitors per day
& atleast i wanna make fw bucks on that 
– http://www.vhxn.com
VHXN, maybe sticking more to one topic will help you reach this goal. When I first started blogging I was in the same situation. Then I started sticking towards one topic rather than trying to hit all possible topics.
Click for Nick
At first it seems frustrating to learn that the journey is much more important than the destination. Once that really sets in, though, it’s pretty liberating.
Thanks for the reminder.
Yea it is a great point.
That’s true in life as well.
To reach Goals sometimes takes Guts!
Goal: Help teach others how to make more money online.
Thats a good point about registering the domain nevermind the rest.
Its like how the saying goes “look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves”
Don’t expect the goals to come in order!
I just thought I’d throw that in there, as an example my ATV blog just hit top 10 on google for the term “ATV” out of 58 million+, traffic is great, earnings are great, but I’ve never seen anything like it… zero comments! If comments was a goal… i’d be frustrated. Thankfully they’re not, content is, but it’s amusing to see such an oddity.
I’m in the same boat when it comes to comments. My blog generates several hundred visits daily and 40-50 RSS readers, but comments are very rare.
Comments are extremely hard to get on some topics – I’ve had the same thing
For me comments would never be a goal – writing on Tech or Linux /Open Source gives little room for various opinions, thus few comments – even when I write on Firefox.
My blog just started around 2 weeks ago and now got a number of visitor but do not have much comment. Well looks like i have to write more content.
I like your thoughts on this. I sometimes forget to set the little goals, and shoot only for the big ones.
Now I realize how much I’ve accomplished by having 60 posts in just over 2 months, approved by an ad network, and have actually made some money.
I’m going to map out my journey more carefully from now on.
- Tevin
P.S. Tip Me $1, get 30 days of advertising, and 100 EntreCard Credits on Bankruptcytomillionaire.com
very nice post.. My goal is now to get 500 uniques/day until 15 of january, i’m averaging 150.
My goals is to hit 1000 uniques daily.
Vision, Mission, Strategy. It should be followed this way, but we are not patient, we want to have results – now.
The article is excellent as there is a nice underlying message – do not expect yourself to be a star of the Internet by tomorrow morning.
Very good point. The same concept was discussed here:
http://ww-success.com/blog/index.php/2007/08/25/celebrating-milestones-10-reasons-why-you-should/
I choose a different route. For every 100 subscribers, I reward my readers by giveaways
Now I have a 600+ and my 700 subscriber giveaway is going to come up soon.
I also like to break up my project into smaller goals. I find it difficult to even start working when the project is large and I feel overwhelmed. But when the goals are small and achievable after a few hours of days of work, then I feel less lost in my over project progress.
I totally agree,
Waiting years for a goal can be quite frustrating and would drain the fun out of everything you used to enjoy doing.
Very well written post. The most important thing to remember is to ‘enjoy the journey’. If you make it a point to enjoy the journey, you are more likely to reach your goal.
You know what, I never thought of it like this, well written. I sometimes set a goal and only plan on rewarding myself only after the “big picture is painted”…and that’s my saying, copyrighted and everything, you can’t have it, lol. Nice post though, I like it.
I have a goal to reach 500 subscribers by the end of 2008.
That would be awesome!
Right now my blog, http://www.jonathanvolk.com has around 85.
Start promoting it with comments then
John, I’m sure you could detail this post a lot more. It’s actually a lot harder than that, but your post makes it seem a lot easier.
-Mike
John this post came right on time. I just published a post yesterday that outlines my goals as a blogger for the year 2008.
As of now these goals are more oriented toward helping others. There are other goals like gaining financial stability using my blog not just from it but through it. Using a blog as a launchpad for your future projects is a great way to go.
Should not be a problem. There is a few which i havent achieve which is: Get 100 RSS Reader, Make 100$ and Quit my job!!
You might need more than $100 saved up to quit your job
You’re absolutely right John. Setting a series of smaller goals which eventually lead to the big one keeps you much more focus and motivated in your journey. I’ve been doing this lately, and It feels great.
