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 10th, 2008
Actually, no, i’ll stick with the same goals, but… it’s going to be a bit harder going because I moved house on Friday and, as well as being in a totally new city, we have limited internet connectivity for up to 2 weeks. Ouch! This might sound stupid but it honestly didn’t dawn on me until yesterday that it’s going to be hard work getting things sorted for the next week or so, not to mention exploring our new surroundings, getting a feel for the place etc. And that added to the fact that we’ll hardly have any internet access has made me realise that maybe, just maybe, it might be a tad more difficult than I thought to achieve my online goals this month.
It’s obviously going to be harder to post here very often over the next week or two (has anyone tried using WP Admin from their Blackberry before?!), let alone work on other sites/projects, but we’ll see how it goes.
Rest assured, as soon as we’re settled and back online, i’ll re-double my efforts to try and make up for the lost time, i’ll keep the same goals in place, it will just be more of a challenge that’s all!
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.
