The Importance of Setting Goals for your Home Business

Firstly, I apologise for the severe lack of posts to my Plug-In Profit Blog over the last couple of months! I am getting married 3 weeks tomorrow so I have been spending rather a lot of time wedding planning and not as much time on my business.

I wanted to write a little bit about goal setting today. This may seem boring, but I believe that it is extremely important and can actually mean the difference between success and failure.

If you are starting your own home business you need to have a think about why you are doing this and what exactly you want to achieve. Where to you want to be six months from now? A year from now? And even 5 years from now? If you find it hard to think this far ahead in terms of your business, have a think about it in terms of your personal life. How much money do you want to be making, what sort of lifestyle do you want to have, what things do you want for your family? What do you want to spend your time doing? If you think of these things it is then easier to work backwards and think of actual goals for your business.

As well as just thinking about your goals it is very important that you write these goals down. It has been proven in studies that people who write down their goals are much more likely to achieve them. Harvard business school did a study on the achievements of their graduate students 10 years after graduating and found that the 3% of graduates that had written goals were earning 10 times more than the other 97% of students.

I always set myself home business goals at the beginning of each month. I then break the goals down into the steps I need to take to achieve these goals. This gives me something short term to aim for and at the end of the month I can then look back and see what I have achieved before thinking about the goals I have for the following month.

When writing down your goals try to ensure that they are "SMART"

S = Specific - write down exactly what you are going to do and why.

M = Measurable - "I am going to make $200 more this month than I did last month" rather than "I am going to make a bit more money this month"

A = Attainable - don't set goals that are completely unacheivable or too far out of reach for you. You need to stretch yourself a bit, but don't go over the top.

R = Realistic - make sure the goal is "doable". The best way to do this is to come up with a plan of the steps you are going to take to achieve that goal.

T = Timely - set an actual date for your goal e.g. "the end of December 2007" rather than "in two months time"