If you haven’t Read Part 1 of the Annual Review, go back and check out my annual earnings report.
In this part, I talk about how I will steer my blog in the right direction, and how I plan on boosting my earnings. I will also release the ways I earned money this past year.
Big Changes Coming When I start Peter Morrow’s Online Money 2.0, I plan on making it a place to chronicle other money ventures. As I mentioned previously, I am starting a business in sports betting with a friend and I should be getting that going at some point this summer.
I want my blog to look cleaner, and this should be possible with a Wordpress template that I have more control over. That will give me and my sponsors confidence in my image, and would make it something I can be proud of and share with friends.
Hopefully I will post more, and the second year around, have more valuable information to share. In all of my posts in the course of year one, the ones that got the best responses were the ones that came from the heart and were completely original. I have had trouble posting a lot and although I have considered posting more, I feel I can’t keep it up with the busy life I have. For those who don’t know me too well, I go to university and I’m 19 years old.
I am gaining enough confidence to invest money into the blog as well. As the earnings go up, I will pool more and more into marketing. I don’t rely on the money I make from this blog, so a vast majority of it will go back into the system.
Breaking Down The EarningsI’m not going to break down my earnings in dollars and cents (more the latter!) because they’re all pretty small. I don’t want to talk too much about monetization because I feel like I can do that part pretty well, even while I’ve been with Blogspot. Using Wordpress I should see a marked improvement, almost certainly. I’m still going to tell you how I made the small amount of money I did this year.
My biggest earner was
AdSense. That’s because I used it from the very moment I started my blog. I wasn’t very happy with my AdSense earnings anyways, as I wrote about before. My second biggest earner was from
private sales, which was my best earner in recent months. Following that is
Project Wonderful, then a little bit from
ReviewMe and
Kontera.
Luckily, the one thing which has been fairly steady has been my RSS readership. Even when my PR got dumped (due to changing domains in April), my subscribership was left in tact. I’m hovering around 45 readers at the moment, which I’m at least satisfied with. Like blog monetization, that is something I can deal with easily and not overthink, because most of my focus should be going to creating good content.
I know there’s a lot of hope in making my online businesses a success. I’ve already demonstrated that I’ve got commitment by staying on board longer than many beginners would. Making it to one year is a big mark for me. Here’s to number two!
Goals, Goals, GoalsI’ve estimated roughly that if I were to keep things going the way they are right now, I would be on pace to make roughly 250-300 dollars next year. While this sounds alright, I’m going to be earning in the kiddie pool forever unless I step it up.
That’s why I’m going to set a firm goal and really go after it. In the next year, I plan on earning 600 dollars online.
In order to achieve that, I’m going to need to make around 50 dollars a month. As the graph showed in previous edition of this report, I’m on pace to make that much in two years. Let’s try to cut that in half.
Of course, if things go well, I won’t need to make these small goals. If I surpass them, I will celebrate for a moment, and then set the bar even higher. Wish me luck.
