How big are your dreams for your home business? You want to earn at least a few hundred or few thousand a month from it. You want it to last for years. But all you can seem to get is a few dollars here, a few visitors there. Nothing to celebrate. Or is it? Are you at all excited about the small milestones in your home business?

Even these small triumphs are worth celebrating. You don’t go from zero to hundreds of dollars all in one step. These things take time, and the fact that you’re earning anything or getting visitors means you’re doing something right.

Pick Your Small Milestones

A home business milestone is whatever you want it to be. Posting a certain number of times can be a milestone. So can earning a certain amount in a single day, week or month. Your first post to reach 100 pins on Pinterest can be a milestone.

These things do not need to be big, at least not yet. Save the big goals for later. They’ll take more time to reach, and frustrate you if they take too long to reach. Little goals are a better place to start.

Don’t make the milestones you celebrate too small. You don’t need to celebrate every post you make or every sale. But there is something to be said for being proud of your first blog post or your first online sale.

Break that big goal into smaller milestones. Want to earn $5000 a month from your home business? Celebrate your first $100 month or $500 month. Celebrate your first $2000 month. While you have small goals to reach at first, there’s always something bigger beyond it, so that you keep pushing yourself.

Keep your focus on your progress toward your goals, rather than on how far away they are. It’s more helpful to note how things are improving rather than focusing on how you haven’t reached your big goals yet.

Improve On Your Small Milestones

The other reason to celebrate your small milestones in your home business is so that you can improve upon them.

Pick something that is starting to go right, and be proud of that. But don’t settle for that. That milestone is something you can improve upon.

Take a look at what went right. How did you reach that milestone? What can you do to step things up to a more challenging milestone?

Money Is Not The Only Goal

While earning a good amount of money is vital to a successful home business, it should not be the only goal you pay attention to. There are a lot of factors that go into making your business successful.

Learn new skills that will help you improve your home business. You can take a course through Udemy to improve how you use social media, for example. Another choice would be to work on how you network in person.

If you have a service oriented business, you could learn new skills so that you can offer a greater range of services to your clients. The ability to do more for your clients or to do your work better and more quickly will help you earn more money.

You won’t always feel as though you’re getting anywhere, and that’s frustrating. But if you pay attention to the places where you are making progress, you can acknowledge the places where it’s getting better, as well as where you need to try harder.

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With the new year approaching, many people like to review how things have been going and make resolutions or set goals for how their business will go in the new year. It’s as good a time as any to do this; in fact, reviewing your progress and setting new goals for your home business is best done a few times a year in my opinion. You need to be aware of how things are going to make sure you’re on the right path.

I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. This past year did not go as well as I wanted it to, but some things I’ve been working on are showing signs of life. My income dropped this year, and that simply will not do.

You have to adjust your goals when things like this happen. It may not be only your goals for your home business that change, however.

Take a look at other things happening in your life, especially if they make it harder for you to work on your home business. Find the parts of your life that are making it more difficult to reach your goals for your home business, and try to change them too. Ask for more help around the house. Tell your family you need more work hours and come up with ways to make that happen.

Balancing a home business with your family is a team effort even if you’re the only one who works on the business side of things. Get everyone on board to make things happen. And always remember that there are a lot of quick tasks you can do for your home business even when you don’t have a lot of time.

Keep Goals For Your Home Business Realistic

Your home business goals must be realistic. Goals that you’ll never reach are only so motivating. Lesser goals that take you in the direction of your greater goals are necessary so you know you’re making progress. You may have a goal of becoming a millionaire, for example, but what are the intermediate steps. If you don’t have realistic goals that take you in that direction, eventually you will get tired of that goal and give up.

Let’s start with something simple, say, earning $5000 a month from your home business. It’s not an excessive goal, but it’s one many of us would love to reach.

Depending on where you’re at, that may be too distant a goal or it may be a perfectly reasonable one. For this example, I’ll treat it as a distant goal, something for someone new to running a home business might be dealing with. Most of us aren’t going to hit that goal quickly – in fact, most home businesses earn much less. You need goals you can achieve so you can really feel your progress.

