This article originally appeared on a now defunct website I was writing for in Feb 07, and discovered again whilst cleaning up a hard drive. It was written as was my case then, but the lessons still apply well.

Whether you’re setting up a blog, or any other type of website, it’s always important before you start to set out some goals, levels you want to achieve, and consequently at which point will you be comfortable in spending money on taking your site to the next level.

I’ve personally been developing (non-blog) websites this year, and the first thing I did was set up some goals for some of the sites.

The goals were simple ones which suited the nature of the sites, and that was revenue.

Goal number 1 was to get the sites (collectively) to $10 each day. I should mention though that I had done a pile of research on the sites I was creating, everything from the right script, hosting issues, where to find traffic etc.. before starting. I even bought a couple of existing sites that covered the same niche just so I could see how they worked myself.

Goal number 1 was reached within the first week, and the following days were all $10+, so I knew that it wasn’t a fluke
At this point I knew that I at least had around $300 coming in for the month, although I’d have to wait until the end of the following month to see it…but alas, I knew I would still see it.

At this point the question was do I spend money advertising the sites? There is always a huge number of options available in relation to advertising, but again I did some more research, and found that some other people in the same niche were using a paid featured listing spot at a directory site. I started with 1 spot for one of my sites ($20). Traffic doubled overnight and revenue also increased for that site.

The next goal was $20 a day. I’d found a way to increase traffic, I saw that certain sites had a higher CTR than others (most likely due to ad layout) so I took the plunge and paid for 3 additional sites to gain a featured listing. 36 hours later and I’d hit $20.

At this stage my server was starting to take a beating, mainly because one site had taken off beyond belief, although notably it wasn’t showing anywhere near the returns of the other sites. I knew that I’d be looking at $600 + per month in revenue, I knew that I’d found a formula that worked, and yet I still hadn’t physically received one cent from any of the sites. This is where it got hard. I could go and buy an additional dedicated server with the same specs I had these sites on for around $125 / month, and yet I knew that if I did this I’d probably outgrow it again within a matter of weeks (all things being equal). So I took the plunge, a top of the range dual core something or other with 4gb ram and 2000gb data transfer, $294/ month. It costs 2.5 times more than the existing box, but I’m guessing that instead of lasting me weeks, I’ll probably be able to grow my sites on it for at least a couple of months, if not longer…or at least until they are bringing so much money that $294/ month doesn’t matter.

The old adage that you have to spend money to make money is still very, very true. I could have held off, even offloaded the hyper-performing high traffic site, but it’s also important to remember that a reliable site is much more appealing to one that is down regularly, and I wanted my sites to grow, they needed capacity, and the better the box the better the provision of those sites.

The next target was $30 a day. I’ve just hit that. The new server will be setup this week. I’m literally twiddling with my thumbs waiting for it so I can go out and drive more traffic to my sites. After this, the next targets are $50 a day then $100 a day. Once the new server is online and the sites are better catered for I’ll be spending more money on advertising, rolling out some new ones, tweaking the existing ones, everything I can do to achieve those goals.

The end goal: enough money to live off.

The moral of this story I guess is about not only knowing what you want to achieve, in terms of goals, but also being able to take a leap of faith in terms of spending money to support achieving your goals. For many years I struggled with shared hosting plans that constantly caused me problems (I went through 5 hosts in 2 years), and yet the day I bit the bullet and bought my own box is a day I’ll never regret. Part of it was greed, when I was only bringing in $200-$300 a month I didn’t want to spend $100 on a server. And yet today I know that if I’d spent the $100 the $200-$300 could have ended up being $1000-$2000. Be prepared to spend money to reach your goals. Whether that be on template design, SEO, advertising, bringing in writers, hosting…what ever is needed, if you’ve got a plan and you can reach goals, money helps take you to the next level.