January has just passed and it’s terrifying to realize that one month of my twelve-month goal of earning $1,000 a month has already passed. I’ve made slight progress, but need to do much, much more. Here are the charts for January:

For expenses, the bill to renew my domain names came up, accounting for a small portion. Annoyingly, there was a charge for website hosting from my old, pre-dedicated-server plan that I should not have received. That charge stings because it’s unnecessary and I thought I had resolved the issue already.

On the income side, there was no cheque from Google Adsense. For reasons that I don’t understand (and will vaguely blame on the recession) my Adsense revenue has plummeted from about $20 a week to just pennies. Since Google doesn’t pay out until you accumulate at least $100, it may be a while before I see them again.

On the positive side, one of my irregular payments from Cafepress came in. Also, my text-link-ads income was slightly higher this month.

Text-link-ads has been a strange experience so far. For almost half a year, I had a big, banner on the Miscellanea webcomic letting people know they could buy text ads on the site. All that time the banner just gather dust and I decided to remove it. I was literally hours away from taking it down when I sold an add. Then the next day I sold two more and increased the limit to five. Shortly after I sold another. If I was a dirty hippy, I’d believe I was manifesting my way to success — but I’m a science guy, so I’d like to try and figure out what happened.

In summary:

Income:

• Cafepress: $60.83
• Text-link-ads: $72.69

Outgo:

• Hosting: $28.36
• Domain names: $9.99

Profit: $95.17

It’s an improvement over last month, but I really need to up the pace if I’m going to hit the goal of $1,000 a month.

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Header photograph by artemfinland

Quick reminder: the goal is to reach $1,000 a month of web income by January, 2010

Currently I run three websites, this one, Silver Clipboard and Miscellanea. Given my time constraints, it’s hard to see how I could start anymore, so if I want to go from a net loss of $144 to a profit of $1,000 per month, I need to expand what I already have.

The clearest problem is that I haven’t been consistently updating these sites. I’ve been rather sporadic with posting. I need to aim for at least once-weekly update on each. In order to find the time to start for creating new content I’ve started the great wake-up challenge on silver clipboard.

Miscellanea gets between about 2,000-4,000 readers a day (according to Google analytics) but it earns hardly any income. Adsense used to bring about $20 a week, but has recently dropped to less than $5. I need to find an alternative advertiser and am considering AdBrite.

Lastly, the most profitable, enjoyable, but most difficult to accomplish, is to to increase the number of productivity coaching clients I have. This is really why I started the Silver Clipboard blog in the first place — I love helping people get organized and productive. I’ve done sporadic work with this but, again, I’ve never really had a focused game plan. I contacted Mark Forester (author of Do It Tomorrow) and he suggested the book Get Clients Now, which I’ve ordered from my library.

In summary, the current expansion plans are:

• Post articles on a weekly basis
• Find more clients to coach
• Try different advertising methods for Miscellanea

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Header photograph by Alvi on the road

Quick reminder: the goal is to reach $1,000 a month of web income by January, 2010

For nearly seven years now, I’ve been playing around with my websites. I’ve pulled in a little income from advertising, but I never really wanted to add up the figures. This way I could tell myself I ‘broke even’ — even if I didn’t. Breaking even was an important goal — it felt like a validation. But the time for vague ideas has passed. To reach my goal, I need to know where I stand to see how far there is to go.

It’s time for charts and figures. Here’s how things went last month, December 2008:

Income

• Adsense: $122.00
• Text-link-ads: $64.45

Outgo

• Website Hosting: $299.99

Nearly all my pain comes from webhosting. Hosting all of my sites, each running wordpress and receiving substantial traffic requires a dedicated server. The $299.99 for three months is my biggest expense and the one I can do the least about. $100 a month for dedicated servers and the good tech support is the best I could find at the time.

The noticeably smaller side of the equation is my income. Adsense is the program that has earned me the most income over the years I’ve been running it. Top earner though it is, it’s not enough to cover costs.

My second source of income for the month is text-link-ads. I’m newer to them and not quite sure what to think. For the moment, they seem to be a bit of too-good-to-be true, but I withhold judgment.

In summary I lost $114 in December — not ‘breaking even’ by far. How to reverse this trend? Next article up, my expansion plans.

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Header photograph by kevindooley

One of the most interesting things we’ve discovered… is that [people] are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. —Paul Graham

Today is New Year’s Day. It’s goal-setting time.

Normally I keep my goals quiet, hidden to all but myself. As a result, I often fail to achieve them. But, since I tell no one my aims, I can sweep them away and try to forget that I every wanted to achieve them.

This year is different. This year it’s time to put myself in a position to fail.

The goal I’m setting myself is: to earn $1,000 a month on average from location-independent sources before January 1st, 2010. I’m keeping track of progress on this blog — were everyone can see how well I do.

Why this goal? Like most, I don’t particularly enjoy working for someone. $1,000 a month is about half of my living expenses. If I could reach that, I could switch from working full time to part time.

The bar is set, the gauntlet thrown down.

Today is January 1st, 2009. 365 days left. Ready, set, go.

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Header photograph by Bob Jagendorf