There are many goals you can set that will help you to know that you’re making progress toward that $5000 a month goal. They aren’t all financial, although having a goal of even $100 a month to start isn’t a bad beginning if you’re still at $0 a month. Here are some goals to consider:

Writing Goals

Most home businesses require a lot of writing. There’s a reason why blogging is such a huge part of many online home businesses. Creating new content is often one of the best things you can do for your online business.

Setting a writing goal is not as simple as deciding that you will write 2000 words a day or whatever. Sometimes you will need to do more research than writing. Sometimes a quick post will be more effective than something long-winded.

The most important thing to remember is that quality is more important than quantity. A reputation for incorrect information is hard to shake. Show your website visitors that you care about giving them the right information by doing your research when it’s needed. Cite your sources. This builds trust, even when you aren’t doing academic work.

Website Traffic Goals

How much traffic would you like to generate? Keep it simple at first, then increase. You may also want to measure this goal by increases, such as increasing your website traffic by 10%, 25%, etc.

There are a lot of ways to generate traffic to your website. Social media is extremely popular these days, as it gives you an audience that has chosen to follow you. Done right, it’s incredibly effective.

But social media is not your only option for building up traffic. You should also consider how to get links from reputable sources in your industry.

There are lots of ways to increase your website traffic. You’re usually best off focusing on no more than a few methods at a time. You can’t master them all, and you probably don’t have the time to work on all of them at once. You certainly don’t have the time to master several different traffic generation strategies at once. Taking the time to learn each one properly will make your efforts more effective.

Social Media Goals

Social media is one of the best ways to bring traffic to most websites. You have a lot of power over how people see your home business on social media, and you should try to make the most of that.

The first thing to remember is that your social media goals should be about more than numbers. Look at what you’re accomplishing with it.

Your social media goals for your home business will vary by the platform. You should look professional on LinkedIn. Twitter is often better for building relationships between a customer and a business. Instagram is about building an image, and it doesn’t let you add links to posts, making it more challenging for traffic generation.

Pinterest is highly visual, and many find it one of the best social media sites for generating traffic. People often use Pinterest for inspiration and to remember things they want to buy.

Any social media website will require time and effort to build a following. Getting to the point where things take off is difficult for most people. You can experiment with the different websites, but there are two basic things I recommend. One is that you find a good quality course to learn about the social media sites you want to try. Udemy has a good range.

The other is that you use the right tools to make scheduling your posts easier. Social media can eat up much of your day if you let it. While you should still visit the sites you use regularly so that you can interact with people and posts there, appropriate automation can take care of the basics for you. I like Hootsuite because it handles a good range of social media sites.

Networking

Social media is important for traffic generation and reputation management, but it can be so much more than that. It’s an opportunity to network with potential customers as well as other people in your industry.

Other people in your industry aren’t only your competition. Sometimes you can boost each other. Odds are that you are not offering the exact same thing to your visitors or customers. If you have networked with others in your industry through social media, you may know when to refer people to them, and they can refer people to you.

You can also network in person, of course. Go to local events, especially if they relate to your industry. Check out your local Chamber of Commerce. Talk to people about what you do.

Don’t be that obnoxious person who talks about nothing else, of course. Overdoing your in-person networking can drive friends and family away.

Education

What do you need to learn to run your business better? Set a goal to learn and apply that new skill. Learning a new skill is nothing if you never apply it. Don’t set a new goal in this area until you’re actually using the information or have consciously decided that the new information or skill is not something you want to apply to your home business.

Check out Udemy and other online education websites to see what you can learn. Pick courses carefully and commit to finishing them. Then apply what you have learned before you move on to learning something else.

As you can see, none of these on their own is about earning $5000. However, they should help you get on the right path toward that more difficult goal.

