SEO revenue goals

I'm giving myself a 6 month run rate. My blog site isn't new but I've only posted a handful of articles and not in a consistences basis. Currently I'm getting about 392 page views, 273 being unique visitors.

Hey Jonathan,
yes I set overall revenue goals. But it's not like I break it down to "SEO efforts" as a certain activity which needs to bring in x% more.

I am only able to attribute a percentage of (non-smartphone-app) revenue to "organic traffic" - maybe that's what you meant by "SEO revenue"?

My approach is more like this:

• set overall revenue goal $x or +x% within next 6 months
• split it down to the revenue streams: more direct sales of product X / more app customers / more visitors for ad revenue / more affiliate revenue / etc.)
• think about which activities are most likely to have the biggest impact on each channel
• do or delegate those activities in the order of biggest impact

i.e. for the channel "+ x% affiliate revenue" the activities could be some of the below

Non-SEO activities

• include more relevant products into the content
• highlight the bestselling products
• etc.

SEO activities

• research and write promising new content
• building backlinks via partnerships
• press releases / interviews for backlinks
• optimize onpage SEO and keywords

In my opinion the crux is, that for all of the SEO activities I have no way to effectively forecast the effect on the bottom line revenue.

I can use knowledge from the past. Like an article about X has Y visitors / month and is doing Z in revenue. So a similar article might have the same results...

But. I could write a similar new article, build the same ammount of links for it, optimize it, etc. but in the end it does not rank good enough or is badly written or not relevant, it does not convert and no additional revenue happens for any other reason...

So thats why I am having a hard time to directly attribute a specific revenue growth / goal to any SEO activity.

What we CAN do instead - setting a measurable (!) goal of DOING things that have worked in the past: like writing a new similar promising content piece, getting x backlinks to it, doing whatever it takes to rank top10 and then wait to measure the actual revenue it generates.

But with every one of those activites, considering you do them as good as you can, you have no control over what ammount of revenue will actually be generated.

Sorry for the long reply!

TLDR: No SEO activity can guarantee any fixed ammount of revenue - even if an identical thing worked in the past. But if I am wrong about that - I'd love to learn how to do it ;-)