Cash Campfire » Achievements

Goals and Achievements – May, June & July 2011

Christina Crowe — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:03:49 +0000

Hello everyone! I hope you’re having a fabulous summer.

First off, I’m sorry for the lack of updates. Things have been really hectic on my end, and I haven’t been able to check email, reply to comments, or update this blog as often as I used to. But I haven’t forgotten about you! I’m going through a few major life changes at the moment, but I’m hoping to straighten everything out in the next few months so that things can get back on the usual schedule.

Now, I know many of you are eagerly anticipating an update on the Do Something Remarkable contest. As you probably know, the deadline for the contest was June 1st (see here for more details). I’m currently going through the list of participants and will email the three winners by Monday, July 25th (thanks everyone for being so patient with me). Once each winner has accepted his/her gift(s), I’ll announce the winners publicly. Thanks again for your overwhelming support!

For those of you who have emailed me in the last few months, expect a reply in the next couple of weeks. I’ll be going through all of my email and comments in the weeks to follow, so it may take some time to get to you. But I will! Stay tuned for that.

Now for the actual post…

I have good news, and I have bad news.

And while I may be upset, I’m also excited about what the future might have in store for me.

Let’s start at the beginning.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the changes Demand Media and all associated companies are going through, and I’m guessing that these changes are a direct result of the sudden Google algorithm update back in February (not 100% certain, so don’t take my word for it). But if you’re not familiar, take a look at this screenshot, taken from an email I received May 9th.

Several of you I talked to may know that I was already upset because Demand Media took down my highest earner on eHow – the article that was making the bulk of my income on the old eHow Compensation Program. This resulted in a 67% decrease in income, reducing my monthly eHow income from $400+ a month to $140+ a month.

I first noticed that the article was removed on April 30th. When I saw the decrease in income initially, I had simply assumed that a few of my articles decreased in rankings because of the algorithm update. However, after looking more closely at the matter, I realized that my article count was reduced and eventually discovered that my highest earner was in fact removed. I’ll talk more about this in the next eHow Experiment update (which will most likely be my last update in that series).

But Demand Media didn’t stop there.

In the beginning of May (and as you can see from the above screenshot), Demand Media decided to close down eHow’s Compensation Program as well.

What does this mean? Well, eHow writers can no longer earn money from the articles they’ve written prior to the platform switch and will have to find another platform in which to publish their old articles. That is, if they don’t accept eHow’s “offer,” which is basically a one-time lump sum of money in return for the full rights to their articles. In my case, I was offered over $2k if I chose to sell the rights to all 100+ articles.

So if I accepted eHow’s offer, I not only wouldn’t be able to earn a monthly residual income with eHow’s old Compensation Program, but I would no longer be able to use or do anything more with those 100+ articles already written. These articles would then solely be Demand Media’s to use, earn money from, and do with as they wish.

In other words, the residual income I used to earn on a monthly basis would be almost completely wiped out.

I had a lot to think about.

My main questions were then, “Should I accept the offer, earn a final $2k, and try to build back my residual income from ground 0?” and “Or, should I decline the offer, try to find another platform in which to publish all 100+ articles, and risk the chance of not earning much of an income at all?”

Let me just say that it wasn’t an easy decision. While the first option did look appealing in the short run, both options still left me feeling like my heart was sinking into the pit of my stomach. And both options would require a ton of additional work in order to get things running smoothly again.

In the end, I went with the first. I accepted the offer, received the lump sum as promised, and re-invested most of that money back into my business.

The final result? One long-term goal was taken off of the list.

Long-Term Goals

Like always and as I do in every Goals and Achievements post, I listed my long-term goals in order of the most significant to the least. This list is basically geared to keep me on track and make me accountable of my goals (hence, I get more work done, and I’m less likely to procrastinate).

I encourage everyone to make their own list of long-term goals. Not only are goals an awesome source of motivation, but keeping a list is the first step towards eventually being able to chart your progress, learn where you’re falling behind (tweaking things as you go), and see results.

Here are mine.

Move to California, buy a house, and start a family
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
ACHIEVED ~~Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer~~ | It’s not an Alienware but something pretty damn similar, and it will definitely be a MAJOR help for business. Read on for more info (and pics!).
NEW! Get into shape (maintain 3-days-a-week workout routine for over a year)
Have a 125+ gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs

Owning an Alienware computer has always been a dream of mine. With its high processing speeds, amazing graphics, and slick design, there is most likely no application around that an Alienware can’t handle. And because of its impressive graphics, the Alienware product line has often been labeled top-of-the-line as far as hardcore gaming is concerned. I mean, sure, there are other gaming computers just as good (HP Envy comes to mind), but I believe that Alienware is the most well known as far as gaming, which is why I’d set my eyes on owning an Alienware system for quite a long time.