Analyze Your Efforts

Whether you reach your goals for your home business or not, you should be analyzing what went right and what went wrong. This will help you keep from making the same mistakes over and over again.

You may find, for example, that in doing your research you tend to skip the step of applying the new things you’ve learned. That’s a lot of time and very possibly money wasted. It’s a very common issue for people running any sort of online business.

You need to figure out why you aren’t applying things you’ve learned to your business. Are you too quickly attracted to bright and shiny product launches? Do you always think they’re too hard to do? Are you really trying to learn the right skill sets for what you’re willing to work on?

Once you know your mistakes you have a better chance of not making that same mistake in the future. That improves your chance of success.

Sometimes things will be beyond your immediate control. You may fail to generate the traffic you hoped to gain because your site fell in the search engine rankings for your best keyword. You can work on that problem once it’s noticed, but it may take time to fix. Knowing where the fall happened will help you figure out what to do about it.

Be sure to hold yourself accountable for your failures as well as your successes. It’s important to acknowledge both.

Even when you aren’t reaching your goals as quickly as you’d hoped, it’s vital that you set some sort of reachable goal. It’s one of the things that can motivate you to keep working on what is probably a very challenging business.

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One of the wonderful and terrible things about working at home is the lack of supervision. It doesn’t matter if you work for yourself or someone else, the lack of supervision is a challenge at times. At the same time, it’s nice having the flexibility to do things without a supervisor wandering by to check on you. It’s not always easy to keep working when no one else is directly holding you accountable. You need to get comfortable with holding yourself accountable.

Just because your boss isn’t in the same building as you doesn’t mean you aren’t supervised at all. If you work for someone else, they certainly have expectations of you. It might be when you work, how you work or how soon things will get done. If you have a business of your own, you may have clients who expect you to get things done in a timely manner or customers who expect their products promptly. You might also have family members who need you to keep up a certain income level for the good of your family.

But that isn’t always enough to keep some of us going. It’s too easy for things to slide just a little bit over time until productivity gets to be a problem. If you aren’t being held sufficiently accountable, this can continue until you lose your job, your clients or a significant chunk of your income. What can you do?

Get an Accountability Partner

One simple thing to do is make yourself accountable to someone. It can be a friend who works at home, your spouse, or anyone who you’re willing to talk to about what you’ve gotten done each day or week. Pick a time to check in with each other. Make check ins frequent enough to motivate you, but not so frequent that they interfere with getting work done.

Decide on what counts. This will depend on what exactly you do. It may be working a certain number of hours on your job, getting a certain amount of billable work done, earning a particular amount of money, etc. You decide.

I think it’s ideal if in some ways you’re accountable to each other. Challenge one another to reach your goals. It gives you both motivation, rather than having one person always listening to what the other has accomplished. That’s not a requirement, but I would consider it a help.

Set Daily Goals

You can also be accountable to yourself. Set goals for every day as well as times you expect to work. I have particular times I expect to be working. This varies day by day. I don’t have the same expectations of getting work done if I know there will be a lot of interruptions as I do on days I know should be quiet.

Your daily goals should be things you can reasonably accomplish in a day. Don’t make your goals so difficult you rarely reach them or so easy they don’t challenge you. For myself, I might set a goal of writing one article a day (not quick, two paragraph posts, but serious articles which may require research or careful thought), or a particular amount of marketing done.

Review Your Progress, Good and Bad

Most jobs have regular performance reviews. There’s no reason why you can’t do that for yourself.

Take a look every few months at how you’re doing. What are you doing well? What should you do better? What do you need to make it easier to do even better? This is a good time to consider any tools you might need for your work or business, and decide if it’s time to spend money on something.

For example, you might realize that you need to do more keyword research so that your blog posts can rank more easily. Market Samurai is a tool to make this easier. It generates keywords for you and provides information about how competitive the keyword is and more. Market Samurai has a free trial, so you can find out if you like it before you buy.

