It’s that time of the year to reflect on what was accomplished in the past year… I always set goals for the business in January, and ask my associates to do the same for their end of the business. Goals however, shouldn’t merely be written or spoken, they should be designed. Well thought out goals enable me to take calculated risks I otherwise might shoot from the hip trying to achieve… I’ve found over the years that if I am at point A now, and wish to reach point D at the end of the year, I need to achieve point B and then point C before I can get to point D.

In 2006 I also found that goals are not set in stone… even a well thought out goal may change as expectations are lowered or raised by the various factors interwoven with the its’ achievement. We encountered this in the past year… our main goal for the business was to add an additional 100 websites in 2006… and we did quite well through June (see the mid year update) while we failed to reach this goal by the end of 2006, it was due to the realization after looking at the results during August-September that the numbers weren’t being returned on certain low cost websites, as I had anticipated at the beginning of the year. And to compound that, our costs would be recurring for those websites (hosting/domain)… hence our loss would only increase into 2007. I slowly woke up as the year dragged through, that enabling these smaller sites would take a lot of our time up, and while we worked to accomplish that, we were merely spinning our wheels on our core group of websites.

So in September (Block C) I “decreed” that our efforts needed to focus back on the core websites which brought in the income, and we did that to a resounding success. I also decreed, that any website purchased would be of a certain cost and profit, bringing with it natural/SEO traffic that would justify its purchase and addition to our holdings. Since September we have added several new websites, which I’ll speak about in other posts, but not near in number to help us reach our goal of 100 new websites in 2006.

One might wonder why set a goal on a number of websites, instead of an income earned from those websites? At the end of 2005 and into the start of 2006 I was of the opinion that almost any website, if it received traffic, could make money online. I was also quite secure in my belief that if I worked on that website, I could increase the money it made. Hence, the money would follow the increase in websites… while this did occur, what also occurred was a rapid loss of time for my partner and me to focus on our core group of websites. So while we were succeeding with this one part of the goal, it was causing us to fail on other goals. Hence, an attitude adjustment was made.

Looking back over 2006, I can think of it as the beginning… setting the stone blocks for the foundation of the road that will eventually be paved in gold… ok… at least paved in silver…

Happy New Years!