Posted January 3rd, 2009
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!
Posted December 30th, 2008
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
Those are the main ones I have at the moment, and I think if I really work at it then it can be done. These aren’t massive goals, but a good start I think, and when I get to them then it will be a good starting point to raise the bar considerably.
I hope you’ve all had a great 2008, and wish you all the best in your plans for 2009! Feel free to comment and let me know what your goals are for 2009.
Posted October 2nd, 2008
Here we go then, my October project, earnings and blog goals.
Earnings Goals
This month I would like to see around a 50% increase in earnings on last month, so I’m looking at about £20-£25 ($35-$45). Because I’m now not going to include any GPT earnings (like Greasy Palm), this should be a good little challenge as I’ll have to try and coax my other income streams (Adsense, affiliates, in-text ads, direct advertising here…) into performing a bit better.
Project Goals
In terms of goals for my online projects, the main one is to get at least one new site I’m working on up and running and to start getting traffic to it. This will probably be the real estate niche site I’ve mentioned before, as part of the challenge over at NicheToRiches. I still haven’t got very far with it, not even really narrowed down my niche, so there’s lots of work to be done here.
I’m also going to take one of my existing sites and try to double the traffic and income from it. This site is in an IT niche which I think has some room for my site in there. It’s getting a trickle of traffic, but the site is only really very basic at the moment. I am going to work towards writing 5-10 articles this month to try and increase the organic search traffic, and also see about doing a little bit of blog and forum marketing, and submitting to stumbleupon, delicious etc.
Apart from those two sites, I would also like to spend a little bit of time looking into another possible income stream which I’ve been getting increasingly interested in these days, domain flipping. If I feel confident enough that I know what I’m doing I’d like to try one domain flip before the month is out. If I do I’ll be posting here about it along the way and sharing my experiences.
Blog Goals
I’m quite pleased with this blog last month. It’s still not getting lots of traffic, but it has increased on the last couple of months which is obviously the right direction to be going in!
Here’s a quick list of my goals for this blog for October.
- To get 10 RSS readers
Currently 6
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- To make at least 15 posts
Last month I managed 10 posts
- To get 300 unique visitors
Last month there were 190 uniques
- To get 600 page views
Last month there were 435 page views
- To break into the top 1,000,000 on Alexa and Technorati
Alexa has currently shot up (not good) from the 1.2m mark when I checked on September 24th, to 1.5m as of 30th September. Not sure why this has happened…
These might be very modest goals, but I know that I’ll be sorely disappointed if I was aiming for this blog to instantly gain 100’s of readers and 1000’s of page views. It’s going slowly at the moment, but at least it’s going in the right direction.
So, those are all my goals for this month. I’m going to work hard to achieve these, and hopefully that hard work pays off.
Do you set yourself goals? If you do, do you normally reach them or find you set them too low/too high? It would be great to hear from you.
Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and follow my progress this month? You never know, you just might learn something new along the way :)
Posted September 30th, 2008
When I started this blog and my journey into making money online, I had a few long term goals in mind. These are the big, life changing goals that I would love to reach through online earnings.
I tried not to be too greedy, but they are long term goals so I may as well aim high! These might not even seem that much to ask to other people out there, but to me they would be absolutely huge things to achieve.
- To Earn Enough to Buy a House
Yes, this is very high up the list of wants. I’m 26 and live in the UK, haven’t got much money saved and have a wife and three kids to support, and we currently rent a house. With the housing market the way it is, not to mention the state of the economy as a whole, I can’t see us being able to buy a place in the near future. So, a real long shot this one, but this goal is to be able to buy a house outright! I reckon maybe £200,000 or so should do it
- To Quit My Day Job
This one is probably the number one goal on most people’s list. I think for my online income to be able to just equal my current salary would not be enough, before I would quit my day job I would want to be consistently earning about 150% of what I currently do at work. I would imagine I would need this to cover things like days I’m unable to work or on holiday, or just as an added bit of breathing space should things start going belly up!
Of course it would be fantastic to work from home, work my own hours, spend more time with my family, and get rid of this 4 hour round trip into the office!
- To Make a Million
This one isn’t really as important to me as the ones above (although would obviously be nice ), but if I can achieve the other two then hopefully I’d be on the way to the £1,000,000 mark anyway
Each month I am trying to set short term goals for my online endeavours to help me stay on track and keep a check on my progress. Each milestone I reach is just another step closer to those big goals!
What are your long term goals? Are you as greedy as I am ?
If you want to see how I get on in my journey towards these goals then why not subscribe to my RSS feed?
Posted August 3rd, 2008
I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I set myself some goals to aim for both in making money online and for this blog. The reasons for this are quite simple… 1) I think it will be motivating to be working towards something; 2) It will be a great way to track my progress, so I can look back when I’m a millionaire (stop laughing!) and see how far I’ve come.
I’ve never really formally set goals for myself before, so I want to try this out and start with some fairly modest goals for the month of August and see how I get on.
Online Earning Goals for August
Last month I thought wasn’t too bad at all for money earned online, but as I mentioned in my July Earnings post a large portion of that was from a cashback site (Greasy Palm) that, although very good for some quick cash, I’m not sure whether you could sustain any decent income from it following the initial spate of higher paying offers available. Keeping this in mind I’m actually going to set my August earnings goal to £50 ($98.70), less than what I managed to earn last month.
Although I will keep doing offers on this cashback site (and any other decent ones I can find), I would like to see my affiliate and adsense income make up a bigger percentage of this months total income. I’m still working on a few affiliate/adsense sites which are slowly but steadily starting to increase in traffic, so hopefully this will happen naturally.
Blog Goals for August
I really would like to build this blog into not only a journal of the things I am doing to make money online, but also as a helpful resource for others who are just starting out and need help to kick things off. I know there are plenty of blogs out there with tons of information on this subject, but I’d like to bring everything that I think would be helpful to a newbie into one place and try to have almost a step-by-step guide with plenty of specific details at each stage, which will walk anyone, no matter how technically minded (or not…), through what they need to do to get started.
This month I want to start this off with a couple of beginner articles with all the information I can find and links to some of the best resources out there, the ones that I’ve personally found the most helpful.
With regards to numbers, I’m still very low on the stats at the moment, but this month I want to start to go about changing that. Here are the goals:
- RSS Subscribers
Of course, getting massive amounts of people reading your RSS feed is one of the main things most bloggers are looking for. At the moment my feedburner account says I have a whopping 6 readers, so by the end of the month my aim is to have at least 20. I know what you’re thinking, “he’s crazy, no-one can get THAT many people to subscribe in just one month”, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.
- Unique Visitors
Another highly regarded metric, and probably more important in my eyes as these are actually how many unique people are browsing on your site. Google Analytics tells me that I had 155 visits last month, or an average of 5 per day. Based on that, I’m going to set this goal at 250 visitors.
- Page Views
Again, Google Analytics says I had 349 page views last month. I’m not too impressed with that as it means that the average number of pages a visitor reads is only 2.25. I’m going to look into some ways of making the site more “sticky” and try and give people some reasons to stick around a bit longer. Hopefully this will also help with the RSS numbers.
I think that will do for this month. I’ll be a happy chappy if at least some of these can be met, but I’ll work hard and see how it goes.
