Now choose your short-term goals - daily and weekly ones. Make up a "to-do today" list and a "to-do tomorrow" list. Check yourself regularly to make sure items on these lists get attention they need and are completed each day. At end of week, check off your weekly goals.

Okay, now you've met your goals, so what? Well, meeting your goals should make you feel very good, and you should highlight that with some kind of reward system.

We all know we can't spend profits of our work before we even make them. It is indeed possible and appropriate to meet goals before we make money. However, what profits we do make need to go right back into business as advertising, new software, web hosting, and like.

But we can reward ourselves when we meet certain goals. Short- term and mid-term goals can be rewarded non-monetarily.

For completing a short-term task that's been haunting you lately, don't go out to eat. Rather, have a nutritious snack, watch a TV show, or read your favorite section of newspaper.

For mid-range goals met, go to Ebay and price a set of golf clubs, let's say, or look at car ads. Perhaps you could get out photos from a recent vacation and dream of your return to spot. Use photos instead of notes posted as reminders of meeting your goals.

Long-term rewards can be monetary, but don't break bank. Hold off on making any major purchases out of your profits until later. Instead, take family out to eat at a moderately priced restaurant, go to a football or hockey game, or have friends over for cards and snacks.

Keep your tunnel vision active by chipping away at your goals. Remember, short-term, mid-term, long-term goals are avenue to success.

To illustrate this point, let me show you what happened in trying to promote my business on a free web site. Before we get into this, though, let me assure where I'm coming from. It's not to persuade you of idea of paid domain names and site hosting as end-all, beat-all solution to success. There's much more to it than that.

I've always been restricted by budgeting concerns. Could I have taken food off table to pay for business expenses that may or may not have earned enough to pay for themselves? For reasons too detailed for this article answer in beginning was "no". I'm sure most newcomers to this marketplace have same concerns.

On other hand, when I finally did register my domain name, I soon began seeing more traffic on my site. My domain host is not most expensive one out there, but what paying for a web site gives me is a shorter web address and less down time than with my free hosting service.

Where am I going with this, you ask? Here's where. It was months of submitting to classifieds, free for all links pages, and search engines with very little gain that finally convinced me. Even though I used funds from family budget as a leisure expense it has been worth it. I have made sales, and traffic is improving.

For you it may be a question of advertising money, or more basically, time to invest online. Whatever issue, it is experimentation that pays off. Please learn from activities that fall short of profit. That's extra value of self-teaching.

Don't be afraid to try and fail. Be more afraid of not trying for lack of all answers. After a sufficient length of time in business - and I mean months to years, not overnight - your efforts should pay off. You will then be able to try and succeed.