Goals for January

Posted January 3rd, 2009 3 Comments »

A few days ago I posted my goals for 2009, these are what I am aiming to have achieved by the end of the year. Each month I will be setting smaller goals to achieve during that month which will all take me one step closer to the bigger ones.

For the first few months or so I am not going to be setting income goals, I am just going to concentrate on creating sites and getting traffic. I will, of course, monetise the sites but will not worry at first how much (if anything) is coming in from them. This way my focus will just be on getting these sites out there and learning to promote them and get visitors.

Here they are then, my goals for January:

  • Give some attention to a blog I created about 4 months ago which hasn’t been touched in about 3 months! This does actually get some visitors (about 150-200 a month, all organic search engine traffic) so with a little work I hope to be able to increase the traffic to it. This is more of a hobby site (video game related) but I believe it does have potential to bring in a little bit every month, it all adds up doesn’t it!The main points I think I need to focus on with this site are to post regularly (a couple of times a week) and find a couple of forums and other related blogs to comment/post on and get my link out there. With a little time and effort I should be able to line up a decent number of posts to keep me going for a while.
  • Another site that I do currently get a trickle of traffic to (around 100 visits a month) that I haven’t looked at for even longer than the one above is in need of some work. Basically I threw up quite a basic site which only shows ebay listings from various categories. I think with some work (posting articles, link building, forum posting, change of design) I could drastically increase the traffic to it.
  • Similar to above but with a site I started around 6 weeks ago. Seems to be a pattern with all my sites… I start off quite strong but then there’s no real follow-through :) . That will change this year! Anyway, this site is a music related one, quite specific to one range of products. Same deal as above really, needs content and promoting.
Now I’ve written this list out it’s look obvious that what needs to be done is what I tend to procrastinate on! Marketing, link building, promoting the sites, and posting regular content! Probably all the hard work/less interesting stuff! I always seem to be going strong while I choose a design and tweak that and the site code. As soon as the framework is there I usually lose interest it seems!
This is going to change this year… if I want this online stuff to pan out then I really need to put in the hard work in all aspects, not just the bits that pique my interest. The ultimate goal is to be able to work from home full time so I need to take it more seriously, and I will!
So there we go, my work is set out for the next 4 weeks, I am going to make sure I start this year off on the right foot and get this all done by my deadline of January 31st, ready for next months goals!
Wish me luck!