Looking Back At 2008… And Forward To 2009!
No doubt you’ve already seen a bunch of these kinds of posts in the last couple of days… so I thought I’d better get mine in before everyone’s sick of them!
So, it’s been 6 or 7 months since I started this blog and other online endeavours, and no everything has really gone as I had hoped. Things started off quite slowly, then as I got into the swing of things the income and activity here picked up a bit, and then the last couple of months have really slowed down alot. All-in-all I think I’ve learned quite a bit, I just need to start putting it all into practice and really sticking with it.
There are various reasons for me slowing down lately, it started when I was out of the country for a week in October, I really lost the momentum at that time, and rather than throwing myself back into my online projects I started doing other things in my free time (mainly gaming…). Since then I just haven’t had the motivation to go back to my sites, I just haven’t been able to get my head into it, mind just goes blank when I sit down with the intention of working on something.
Anyway, evil games. But… I will change this in the new year!
Of course this time of the year has a habit of getting people to make promises for the year to come, and so seems like a good time to make my own resolutions and set some goals for 2009.
Here we go then, here are my online goals for 2009:
- To get one site up and getting traffic every month. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean each site will be very big or very involved from myself. Some may just be quite static affiliate type sites, some ebay/amazon mashup sites, but I also do hope to try one or two bigger projects.
I have just made a list of all the domains I own, most of which were bought in the last 6 months, and it turns out I have 25 of the buggers… so I aim to work with those rather than buy new ones, after all I did have ideas for them all in the first place! - To be making £300/$500 per month regularly by the end of the year. May not seem a high goal to some, but to me if I could do this by this time next year then I’ll be very happy. I know I can do it, I just need to focus more on my online work.
- To learn how to create WordPress plugins. This might be really simple, I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet, but it’s something I do want to learn so that I can start to enhance my WP sites properly rather than editing the WP files. I already know PHP fairly well so I’m hoping this might be something I can get out of the way early in the year and build on. You never know, I might even be able to create some really good plugins that people would actually pay money for!
- Start to regularly contribute to blogs and forums in the niche(s) I am interested in or will be working in. At the moment this means MMO sites, web development type sites, and maybe some general techie/gadget sites. These are what I’m interested in, but I will also add others related to whatever projects I work on. I do enjoy visiting and posting on blogs and forums but just don’t make time to do it very often. I think this could really help to promote my sites and get traffic too, as well as hopefully helping other people and maybe learning a thing or two myself as well