The only problem? The outrageous price.

I mean, to max out an Alienware M18x laptop (the most powerful laptop in the Alienware franchise), you’re looking at over $6k. That’s A LOT to spend on a laptop.

And then I saw the XPS 17.

This beauty is almost just as good as an Alienware M17x but at a more affordable price. Both systems have a 17-inch screen display, offer 3D, and can be customized with almost identical settings (with a few small differences). While the Alienware M17x has the option of a slightly better graphics card, the XPS 17 is only 2 inches thick (so it’s easier to carry around than other 17-inch laptops), and you have the option of customizing the laptop cover (I chose the Lovers in Morning design, which you can see in the image to the right), making it look much more professional than the Alienware brand in my opinion. It’s also way cheaper for almost identical settings (and I was even able to reduce the price by over $600 at checkout PLUS get free shipping by using several coupon codes I found around the Net), though I opted not to go with 3D (I felt as though I didn’t need it).

I don’t regret my decision in the least.

My old laptop (a Compaq) couldn’t even handle flash games, was super slow, overheated to the extreme (causing it to occasionally shut itself down, even with a cooling pad equipped), and would freeze up randomly. I think the motherboard was fried, for it definitely didn’t have any viruses (I scanned and re-scanned with multiple anti-virus/spyware programs – Microsoft Security Essentials, Adaware, and AVG to name a few). So I definitely needed a new computer, and a laptop was my preferred choice since I travel often.

In the end, I’m happy that I was finally able to get one major goal out of the way, and working on a computer that doesn’t take forever to start up, freeze, or randomly shut down while working on important projects (resulting in lost work) is nothing short of exciting.

***

You may also notice that I added a new goal to the list in replacement of the previous one – to get into shape. While I have been trying to stick to my morning exercise routines, sometimes it would slip my mind or I’d wake up a tad late and my whole schedule would go out of whack. As a result, my body isn’t near as fit as I want it to be.

So I’ve decided to make it a commitment and work on improving the overall health of my body (eating a balanced diet) and develop flexibility while strengthening and toning my body. My goal is to exercise three times each week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), and I’m currently four weeks into the One Hundred Push-ups, Two Hundred Sit-ups, and Two Hundred Squats workout routines (seriously check them out – very motivating!). I plan to go all the way through until I’m able to in fact complete 100 push-ups, 200 squats, and 200 sit-ups.

I also incorporated speed jump roping into my workout routine, following the training programs found in Jump Rope Training Second Edition (definitely worth the read) and the routines in the short DVD that came with the speed jump rope I purchased (aff links).

So far, it’s been pretty intense. Yesterday, for example, I did a total of 140 push-ups separated into 5 sets (avg of 28 push-ups per set), 170 sit-ups (avg of 34 reps per set), 191 squats (avg of 38.2 reps per set), and 200 jumps separated into 10 jump roping sets (avg of 20 jumps per set).

It’s crazy thinking back four weeks ago when I first started out (I could barely do 10 consecutive push-ups, never mind 28!), then looking at now and how much farther I’ve come. And the best thing is, I feel so much healthier since I’ve made this commitment; I definitely feel a lot better about my body than I did before.

I also plan to eventually incorporate yoga and meditation into my workout routine (I’ve never done yoga, so I’m pretty excited about that as well).

April Goals and Accomplishments

This post has gotten pretty long already, so I’m going to try to keep the rest of these sections short. Basically, since eHow closed their compensation program, my residual income has been seriously suffering as you’ll soon see in the sections to follow.

April Results

Earn $800 in residual income – Fell Short

My Lesson Learned

Simply this: When it comes to residual income, don’t depend on revenue sharing sites.

I’ve always been a fan of content sites, simply because of how much easier it is to earn an income working for them as compared to starting your own site from scratch. Most content sites have a high page rank and already have a large audience reading their content. All you have to do is write the articles and you can technically earn an income. Content sites basically take care of the revenue sharing and traffic for you, since they already have a large audience of readers to begin with, as opposed to the 0 visitors you start off with if you were to create a site of your own. Backlinking your articles to improve your page rank and search engine traffic is optional, though it can make a huge impact on how much income you earn (check out my awesome link wheel series for more info). So, not surprisingly, many writers start off writing for content sites.

