SMART Goal Setting

Using This Web Site As An Example

Welcome to the Smart Goal Setting page. This web site is about setting and achieving personal goals. To see more goals articles please go to our achieve your personal goals or setting goals pages.

Here you'll see SMART goal setting in practice. These are the SMART goals that I've set for the popularity of this web site.

When setting these targets, I've followed the suggestions of Gary Ryan Blair. First you set your specific, measurable, time-bound overall goal. Then you establish review dates and interim targets to measure your progress as you go along. All this is done at the planning stage.

Gary recommends setting performance standards for each review date for five levels of progress: outstanding, good, average, poor and counter-productive. I've amended these to platinum, gold, silver, bronze, and failure - as if I'm winning medals in the Olympics. Well, use whatever motivates you....

Anyway, to start with, here's my overall goal:

SMART GOAL SETTING

THE GOAL
"My goal is for this web site to be ranked in the top 100,000 web sites by Alexa on 31 January 2005."

At the end of each month I'm going to update this page with the actual results from Alexa so you can see how I'm progressing. You can also check the ranking of my web site at any time by visiting the Alexa website yourself. It will spur me on to know that you're doing that!

So next, I need to set the interim targets. Having interim targets or 'milestones' is very valuable when SMART goal setting. You have to be specific when SMART goal setting, even though the figures you come up with may be a bit of stab in the dark.

That's the case here, as getting a high ranking web site is new territory for me. For example, I suspect that getting into the top 100,000 web sites is very difficult. However, I reckon that getting into the top million (there are about 16 million web sites I believe) will be easy - at least with the help of SiteBuildIt.

SMART GOAL SETTING
REVIEW DATES, TARGETS & ACTUAL RESULTS
(The figures relate to Alexa rankings)

31 JANUARY 2005 - Actual Alexa Ranking 571,373 - a Failure!
Very interesting result as visitor numbers to the web site in January were 1,727 compared to only 833 in November when the Alexa ranking was 342,259! Although I didn't hit my Alexa ranking target, setting smart goals ahead of time has given me an excellent way to measure progress towards my goal.
TARGETS
50,000 - Platinum
100,000 - Gold
200,000 - Silver
300,000 - Bronze
500,000 - Failure

31 DECEMBER 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 366,761 - a Bronze medal!
TARGETS
100,000 - Platinum
200,000 - Gold
300,000 - Silver
400,000 - Bronze
700,000 - Failure

30 NOVEMBER 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 342,259 - a Silver medal!
TARGETS
200,000 - Platinum
300,000 - Gold
400,000 - Silver
500,000 - Bronze
1 million - Failure

31 OCTOBER 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 388,599 - a Gold medal!
TARGETS
300,000 - Platinum
400,000 - Gold
750,000 - Silver
1 million - Bronze
2 million - Failure

30 SEPTEMBER 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 739,514 - a Gold medal!
TARGETS
400,000 - Platinum
750,000 - Gold
1 million - Silver
2 million - Bronze
3 million - Failure

31 AUGUST 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 1,758,562 - a Silver medal!
TARGETS
500,000 - Platinum
1 million - Gold
2 million - Silver
3 million - Bronze
unranked - Failure

31 JULY 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 1,987,583 - a Gold medal!
TARGETS
1 million - Platinum
2 million - Gold
3 million - Silver
4 million - Bronze
unranked - Failure

30 JUNE 2004 - Actual Alexa Ranking 2,932,850 - a Gold medal!
TARGETS
2 million - Platinum
3 million - Gold
4 million - Silver
5 million - Bronze
unranked - Failure

31 MAY 2004 - too early to be ranked

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For more information on achieving your personal goals please click on Personal Goals to return to the Make Your Goals Happen home page