You might also decide that it’s time to subscribe to a tool to make your social media marketing easier. I like Hootsuite for scheduling my basic social media posts. I can schedule out a large number of posts in an hour. It’s a huge help to not need to focus on my basic posts. Social media needs more than scheduled posts, but it’s a part of the job out of the way.

Come up with a plan to improve your problem areas. This isn’t always easy, but it’s necessary. It might be how you deal with the many distractions inherent to working at home. You might realize that you’re charging too little for your work. Find ways to take action and fix the problems you’ve noticed. Keep holding yourself accountable.

Take Pride in Your Accomplishments

Celebrating the things you’ve accomplished is important too. It’s very motivating. You don’t have to do big things to celebrate, and you don’t only have to celebrate huge accomplishments. Have little goals as well as big ones. Make your rewards appropriate to the accomplishments.

I’ve taken my family to dinner to celebrate certain income goals being reached. It’s fun for all of us but doesn’t happen so often as to become meaningless. We don’t eat out very often, so this is a special thing, but the cost is far less than the increase being celebrated.

Working at home is hard in many ways. You gain freedom, but you also gain responsibility. If you don’t motivate you, it doesn’t happen. Try some of these ideas to make it easier to stay motivated by being accountable.

The post How Are You Holding Yourself Accountable? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Having goals when you work at home or run a home business is important, but even more important is setting the right goals. The right goals will encourage you to keep aiming at them, while the wrong goals will frustrate more than they help. It’s not just what the goal is – it’s how you phrase it and how you break it down.

Look At Your Big Goals First

Go ahead, look at them. Your dream goals. The things you aren’t sure you can achieve. Get it over with so that you can get to the more practical goals next. Write them down.

Skip things you have little to no control over, such as “winning the lottery.” That’s more dream than goal. When the only control you have over a goal is the first step and the rest is sheer chance, it’s not a good goal. Make your goals something you can work toward and have some level of control over your success or failure.

Look At Your Midrange Goals

Your midrange goals are the goals you’re more confident that you can achieve in a reasonable period. They aren’t huge, but put them together and they might just lead to something bigger. They might not be easy, but you know more about how you’ll get there.

These might be income goals nearer to where you are now, learning a new skill, working more hours more often… you get the idea.

Break It Down

Even your big goals can be broken down into steps. You might dream of running a six figure business (or more), but setting that as a goal has nothing to do with how you get there. You need to break it down into goals that will take you in that direction.

You might have a goal to find 5 new customers in a month. Sounds like a good goal, but it doesn’t say anything about how you’re going to get there. What actions do you need to take to get there? How are you going to get more attention to your services to get those customers? Think this through to come up with the steps you need to take to reach your goal.

Smaller steps can make great goals. These are the things you can get done. Some may take a couple hours work while others will take weeks or months. Some may be a simple to commitment to work a certain number of hours a day on a project.

Consider The Obstacles

If it were easy to meet your goals, most people wouldn’t struggle with them so much. When you set a goal, think about what might get in your way.

When you work at home and have kids, they’re often one of the major obstacles you face. It doesn’t matter how much you love them and enjoy working at home so you can be with them, they also make it harder to reach your goals.

Staying up late to work or getting up early are popular ways to handle the challenges that kids add. That may not be enough. You may need to look at ways to add in a little child care so that you can work during the day as well. You may be able to get a family member or friend to take the kids some of the time, a lovely, potentially free way to handle things, but not something that works for everyone. Working during naps only works as long as the kids are young enough to nap, and may not be enough. Finding the right balance is one of the major challenges for many people who work at home.

Other things may challenge you as you work at home too. Pets, friends, neighbors, TV, chores, there are plenty of distractions that can make it harder to reach your goals. Find a way to deal with whichever are keeping you from reaching your other goals.

Take Action

All this planning won’t help you at all if you don’t take action. Don’t overthink your goals. Don’t overthink the steps you plan to take to reach them. Do something. You won’t get anywhere if you don’t.

