After getting your business up and running, one of the most important things you can to do is to come up with some short terms goals, write them down, and then see them through.  The more and more I work at trying to establish my businesses, the more I realize that setting goals for your business is absolutely vital to helping it grow and stay on track to becoming a success.

You can go about this process one of two ways: 1) you can just haphazardly come up with very vague, open-ended goals or 2) you can really think about what you want out of your business, and come up with a few very specific goals.

Obviously, I’m going to encourage you to take the second route, but I guess I won’t complain if you take the easy way out - as long as you’re coming up with and writing down something!

But, should you choose to take the more constructive route, make sure that you are setting SMART goals for your business.  For the many of you who know what I’m talking about, go ahead and skip these next couple of paragraphs, but for those of you who don’t know what a SMART goal is, let me explain.

SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

The reason why it’s better to set SMART goals as opposed to vague goals is because SMART goals force you to really think the goals through and, in the process, make you come up with your plan of action to complete the goal.  I look at vague goals as things that you hope will happen, while SMART goals are things that you will make happen.

Anyway, let me give you some of my SMART goals as examples:

1. Average 2,000 page views per site by the end of July 2007 by writing quality content and promoting it through news submission sites and by leaving comments on other high traffic sites.
2. Increase RSS subscriptions for each site to 500 by the end of July by increasing traffic, writing quality content and submitting my feeds to RSS aggregate sites.
3. Maintain an Adsense Click-Through-Ratio (CTR) of no less than 4% for each site by optimizing the Adsense code for each site and testing different locations and ad types.
4. Average daily Adsense revenue of $20 for each site by July 2007 by accomplishing the three previous goals

Simple enough, right?  These goals aren’t super elaborate, however they are certainly enough to keep me busy! 

On top of these goals, I also carry around a $10,000,000 check payable to myself, dated April 1, 2012.  Granted, this probably breaks the “realistic” section of SMART goals, but I figure even if I fall just a bit short of that, I’m going to be pretty happy!

Anyway, if you haven’t thought of what goals you’d like to have for your business, or you just haven’t gotten around to writing them down, I would highly encourage you to get around to it.  Hopefully it’ll help keep you on track and force you to try and maximize your business’ potential.