I think that most people are more motivated to finish their goals if those goals are made public and are based on financial costs that have already been incurred—I don’t want to look foolish and I don’t want my money to go to waste. Understanding that many people, including me, operate this way, I am going to make some of my goals for DiamondLime public.

Interestingly enough, this may be the first time I have formally gone through the process of setting goals for DiamondLime. I have written many to-do lists for DiamondLime, but those lists contained mostly simple, fix-it kind of items and were designed to keep my site from being embarrassing and broken. It’s now time to establish this site’s direction and objectives more concretely (whether or not I have succeeded in making the site unembarrassing and functional!).

DiamondLime Goals for 2007

1. Pay for Itself

   This is the big goal for the year—I would like DiamondLime to generate enough affiliate/ad revenue to pay for the costs of hosting the site.

2. Write an Internet Marketing Ebook

   The whole purpose of DiamondLime is to help me and others learn and share more about Internet marketing, web design, and business. I think preparing an ebook about marketing on the Web would help me to make solid, quantifiable progress in this direction. However, this ebook doesn’t need to be 600 pages long, wax your car, and cook dinner. My goal is to write 50 pages of solid content, or one page a week.

3. Write a Web Design Ebook

   Again, I’m going to shoot for a modest ebook here—about 50 pages, or one a week.

4. Get 15,000 Visitors

   This works out to an average of 1,250 visitors a month. I currently get approximately 600 a month, so this will be quite a stretch - I will need to triple my traffic by the end of the year to reach this goal.

5. Update the BYU Blog and Web Site Directory

   Many of the listings in the directory are out of date—I’m pretty sure many of the students have graduated—and it’s time to add some new listings. I will set a modest goal of adding 20 listings this year.

So those are my goals for DiamondLime this year. I feel like I am going to have to stretch to reach these goals, but that’s what goals are for—to compel and aid us in achieving greater things than we normally would otherwise. Hopefully DiamondLime will become more than it would have without these goals.