The post Practical Tips For Goal Setting appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

If your kids are like mine, they talk a lot about the things they’d like to do over the summer. Mine have talked for the past couple summers, for example, about building a hovercraft. It hasn’t happened yet. I decided to see what I could do to encourage them. They also have other things they want to make, learn or do.

The method we’re using is pretty simple. First I had them write out the things they want to get done this summer. I’m not talking family vacation stuff – that was a different conversation. I also don’t mean summer academics for the most part. Helping kids remember the stuff they learned in school has its place, but not in excess. Besides, sometimes the things they want to do will take that place up quite nicely.

My oldest daughter wants to be a better artist, learn to play harp, build that hovercraft, start a YouTube channel reviewing her favorite video games and learn to design apps. My son also wants to build a hovercraft and a go cart, learn to solder electronics and he has already finished building his Meccano Meccanoid. My youngest daughter wants to do a lot of crafts and learn to make doll videos.

Now, if we let this summer go like usual, once every week or two they’d remember a project and maybe work on it. Mostly, however, they’d just play together or on computers whenever I’d let them. Nothing much would actually get done toward their goals.

Here’s How We’re Fixing That

The kids and I looked over their goals and made a weekly schedule for each of them. The schedules for the younger two are very flexible. The schedule for my oldest is more strict, but we planned it that way. She wishes she could have a summer job, but isn’t old enough for one, so the things she wants to do which might make money are scheduled to be like a summer job.

All of the kids have a lot of completely free time in their schedules, and I consider this part important. They can work on their projects longer than scheduled if they want or cut the time short, especially for the younger ones. All of the kids are often free to do whatever they want, provided it doesn’t involve staring at a screen.

For the younger kids in particular, they’re also allowed to say when they’d really rather just play that day. The point in the schedule isn’t to force the kids to work on something; it’s to make them remember the things they said they want to do. Most times, they’ll want to do it, and they often work on whatever thing for longer than I put into the schedule.

That the scheduled time is on the short side deliberate on my part. I don’t want them feeling that these things they want to do for fun are burdens. There’s lots of completely free time surrounding the scheduled times, so that it’s easy to spend that extra time on a project that is going well.

Boring things such as chores are also listed on the schedule.

So far, this has worked pretty well. My son had been overwhelmed by the thought of assembling his Meccanoid at first, but once he got going on it, he realized it wasn’t that difficult. I ordered a Snowball microphone for my oldest so she can do her video game reviews. With the right software, she can start that soon.

The kids have taken advantage of the schedule’s flexibility. The day after he finished his robot, my son said he didn’t want to do project time; he just wanted to play with the robot. I told him of course he could – playing with what you made is certainly part of that kind of project. Even if he had wanted to do something else I would have been fine with it. It’s good for kids to just be kids during the summer, after all.

I hope that this whole plan will help my kids to plan their own time better. My goal was to add just a little structure to their days without controlling their activities too much. Unstructured time is very important to children – it helps them learn to make their own decisions and be more creative. The schedule we’re using is more of a reminder of what they said they want to do than a demand from me, and I hope that will be a good thing for them.

The post How to Encourage Your Kids to Reach Their Summer Goals appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Goal setting is a very important step in making your online business a success. It’s hard to know where your business is going if you don’t have any goals for it. Sure, you can chug along and see where things end up, but in the long run having big and small goals will help you along your way faster.

My son joined his school’s 100 Mile Club this year. The goal for each participant, quite simply, is to run or walk at least 100 miles during the school year. But that’s not the only goal they celebrate. Every 5 miles is acknowledged, and the kids get a t-shirt with boxes at 25, 50, 75 and 100 miles when they reach their 25th mile. It really helps to keep the kids motivated.

These things are important. My son wasn’t really keeping track of his miles and wasn’t turning anything in to show that he’d reached 5 miles. He finally did it when he was close to 10 miles. He was a little frustrated with his lack of progress until he realized – he’d run 10 miles already!

These things help in your online business too. You may have a goal to make $5000 a month, $100,000 a year or whatever, but if you don’t acknowledge the progress you’re making, you’re more likely to feel as though you aren’t really getting anywhere.

