I’m going to attempt to write this without sounding like a “life coach” or self help tutor but forgive me if it comes across that way.

In life the best way to get something done is to set a goal and giving yourself a set amount of time to complete it. So many people say “One day I’ll be a millionaire” or “I hope to be a millionaire before I’m 30″ these people will never achieve it. As much as you want to buy that 10 bedroom house, it won’t happen unless you make it happen.

It’s important to be in a positive frame of mind when setting goals, you should be thinking “I will be …” not “I want to be…” Don’t think it’s too hard or it’s impossible, nothing is impossible if you’re willing to work for it. So lets take this scenario and work through it step by step;

You’ve set up your blog / website in a niche you can fill or a topic your passionate about. You’ve got content submitted every day and you’re visitor numbers are growing, it’s time to decide on your first goal. A new website, especially a blog, shouldn’t be setting money based goals to begin with, it will make you lose site of the important factors that lead to revenue. A good starting goal might be; “I want to have 500 unique visitors a day by the end of the month”

Write this on a piece of paper with a big black marker pen and stick it above your computer. This is what you’ll be spending all you’re energy on achieving. Great, you know what point you need to get too, now on to the route you’ll take to get there. Try to see “Having 500 Unique visitors” as a problem that needs to be solved. If we break down the problem we can identify the steps we need to take to solve it. The problem concerns traffic to your site, so lets look at the top 5 sources of traffic (in no order);

1. Social Bookmarking Sites ( see the list here )
2. In bound links
3. Direct Requests (typing your URL in the address bar)
4. Search Engines
5. Purchased Advertising

Okay so we have 5 different resources for traffic, but which can we affect directly and which are affected by another?

Social Bookmarking Sites
We can definitely affect traffic from these to our own site almost immediately by submitting our own stories and pages. If we’re lucky our story will get picked up and we’ll have thousands of visitors in a matter of hours, but the worst case scenario is we see small numbers of a period of time. Every time you submit a story or page you create a back link to your site and the search engines will pick this up.

In Bound Links
As discussed above we can generate our own by submitting to social bookmarking sites but the real quality links come from other sites in your niche. These are not as easy to accumulate, at least until your site is ranking PR 4 and above. While you should look out for any opportunity to exchange links with other sites, these will come organically by pushing on with other methods of promotion and writing quality content. There are methods to encourage others to link to you, I’ll discuss these in my depth at another time.

Direct Requests
A new website is unlikely to see much unique traffic from this as most people that know your domain name have visited before. Word of mouth advertising will bring in unique traffic this way but this is difficult to control at the best of times.

Search Engines
When you’ve become established this will become a significant source of traffic but again for a new site you’ll see little traffic from search engines. Don’t worry too much about pushing for page ranking on your keywords, that will come by building back links and return visitors. Also please note no matter what anyone tells you, it’s impossible to get a number one spot on Google overnight unless your niche is tiny (which limits your growth).

Purchased Advertising
If done correctly there is no reason purchased advertising can’t help you reach 500 uniques a day on it’s own, but it’s important to pick the right place to advertise and at the right time; there’s little point in advertising on a site about Football if you’re writing about Tennis. Find similar sites to your own and consider where your advert / link will be placed on that page. A link in the footer for a month is unlikely to yield as high traffic as an advert in the header. Sites like Text Link Ads allow you to purchase links from blogs that receive high amounts of traffic in the niche you’re trying to fill. If you pick the right blog, this alone could result in massive traffic boosts.

Once you’ve identified the best ways to pursue the above you’ll find traffic starts building and before you know it, the goal is complete! If on the other hand you find you don’t quite manage to reach your target, don’t be disheartened, reset the time limit and try again. The worst mistake you can make is giving up.