However, it just isn’t reliable. I know I probably said it before in the past, but I’ll say it again – content sites aren’t reliable. You’re much better off earning an income off of a site you have complete control over (a blog you’ve created in a certain niche) or writing for individual clients (copywriting) than spending all of your time and energy publishing content for massive article publishing companies.

I even saw this coming and was telling my boyfriend several months before the email notice how I wouldn’t be surprised if eHow just stopped sharing revenue with its writers. As much as I didn’t want to realize it (I had tried to convince myself otherwise), eHow has been going downhill ever since I can remember, even when I first started writing for the company (with it’s massive article deletions, switch to a new writing platform, and now the complete closing of their compensation program).

But life moves on. There’s nothing you can do about something that’s already come and passed. All you can do is move forward and keep improving your current situation – so that’s what I’m going to do. There’s no sense in sulking or agonizing over your problems. That would just lead to constant worry and regret. And we all know how I hate going down that road.

***

On a more friendly (if somewhat random) note, I did come to a realization that I do, in fact, like red wine after years of despising the liquid. Actually, that’s an understatement; I LOVE red wine, almost as much as I love margaritas! Amazing how taste buds can change, isn’t it? But of course, I’m getting ahead of myself…

***

Back to the topic at hand. The following is a compilation of the income I earned in April, May, and June.

April Earnings Breakdown

Content Income

eHow: $140.84
Demand Studios: $18.32
Triond: $0.08

Content Income Total: $159.24 | -$278.90 difference (64% decrease)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $4.36
Chitika: $0.07

Advertising Revenue Total: $4.43 | +$2.62 difference (145% increase)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $14.07
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $0

Affiliate Sales Total: $14.07 | -$5.06 difference (26% decrease)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $47.67

Product Sales Total: $47.67 | +$23.71 difference (99% increase)

Total Residual Income: $225.41 | -$257.63 difference (53% decrease)

May Earnings Breakdown

In the content income section, I include the amount earned from accepting the eHow offer. The lump sum was paid out in two equal payments (first payment was received in May and second was received in June).

Content Income

eHow: $25.19 (+$1,163.00 from offer, 1st payment out of 2)
Demand Studios: $14.55

Content Income Total: $1,202.74 | +$1,043.50 difference (655% increase)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $0.74
Chitika: $0.40

Advertising Revenue Total: $1.14 | -$3.29 difference (74% decrease)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $7.55
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $4.00

Affiliate Sales Total: $11.55 | -$2.52 difference (18% decrease)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $0.0

Product Sales Total: $0.0 | -$47.67 difference (100% decrease)

Total Residual Income: $1,215.43 | +$990.02 difference (439% increase)

June Earnings Breakdown

Content Income

eHow: $0.00 (+$1,163.00 from offer, 2nd payment out of 2)
Demand Studios: $14.61

Content Income Total: $1,177.61 | -$25.13 difference (2% decrease)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $2.68
Chitika: $0.0

Advertising Revenue Total: $2.68 | +$1.54 difference (135% increase)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $5.84
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $0.0

Affiliate Sales Total: $5.84 | -$5.71 difference (49% decrease)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $0.0

Product Sales Total: $0.0 | +$0.00 difference (0% increase)

Total Residual Income: $1,186.13 | -$29.30 difference (2% decrease)

July Goals

I’m going to continue working on my niche sites (for residual income) and get my writing profile together. I’m also going to keep exercising and do a lot more reading (so that I can eventually finish all of the books in my office library; I tend to buy books and let them sit on the shelf gathering dust – horrible habit).

There you have it. Not too long I hope? Again, thanks a bunch for your continuous support. Stay tuned for the contest results, and best of luck with your writing career!

Goals and Achievements – April 2011

Christina Crowe — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:23:50 +0000

Happy Tuesday, everyone! It’s the first week of a new month, and we all know what that means; time for another goals and achievements post!

Yes, I know. You’ve all been waiting in anticipation. I’ll be honest with you though – this month wasn’t exactly my best month yet, but I did come to a lot of realizations that will potentially open a lot of new doors and opportunities for me (at least, I hope so). You see, I’m starting to realize what’s important… and what’s not so important in my life, and it’s really making a huge difference in the way I think and go about my daily tasks.

I’m still straightening everything out, but just know that this won’t be your ordinary goals and achievements post. This month, I’m going to try something new. And for that reason, I won’t be getting as detailed as I usually do in the goals section. But I’ll get to that in a second.

Photo by Julian Wylegly (flickr)

Lucky for you, I also have a surprise for you! Yep, another one. Am I not awesome?

