Aims for 2009 - Follow Up

Posted January 6th, 2010 in Miscellaneous Postings

Back in January 2009 I set out some aims for 2009 and this short post has a look at whether I achieved them or not. This is part of a number of posts for the start of 2010 which looks back at 2009 and what's in store for 2010.

Aim #1: Daily posts focussed on PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML, CSS

My first aim for 2009 was to re-focus on PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML and CSS instead of the unstructured free for all that had happened previously. My intention was to post using a daily schedule with PHP posts on Mondays and Thursdays, Javascript/jQuery posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays, MySQL on Wednesday, HTML/CSS on Saturday and some other post on Sundays. This was detailed in my Aims for 2009 post and then revised a short time later in my posting schedule.

On the whole, I managed to stick to this and posted new content on 316 days of the year and 303 posts on the core focus areas. (See my 2009 Summary of posts for more details).

So I would therefore conclude that I met Aim #1.

Aim #2: Tenfold increase in monthly pageviews and RSS subscribers

My secondary aim was to grow the RSS subscriber base from 100 to 1000, and monthly pageviews from 60k to 600k.

The RSS readership increased to about 500 so I fell somewhat short, but I did start a Twitter feed and a Facebook page which at the end of the year had 112 and 26 followers respectively. There are also 10 people receiving the feed by email. This totals approximately 648 across all of these I managed to get about 60% of the way to getting 1000 followers.

As far as pageviews are concerned, the last three months of 2009 each received around 230k pageviews so I managed to roughly quadruple the total pageviews but only got about 30% of the way towards this goal. However I do believe that it was an unrealistic goal.

I would therefore conclude that Aim #2 was not met, but I am still satisifed with the result.

Aim #3: Make US$600 per month from this blog

This was not a published aim but it was one that I had in mind at the start of the year. In order to justify the amount of time I spend writing content instead of doing work, I would need to make around US$600 per month (the actual amount was NZ$1000 which equated to US$600 at the time; sadly now US$600 only buys around NZ$815...)

It was this figure which also helped me create the target of 600k pageviews per month as that was the number I thought at the time that I would need to make this amount of money per month.

I was still making very little per month until November when income for this blog totalled US$460.75 and in December US$662.97. The income comes from various forms of advertising and affiliate sales.

Although I expect January to drop to around US$550 I think with a little more work I can keep it around the US$600+ per month mark and conclude that Aim #3 has been met.

Conclusion

It was a good year for this blog; I managed to post on a regular schedule with only a few interruptions and kept mostly on topic, while building traffic and starting to make some money from my posts. May this continue throughout 2010!