Eventually setting up goals are important for everyone especially for people who want to earn some money from blogging. If you want to have a lot of post try writing 2 or 3 post per week. I have been witting almost 2 post everyday. Thanks john for providing these good advice for us. For now my small goal is to get 5000 unique visitor per day
hopefully i can. Here are my blog http://celhub.blogspot.com I have been getting more than 200 a day since the day i started which is around 2 weeks ago. Thanks for the advice.
I love the post, mini goals are a good way to get where you want to be. I think you should also add in having passion for what you are doing. Goals are great but without the passion and the true love of what you are doing even the easiest goals can be mountains.
milestones, milestones and milestones..stuffs like these in my plans keeps me on my toes..
Good Post.
Goals are very important. Have you ever heard of the brain dump? I thought it was an interesting idea to clear the head and I used it before I had wrote my goals for 2008. Goals are a great motivation to get going and are a lot of fun to write about.
I love the idea, because I have been blogging for more than six month now and I didn’t have really a goal in mind because I’m doing that as a hobby. But now that the hobby because more serious, I should follow your advices to set goal for short term and long term. The mini goal is a very good idea, because I can set goal that I can achieve than trying to reach my final goal.
I feel, instead of doing review of everysuccess, we should put a weekly or monthly blog review where you can blog about what you achieved or how was the week or month for you. That will give readers an idea what they are reading.
What happens when you realize that your goal is unattainable? Do you call it quits? Do you feel discouraged? For me it’s all about adapting and finding several alternatives to solve a problem. I guess it amounts down to how driven an individual is. If you want it bad enough you’ll find a way to attain that goal. Oh yeah, having a back-up plan helps too.
Well, it’s a nice plan for beginners but instead of quitting job you could say:
-start an affiliate marketing biz
-create a website and than flip it
-try ppc marketing etc.
Like you mentioned in a previous post, the first thing you have to do is GET STARTED! Right now I have already managed to get 50 RSS subscribers in less than a month. So it’s not hard to accomplish as long as you can stick to your guns and JUST DO IT!!!
Planing and achieve the mini goals is perfect when you want to avoid frustration.So thx for the tip John.I was doing something similar but not in a organized way.
Well my blog has launched today and I have already achieved some of the success’s mentioned above. Now I’ve just got to work on getting more traffic and brainstorming more ideas while the enthusiasm is still there!
John:
The paradox here is that you say that the journey is important not the destination. So you break the journey into little pieces and have lots of destinations and reward yourself for attaining each little destination. which now makes those little destinations important thus contradicitng the original hypothesis. (smile)
Nevertheless, I love the post and think the philosophy makes sense. Basically another way of putting it is that you not only need a goal or destination but you need interim destinations or measurable objectives and you need to set up a schedule or plan to knock off these objectives.
This is the heart of personal planning.
Thanks
I tried to switch over my blogger blog to my domain name. But failed. Can you please tell me how can I do it or from where I would get help.
nice post John , exactly how I feel. Got the first three done , will try the fourth one. No idea how they calculate that though , it changes every day. Only have 3 email subscribers so a long way to go yet.
Yes, awesome and true.
Thank you Mr. Chow for this inspiring article.
yes its really true. i always use blogger
The domain name costs $10dls and I don’t have a credit card, so when I had to create a paypal account, make the blog earn some dollars and the blog itself made his own domain money, it took me about 5 months and I earn $280 before I decided to buy the domain because of the time with the blogspot name. So, I think getting a domain name can be a real goal.
The domain name costs $10dls and I don’t have a credit card, so I had to create a paypal account, make the blog earn some dollars and the blog itself made his own domain money, it took me about 5 months and I earn $280 before I decided to buy the domain because of the time with the blogspot name. So, I think getting a domain name can be a real goal.
I think this is a great idea.
Thanks for the reminder. Sometimes we lose sight of this. Great post!
Great post for this retrospective time of year, John. It’s important to break goals down into short, “doable” step so you can mark them off and reward yourself.
Too often folks set goals like “optimize site”. Well, that’s built in failure, becuase the site optimization will go on forever … so it’s important to break things into small bites.
I’ve certainly enjoyed the rise this past year, here’s hoping 2008 sees the realization of alot of goals for all of us.