Ahem. (Hint: This is your cue to say, “Yes, Christina. You’re very very awesome! No one could be as awesome as you are,” and try to butter me up with excessive compliments; you know, the things I like to hear. )

I won’t give anything away because, well, what good would the surprise be then? But I will say this: In the next few weeks, you’re going to be seeing some awesome things here on Cash Campfire – and Christina is going to be getting out of her comfort zone! The fun and lovable (and somewhat dramatic, while often annoying) Christina is breaking free at last, and you’ll all get front row seats to watch her stuttering, embarrassing show. Now don’t you feel special?

It might get pretty mortifying (at least, for me), so don’t say I didn’t warn you. But you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?

Anyway, let’s talk goals.

Long-Term Goals

As always, here are my long-term goals to help keep myself on track. If you have your own long-term goals, I encourage you to list them somewhere safe, so that you can go back to them again and again when motivation needs a little boost.

If you don’t already have long-term plans, you need to get on that boat awfully soon! What you do now makes a world of a difference in where you’ll end up in the future. And you don’t want to get off track!

Below are my goals listed in order of importance.

Move to California, buy a house, and start a family
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer
Have a 125+ gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs

March Goals and Accomplishments

You may notice that I didn’t do as well this month, and my income had actually decreased a little compared to February. This was mainly a result of the Google algorithm change (you may have heard of it, but Google made some changes in their algorithm code, which ended up lowering search results for many of the articles I had on content sites).

While eHow wasn’t affected much by this change (and Demand Studios income actually increased – I’m earning $5 an article per month now with the 5 rev share articles I have published), it did open my eyes to the fact that maybe my writing efforts are better spent elsewhere.

But before I get into that, here are the results from last month.

March Results

Earn $800 in residual income – Fell Short

My Lesson Learned

As I mentioned before, my residual income suffered a bit last month, partly because of Google’s algorithm change but also because freebie trading has been a bit slow lately (and I mean seriously slow). I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t been receiving as many referrals as I used to – I used to see at least two referrals a week. Now, I’m barely getting any at all (and it’s not just me), which makes me think that freebie trading might be slowly dying after all (and if you don’t know what freebie trading is, check out the above link).

This sort of makes me sad, because freebie trading did have potential. But, from what I’ve been hearing on the forums and other sources, offers have been getting more pricey and the stream of referrals coming in has been decreasing and decreasing over the past few years. Freebie trading isn’t dead yet, but I think it might be dead in the next couple of years if things don’t pick up.

But I’m getting sidetracked…

Because of the above factors in which I have no control, I did some pretty heavy analyzing the last month (and I’m still working things out as we speak). In the end, I just don’t think writing content for content farms (as much as I hate that phrase) is the best use of my time right now.

I mean, I’m still going to submit an article or so every now and then when I have the free time (and I’m not getting rid of the income stream entirely), but I think it would be better for me and my long-term goals if I focused on the projects that I have the most control over. And, seeing that I have complete control over this blog and what happens to it, Cash Campfire was the natural place to start.

What does this mean? Well, basically you’re going to start seeing some amazing things happening here. With 100% of my energy focused on Cash Campfire and this blog community (which is what I should have been doing all along), I’ll be able to do more in terms of creating more awesome free content, ebooks, courses – and I’ll have more time to experiment with certain things and just make everyone’s usability and learning experience a bit better. I also hope to connect with you all on a much higher level.

I won’t get too detailed because I want this to be a pleasant surprise for everyone involved here, but just know that you’re going to start seeing a lot of awesome, free stuff soon – and sometime in the next few weeks, I’m going to have a VERY special surprise for you (that will require a lot of sweat and guts on my part to make happen ). So I hope you like it, and as always – thanks for being a loyal follower here. I can’t appreciate your tremendous support enough! And for everything that you’ve done to make this blog come to life, thank you.

Oh, and my birthday was awesome! Thanks for the lovely birthday wishes everyone. For those of you who missed it, I turned 21 on March 27th.

March Earnings Breakdown

Content Income

eHow: ~~$392.42~~ $411.97 (Edit: Received an email from eHow about a glitch in reported income; checked my income stats and, sure enough, I actually earned over $400 for March)
Demand Studios: $25.72
Triond: $0.09
Firehow: $0.36

Content Income Total: $438.14 | -$22.33 difference (5% decrease)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $1.63
Chitika: $0.18

Advertising Revenue Total: $1.81 | +$0.49 difference (37% increase)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $6.13
Freebie Trading Profit: $13.00
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $0

Affiliate Sales Total: $19.13 | +$0.01 difference (1% increase)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $23.96

Product Sales Total: $23.96 | +$0.00 difference (0% increase)

Total Residual Income: $483.04 | -$21.83 difference (4% decrease)

April Goals

Because I’m still in the planning/experimental phases, I can’t reveal much right now. But bear with me! You’ll like the new changes, I promise.

