When you think about where you want your business to take you, start by thinking of your destination.

If your primary aim is to have a certain level of income, for instance, $5,000.00 per month in hands-off income, then start your backward planning there.

In order to have $5,000.00 in hands-off income you have to sell a product–either directly selling your own product, or selling other people’s products as an affiliate. (Of course you could also sell advertising–which I would consider a product–though advertising sales only works well when your advertisers are actually SELLING the products you advertise for them…)

Let’s look at selling products as an affiliate for ClickBank products (which are digital and easy to plan):

$5,000.00 per month in affiliate sales at a 50% commission means $10,000.00 in gross sales.

$10,000.00 in gross sales is about 300 sales at an average sale of around $35.00.

300 sales comes from sending 10,000 people to an affiliate site from your recommendation. (Note: This is not the same as sending them “raw” without your recommendation. I’ll detail in later posts how to recommend a product.)

10,000 visitors come from 20,000 of your RSS or email subscribers actually reading your message.

Since about 1/2 of your messages are going to get read, that means 20,000 readers means around 40,000 subscribers via email or RSS.

40,000 subscribers is the result of 100,000 visitors.

So if you want to get to a $5,000.00 per month affiliate income, you need to focus on getting 100,000 visitors to your blog (with a compelling reason to subscribe.) If you want to get there in a year, you need to focus on getting 300 new visitors per day.

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