I’ve been posting monthly income reports for a few months now and I thought I’d combine the December 2010 report with the overall report for 2010. You can read the November 2010 report here.
December 2010 Blog Income Report
Here’s November and December:
The news here is mixed: I hit my goal of 20% growth over last month, which is the target that I’ve set for myself. If I can hit this target every month for a year, I’ll be making more than enough by the end of 2011 to live off the income from RyanWaggoner.com alone. So that’s good, but I’m also slightly concerned because I just barely hit the goal, while I completely blew it away last month (264%).
Upon reflection, I think my post quality went down slightly this month. I know that part of this was just the holidays, but it was also partly worrying too much about the big things to move the income needle in the long run, and neglecting some of the basics, like writing great content every single day.
So for January, my goal is to buckle down a little and get some of the bigger ideas for posts that I have out the door, as well as land 1-2 guest posts on top blogs that I admire. I also want to focus more attention on the advertising side of things, and I have some ideas on how to make that happen and get my CPM rates up so that I can bring the advertising and affiliate income more in line with each other.
2010 Annual Blog Income Report
Overall, I had a blast this year. I started blogging every day in August and I truly didn’t have much in the way of income expectations for it. A friend actually suggested I throw some Adsense on the site because it couldn’t hurt, and the last few months have been amazing. It’s really exciting to see something grow organically from nothing into a project that could actually replace my income within a year or two.
Goals for 2011
As mentioned, I pretty much just have one goal: be able to make a full-time income from this site by the end of 2011. To be more specific, I’d need to make about $5 – 6k / month from the site before I’d be able to stop doing all contract and freelance work. Starting from a baseline of $800 / month (which is what the site earned in Dec 2010), I’ll need growth of about 18% per month to reach my income goal by the end of 2011. I think this is an achievable goal, and I’ll be working very hard over the next 3-4 months to see if I can achieve it early.
Once again, thank you so much for being a reader; it means the world to me.