Until then, I wish everyone a very happy afternoon and an awesome new experience! I’ve never let you down before, right?

So What Do You Think?

Do you have an idea of what I might be planning? Do you have suggestions or feedback? Is there something that you really want to see here on Cash Campfire?

Speak your mind!

I love hearing your thoughts – that’s what makes this a blog community and not a lecture. So please share!

Goals and Achievements – March 2011

Christina Crowe — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:31:32 +0000

Well everyone, it’s time for the monthly income report. If you’re new here, here’s how these posts work: At the start of every month, I look at the goals I accomplished the previous month and analyze my progress. Then, I give a detailed breakdown of the income earned from the month before, followed by the goals I’ll be working towards as the month rolls on and how I intend to accomplish them.

Goal planning is something I always enjoyed doing. The reason why I write these posts is not to satisfy my ego (rather, the opposite). Instead, these posts are meant to:

Keep track of my monthly income.
Plan out my goals (and have them all in one place to refer back to throughout the month).
Hold myself accountable for my goals (to increase my chances of completing them).
Celebrate new milestones.
Acknowledge where I came short, learn from my mistakes, and strive to do better.
Offer encouragement.
Inspire others to set their own goals, work towards their dreams, and improve their lifestyles.
Stay on track so that I avoid doing tasks that offer no (or barely any) value.

Photo by Alan Cleaver (flickr)

With that said, last month wasn’t as productive as I thought it would be. But while I didn’t reach many goals, I did meet new milestones. If you were following along with my eHow Experiment series, you’d know that my income on eHow has been dramatically increasing. In fact, many of you can probably recall how excited I was in my last eHow update. However, with Google’s new algorithm, there was a slight decline in income – but I’ll get into that in my next eHow Experiment update. Even with the decline, my eHow earnings are reaching pretty good levels, so I’m happy with how things are going.

But before I get into the real meat of this post, I just want to remind you all about the contest deadline coming up. You can still join in the Do Something Remarkable Contest for a chance to win the book Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson, as well as a $30-60 Amazon gift card. There’s still 18 days left, and everyone can enter. Basically, the idea is to complete a specific task or goal that will help improve your career or lifestyle – it can be anything (big or small!), as long as it makes a difference in your life – by the due date. Once you accomplish one of your goals, tell me about it and I’ll add you to the list of contestants.

This is really a big deal here on Cash Campfire (it’s the second contest on this blog and the first time I’ll be mailing physical gifts and cash prizes to winners), so I hope everyone can participate. And don’t be shy – everyone has a chance to win. The drawings will be random, so don’t let all the other participants stop you from joining in! This is really a great chance to achieve some of those pending goals and get rewarded for your efforts, so I hope to see you on the list.

Speaking of goals… let’s get this post kickin’!

Long-Term Goals

As many of you know, I list my long-term goals each month (in order of priority) to help me stay focused on what’s really important when I’m tackling short-term goals for the month (so that I don’t work on unimportant goals that don’t benefit my long-term aims). However, these long-term goals are not set in stone – so if I lose interest in a particular goal, I can always make changes if I ever want to redesign my future aims.

With that said, I slightly reorganized which goals take the most priority. First, I moved my goal to earn $5k a month in passive income to the second slot because this goal will ultimately help me achieve my first goal – to finance a home. Then I moved my goal to buy an Alienware desktop computer/laptop up a slot, since a computer that can handle most applications will ultimately benefit my business and further my hobbies.

The following are my long-term goals.

Move to California, buy a house, and start a family
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer
Have a 125+ gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs

February Goals and Accomplishments

Like I said earlier, I didn’t meet many of my goals (I’ll talk about why later) – so don’t expect much in this section. I did make progress, however, and that’s all that matters. As long as I’m making improvements, I’m happy.

I strongly believe that everyone should work towards growth. The growth is what matters. So if you don’t meet some of your goals by the deadline, you always have next month. As long as you’re growing and making progress, you have nothing to worry about.

February Results

Earn $750 in residual income – Fell Short | earned $245.13 under
Increase the number of Cash Campfire RSS followers by 30 – Fell Short

My Lesson Learned

Well, I actually learned two lessons: Always be ready for the unexpected, and don’t depend on inconsistent income.

Always be ready for the unexpected.