Unlike the 100 Mile Club, your business isn’t going to be a straightforward progression, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. August was my best month ever by far, but things have gone down since then. That’s business for you, no guarantees about anything. Still, knowing how much more I can get from my business is quite motivating… and you’d better believe I enjoyed hitting that big milestone quite a bit, even if it isn’t sticking. Things are still going well, it’s just that they’ve dropped from amazingly good to pretty good.

I like a mixture of goals. Financial goals are well and good, but you need other goals that will help you to get there. Marketing goals. Writing goals. Any business activity you undertake that is important to your overall success, you should have some sort of goal for.

This isn’t always easy. Setting a writing goal should be more than pure volume, for example. I could crank out a dozen articles a day if I didn’t care about quality. Fast writing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but quality writing is more within my view of how I want to run my online business, and so it’s more of a focus than quantity.

Results are good to track, if not always easy. There are a couple options for how you track results. Hits on a page is one thing, after all, but if those hits don’t convert into income, how important are they really to your overall goals? Not terribly important if you’re trying to make a living more than you’re trying to feed your ego by how much traffic you get.

Keep that need for steady progress in mind. There’s no shortcut to running 100 miles, just consistent work. There’s also no replacement for hard work in your business. Work at it and understand that even the small signs of progress are important to your long term success.

The post Set Big Goals and Small Goals to Make Your Online Business Work appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I believe that goals are important to the long term success of any home business. How can you get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going. And so it’s common to say your goal is to make a certain amount of money a month or get so many leads.

Those are nice goals, but how are you going to reach them? It’s important to have actionable goals as well as goals relating to the results of those actions.

What Are Actionable Goals?

An actionable goal is one that requires action, such as writing a certain number of articles a day/week, submitting a guest post to certain sites, blog commenting, contacting leads and so forth. They’re the actions you take to reach the results you’re after.

Earning $5000 a month is not an actionable goal. It’s a lovely goal, but your earnings are a result of actions you took earlier.

Why Actionable Goals?

If there’s one thing true of all businesses, it’s that there’s a certain degree of uncertainty. You don’t know exactly how much you’re going to earn each month or if your business will be successful when you first start it. All the goals you have relating to your success mean little without action.

Your actionable goals are things you can control. You can control how productive you are. You can control whether or not you hire help and what you expect of them.

You can’t perfectly control the results of your actions. You can write articles you hope will go viral, and they’ll sit there no matter how you try the initial promotion. You can have a goal of contacting a dozen leads a day, but you won’t know for certain how many will take you up on your offers.

So long as you’re taking action, however, you’re improving your chances of success.

Pay Attention to the Results of Your Actions

If you don’t pay attention to the results your actions get you, you don’t know what’s helping your home business succeed. If your blog posts aren’t getting any attention, why isn’t that happening? If leads are saying no to your every offer, how can you improve how you get the leads or how you present to them?

Blind action, with no attention to the success of that action, isn’t going to help you a whole lot. It relies too much on hope and not enough on information.

Keep some track of the benefits you get from the actions you take to grow your home business. This isn’t always easy to do. Link building, for example, does not always provide results you can clearly define. You can track when you got a particular link and perhaps whether or not it brings in traffic. Figuring how much benefit it’s bringing in your search engine optimization efforts is more difficult, although you can check to see if the page with your link has been indexed recently enough to include your link.

Traffic to particular blog posts is more easily tracked. You can use a good analytics program to see if that page is getting visitors. If you use tracking codes for any sales links on your pages, you may be able to tell which pages are generating sales for you. This helps you to figure out which pages are bringing in the most profitable traffic, information you may be able to use elsewhere.

It takes time to figure out which actions are most worth your time. Setting goals and working hard to meet them can help you to stay more focused on goals you can achieve and help you to grow your home business.

