Goal setting is important – if you’ve set goals, you’re more likely to achieve things. There have been various studies that have shown that people with goals outperform those who don’t have them.

Written goals perform better than “top of the head” goals.

Detailed written goals go even further.

But what’s rarely mentioned is how your goals affect your results.

A lot…

Truth be told, a lot of us don’t reach our goals.

We get some of the way there but life gets in the way.

That’s perfectly normal and it happens to even the highest achievers.

But let’s take a few examples to clarify why bigger goals are usually better.

Let’s say that you intend to spend an hour a day on your internet marketing.

That’s a worthy goal and one that will work nicely.

So long as you actually spend that hour on your internet marketing.

But what if you take time off to check emails, check Facebook, maybe watch a YouTube video or read an extra dozen Wikipedia pages as part of your “research” whereas you’d have got enough information to write your couple of posts from skimming the first page of the Google results.

Then the hour a day dwindles. Maybe 30 minutes. Maybe less.

Then there are the days when you’re just too tired so the hour drops to zero several days a week.

Before you know it, your hour a day that would have translated into between 5 and 7 hours a week turns into 1 or 2 hours.

In a good week.

Now let’s say that you decided an hour a day wasn’t enough.

You get back home from your day job and eat your evening meal.

That leaves from (say) 7pm until 10pm, at least 4 days a week, for your internet marketing.

12 hours a week or more.

And let’s say that you’re more disciplined.

So you manage 9 or 10 hours a week in total (life gets in the way one evening a week and you’ve given yourself Fridays and weekends off).

That’s between 5 and 10 times more internet marketing work done, even though you’ve not hit your goal in either case.

There’s another twist you can consider

What would you do differently if your money goal was bigger?

Maybe you’ve got a perfectly respectable goal of earning $10 a day from your internet marketing.

That’s $300 a month and would likely pay a good chunk of your regular bills.

Providing you hit it.

But maybe you’re only half way there. Still respectable for a lot of people who want some spare cash from their internet marketing.

What would you do differently if your target was bigger?

Maybe $100 a day.

Or $1,000 a day.

Would you do the same “stuff”?

If the answer’s yes, that’s fine.

But my guess is that the answer is either an out-and-out “no” or a qualified “I don’t think so”.

If you can turn your thinking round so that your target is bigger, you’ll almost automatically do things differently.

I know I do when I indulge in this kind of thinking.

There’s a shift that happens in your subconscious mind that just has to happen when you do this.

It’s the difference between walking round the block for 15 minutes and driving across the country for a few hours.

Except it’s in your mind.

And our minds are weird at best.

If you’ve got this far in this post, your mind is probably contemplating a few “what if” scenarios.

Maybe you’ve dismissed some as impossible.

That’s OK.

Notch down the big goal but nowhere near as low as the first (relatively miniature) goal and aim for that instead.

Play with this.

Let yourself take yourself to higher heights than you ever imagined possible.

Just by changing gear in your internet marketing goals.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments box below.