In the middle of February, a major change took place where I had to completely move my office (or rather, the room I used as an office) and work in a smaller and more intrusive environment. This took some time to get used to – since I not only had to move all of my office equipment, but I also had to relocate a pretty heavy aquarium and find a way to deal with all of the constant interruptions (mostly people entering/leaving the room and randomly loud chatter, which would make me lose concentration and force me to refocus on whatever I was doing – not fun). In addition to that, I had a random fungus outbreak in one of my aquariums, making me lose several hours in my workday (to change the water, medicate the tank, and so on).

These events were all pretty sudden (I wasn’t aware of any of them until a day before or the day they happened), and they all resulted in massive amounts of lost productivity. But I don’t have the events to blame. The root of the problem was that I wasn’t ready or prepared for the unexpected.

But how do you prepare for the unexpected? Isn’t that a bit ludicrous? I mean, you have no way of knowing when something sudden is going to happen or there’s going to be an emergency that will require your immediate attention.

Actually, there is a way to prepare for such things and that is to create a back-up plan (I’ll be writing a post about this in the near future). In other words, you have to have a “Plan B” in place for when change occurs, so that you aren’t caught up in lost time.

For example, many of you have insurance to help protect you (your business, belongings, or whatever) against disaster. Maybe you have an emergency fund saved up in the event that you might have to pay massive amounts of cash (that you may or may not have) later on down the road. That is your “Plan B.”

Just like insurance, you can also protect the amount of time you have to work (even if only a little bit) if a similar event occurs, so that you don’t lose a massive number of hours out of your day. Because remember: You can’t get those hours back. Each hour is crucial to advance in your career, make progress, and grow.

Don’t depend on inconsistent income.

There will be a time when an income stream dries up or becomes dormant for a while. During this time, you still have to find a way to support yourself and fulfill obligations (even more so if you have children). As a writer, you’re probably used to inconsistent income. If you’re not prepared for the lows, you might find yourself in some serious trouble. So what do you do when this happens?

Diversify.

I’m sure many of you have heard it before – create multiple streams of income. When one stream dries up, you’ll always have the others to get you by. In my case, my affiliate income suffered (as you’ll soon see). While I earned more with Amazon Affiliates, my freebie trading income took a big hit. I also made no e-junkie sales (not that I’m an affiliate for many ebooks anyway). This one income stream contributed to a whopping 28% decrease in income.

Not good.

So what does all this mean? It means I need to work more on diversifying my income – maybe not all at once (or I risk crashing), but I should put some effort into it in the months to follow. Mainly, I’m going to work on building up my smaller income streams to the levels of my larger income streams.

February Earnings Breakdown

I don’t want to bore you with the details (I already did in the last section ), so I’m just going to get right to it. The following is my income to the last penny (before taxes) with any associated fees deducted from each income stream (so these are purely profits).

Content Income

eHow: $437.23
Demand Studios: $23.18
Triond: $0.06

Content Income Total: $460.47 | +$21.78 difference (5% increase)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $1.32

Advertising Revenue Total: $1.32 | -$1.89 difference (59% decrease)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $19.12
Freebie Trading Profit: $0
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $0

Affiliate Sales Total: $19.12 | -$213.40 difference (92% decrease)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $23.96

Product Sales Total: $23.96 | +$0.25 difference (1% increase)

Total Residual Income: $504.87 | -$193.26 difference (28% decrease)

March Goals

Whew, this turned out to be a massive post. In fact, I’ve already written over 1,600 words. Well, I’ll try to keep this section short (edited: eh, well maybe not so short).

I’m going to do something new this month and that is focus on only one main objective (in accordance with my new years resolutions of course). In the months previous to this one, I’ve been diversifying my efforts into several different goals (mainly to keep the excitement up rather than to increase my results – diversifying in this way can have the opposite affect actually). But this month I want to see what will happen if I only work on one recurring task for the remainder of the month.

You see, I’ve been looking at apartments lately (mainly ones in the Napa Valley region of California). Actually, let me start from the beginning…

If you remember (if not, just scroll up to the beginning of this post), one of my long-term goals is to move to California, buy a house, and start a family. Well, what better way to achieve this goal than to take the first step (move to California)?

While where I currently live is clear across the country from California, I’ve been there numerous times for long periods of time, and both my boyfriend and I are completely in love with the Napa Valley. So, we’ve been looking at available apartments around that area, and they can get pretty expensive.

But why am I telling you this story? For the next few months, I’m going to make this first goal reality by increasing my monthly income so I can afford living there. I was originally going to wait until I accumulated enough money to buy a house, but present circumstances have made me re-evaluate my options, and I think renting (at least for the time being) is the better way to go.