The post Are Your Home Business Goals Actions or Results? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I think I’m like a lot of work at home moms in that my original reason for working at home was to add to our family finances without needing daycare. Not all that much was needed, as by the time you take out the costs of daycare, transportation, wardrobe, eating out more and so forth, any job I was likely to get at the time wouldn’t be bringing in that much.

Either that or I’d be bringing in enough that we’d complain that my husband’s income was getting entirely eaten up by that stuff. But since I was the one having the baby and having left my job for other reasons at the time, as well as taking training in medical transcription, it just made sense for me to be the one at home.

And sure enough, those first few years I didn’t earn that much. I just worked part time hours on my transcription and dabbled in a couple websites. Nothing serious.

Until the first month that I had a website outearn my husband’s income.

That was quite a flash of insight. Suddenly I realized that there was much more potential in what I had been working on.

These days my sights are higher. I don’t always outearn my husband; matter of fact some months flat out suck. But knowing that I can do that has made me set my sights even higher.

I want to let him work at home.

That’s a tough one, I’ll admit. That means a sufficiently stable income to take that gamble. It means being able to pay for health insurance for a family of five. It means money to invest in whatever it is he wants to do and keep it up while he gets things moving.

After that, the goals get higher yet.

What Do You Expect of Your Home Business?

When you set a goal of just a couple hundred a month, you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. It may be all you need, but is it really enough to motivate you to work as hard as it takes to get things going?

Admittedly the benefit of being there for your family is pretty motivating too. But it’s motivating in a different way than earning money.

Here’s the thing. If you can earn a couple hundred a month, there’s a pretty good chance that you can expand on those same concepts and earn more the same way. It won’t always work; some things just don’t grow that way, but often enough one thing leads to another.

I like having tiers of earning goals. There’s my basic goal of a regular $5000 a month which I’ve hit a couple times, but have yet to reach regularly. And since my lows can be really, really low yet I know I have a good bit of work to do.

But that goal is just the first, and it’s not enough to get my husband working at home. Not in southern California anyhow, and we have no plans at this time to leave the state. Both of our extended families are primarily here.

Set your goals high enough to be challenging but low enough that you know you’ll reach them eventually. You won’t know how long it will take, but make it reasonable and it will happen.

Plan rewards for yourself for each goal. I have rewards planned both for occasional high earnings and for when things start looking regular.

How Do You Get There?

There are a few key factors to reaching your business goals. One quite simple to say – hard work.

Hard work won’t guarantee success, but you’re not likely to get anywhere without it.

But there’s generally more to it. You need to invest time and money into training yourself. How you balance this depends on what you can afford to spend versus how long you’re willing to take to find the right information.

If you’re in network marketing, for example, downloading The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing and buying The Renegade Network Marketer can be a great place to start. You need to know how to build your business, and trial and error or working your family and friends isn’t always all that effective. It’s better to learn from someone who knows what works.

The resources you pick depend on just what it is you want to do. If you really aren’t into network marketing, those resources aren’t going to do a thing for you. They’d be a waste of time and money.

Pick just one business skill you want to improve. It should be something that helps you to make money, whatever it is. You might want to do more on AdWords and want the latest version of Perry Marshall’s AdWords guide. You might want to learn more about article marketing, blogging, forum marketing… any one of many more skills that you can use to grow your business.

Yes, you’ll probably have to spend money. Buying ebooks or training from reliable sources is very much so worth the expense. You might find the same information for free elsewhere, but you’ll have to dig through a lot of garbage and inaccurate information first. The time saved is worth it most of the time.

Don’t try to improve all your skills at once. You’ll probably just make it harder to improve any of them. Pick one. Get comfortable with it and see how it works for you. Focus on it.

Once you’ve really mastered it or decided that it really isn’t for you, then you can go on to the next thing. Don’t drop anything that works well for you, of course.

Your focus should always be on meeting your goals. While you can have very simple goals, the simple truth is that having higher aspirations can be more motivating than merely wanting enough to get by. Don’t settle for good enough. That can be your first goal, but why let it be your final one?

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