In other words, I’m ready to start maximizing my earning potential and kick things into high gear. This requires skipping diversity (only where my goals are concerned) and focusing more on one task at a time.

And this month’s task is to…

Earn $800 in Residual Income

I didn’t quite meet last month’s mark ($750), so I’m not increasing this month’s goal all too much. But by focusing on only one task this month, I should be able to phenomenally increase my residual income.

And here is the task that will help me reach this goal.

Write 93+ Demand Studios (residual income) articles (3 articles a day)

Three articles a day isn’t bad (and I was able to do it before when writing articles for eHow before the platform switch). Essentially, that’s about three hours a day of work (assuming that each article takes an hour to write). In fact, I expect to write much more than 93 articles.

And I even did the math (surprising, I know)! First, I added up all of my eHow and DS residual income articles (if you write for residual income on Demand Studios, the articles get published on eHow). In total, I’ve written 117. Then, I added up my total earnings from February for all of my eHow articles (including DS residual income articles) and got $493.30.

What I wanted to find out was how much income I was making for each article (on average) per month, so I divided my February income by my total article count and got $4.22 (rounded off). That may not seem like much, but if you look at it in terms of yearly income, each article is making $50.64 a year, while still earning in the years to follow. If that doesn’t seem like much to you, you can look at the articles as a whole instead: Each year, those 117 articles will make $5,924.88 without any additional work or writing required. The best thing is, they’ll keep on earning. So in three years, they’ll have earned over $17k and in ten years over $59k, assuming that I’m able to keep up that average.

But I’m getting sidetracked…

Based on the average monthly income per article ($4.22), 93 more articles will earn me an additional $392.46. If I add that amount to the income I’m already making, I’ll earn $885.76 a month from just eHow alone (that will more than surpass my income goal, since I’ll also continue to earn an income from my other streams).

Hopefully by focusing my efforts on one task for the next three months, I’ll be able to start renting by the time June comes along.

So what do you think? Am I growing two heads or do you think these goals are plausible? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section!

eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

Christina Crowe — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:37:37 +0000

When I wrote my last update over a month ago, I estimated that I would earn at least $412.92 for the month of January. If I met this goal, I would surpass my overall goal of earning $3 per article in any given month (or $339 a month – though one of my articles was removed, reducing my goal to $336 a month).

Well, as it turns out, my estimations were more than correct.

In January I earned a total of $420.29, which is about $3.75 per article a month and $13.56 a day. And, so far in February, I earned $368.44 (earnings were last updated Wednesday), which is about $4 per article and $16.02 a day. If this keeps up, I should make an all-time high of about $449 by the end of the month (and there’s only 28 days as opposed to 30 or 31)! Not bad for doing very little work as far as backlinking is concerned.

I’m also happy to see that my earnings are continuing to grow. If you remember, last year saw 3 months (Oct, Nov, and Dec) where my eHow earnings sort of leveled out and didn’t increase by much. That was when I started giving a few of my highest earning articles backlinks from content written on other Web 2.0 sites. If you compare now (or my estimated total income for the month) to my earnings in December 2010, my earnings increased by 64%.

Why the Dramatic Boost in Income?

When I saw how well my eHow articles were doing, I took a look at each article individually. I discovered that many of my articles were earning about $5 a month, and, in January, my highest earner made $346.25 in that month alone. So far in February, this article brought in $314.45, which isn’t bad at all considering there are still a few more days left in the month.

But I wasn’t happy with just those stats. I wanted to know exactly what ranks each of my highest earning articles were at.

So I opened Market Samurai.

And, mouth unhinged, I discovered what contributed to much of my growth – I had 3 articles ranked 2nd on the first page of Google and another ranked 6th! To the left is a screenshot from Market Samurai (to view what each acronym means, visit my 6th eHow update – I removed keyword listings and article links for privacy reasons).

Now, one of my articles did move down a rank (was on the #1 spot until it was moved down to #2). However, I’m still pretty impressed with my progress. The best thing is – my highest earner (when it was previously on page 2 of Google) is now ranked 2 on page 1 of Google, which is probably the reason for its increase in earnings (the article only made $225.83 in December – now it’s making $346.25+).

I’ve heard from many sources that earnings almost double when ranked 1 as opposed to 2 on Google, so just imagine how much more income this article will bring in when it hits rank 1! And if I can keep it there? That’s a possible $500+ from one article. And even if it doesn’t earn $500+, $346 a month from only one article is pretty damn good in my opinion.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go. Right now I’m just going to stick with my goals and work on sending my articles more backlinks (I must admit, I haven’t been doing as much backlinking as I could have the last few months – but all that’s going to change).

Speaking of goals, here are my major eHow goals and accomplishments.

Major eHow Accomplishments

Average $3 an article per month (earn $336) – ACHIEVED

Top 3 eHow Experiment Goals

Make my first $500 on eHow
Updated – Average $5 an article per month (earn $560)
Rank on the first page of Google for 57 articles

With enough time, optimism, and effort, I should be able to accomplish all 3 of these goals.

How about you? Whether you’re working on improving your own eHow articles or you write on Demand Studios for residual income, what are your content goals?

Progress

Goals and Achievements – February 2011

Christina Crowe — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:53:39 +0000

First of all – sorry for the late income report. I just got back from vacation the night before yesterday, so I’m still getting everything settled. I’m also pretty behind in comments and email. So if you commented on a post or sent me an email while I was away and I didn’t respond, don’t worry. I’m not ignoring you. I just haven’t gotten to it yet – but I will! Over the next few days I’ll be setting aside several hours to answer comments and email, so check your inbox for that.

Second of all, I’m really excited to tell you that I achieved a major milestone last month. But before we get into that, I’m going to talk about my major accomplishments last month, any mistakes I’ve made, and what I’ve learned from them. Then I’ll get into the income report and my goals for February.

Photo by Eric Danley (flickr)

Also, before I forget, you can still join in the Do Something Remarkable Contest for a chance to win Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson and a $30-60 Amazon gift card. For those of you who are a little late, the rules are simple. Do something that will help better your life by March 27th (my 21st birthday!) and tell me about it. It’s a win/win in my book. You win because you’ll be furthering your career and meeting new milestones (while you compete for a free book and cash prize), and I win because it makes me feel good to motivate you and watch your progress. After all, that’s what this blog is for – to help you grow as a writer and entrepreneur.

Best of all, you still have 37 more days to get into action. So there’s really no excuse why you can’t join in the contest, unless you aren’t interested in bettering your career and making improvements. If that’s the case, why are you reading this blog for? And trust me – there’s no limit to how you can improve. So don’t give me, “But my life is already perfect!” Because there’s always room for improvement.

Now, without further ado, let’s get into the good stuff!

Long-Term Goals

Every month I list my long-term goals so that I stay focused and don’t stray from my overall aims. Then I talk about my short term goals that, if completed, will help me achieve my long-term aims. However, these long-term goals are not set in stone. Every now and then I’ll change them to better reflect my constantly evolving interests. So, though minor, I did make a small change.

The list goes from most important to least important.

Move to California, buy a house, and start a family
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Have a 125+ gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs
Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer

January Goals and Accomplishments

As I mentioned before, I met a HUGE milestone last month. I try to meet at least one new milestone every month, so I’m really excited about what I accomplished. However, I wasn’t able to reach all of of my January goals – though I’m still happy with my results.

Let’s take a look.

January Results

Earn $500 in residual income – ACHIEVED | actually earned $198.13 over
Increase the number of Cash Campfire RSS followers by 100 – Fell Short

My Lesson Learned

Now, while I wasn’t able to increase my RSS subscriber count by 100, I did manage to earn a lot more than I thought was possible, mainly because I had a major eHow boost in earnings because of the articles I’ve been backlinking (I’ll talk more about what changed in the next eHow Experiment). As a result, I earned 54% more in January than I did in December on eHow, resulting in a total of $420.29. Below is an image.

From this I learned that, just because something may appear finished, it can always be improved if you put the extra work into it. In this case, I worked to better my eHow article rankings – which made a significant difference in earnings.

I wasn’t able to reach my goal to increase my readership by 100 though. I think this was largely because I simply didn’t have enough time to expand my reach with the vacation coming up and the article writing I was doing. With that said, I think I should slow it down a bit when I have something big happening the same month and only stick with one goal during months when I have big events planned. If nothing else is planned, I should be able to work on two goals without a problem, though I think two is maximum for me if I want to see accomplishments (too much going on can be detrimental to your results – you can’t be everywhere at once).

Overall, last month was an experiment to determine my limits and what I could accomplish before my three week vacation. Judging from my performance last month (and I’m pretty proud of what I’ve gotten done in such a short time frame), I can safely complete two short term goals in a month if I don’t have any special events happening the same month. Otherwise, I better stick with one goal.

January Earnings Breakdown

As I mentioned in the last earnings breakdown, the purpose of this income report is to show you how I earn my income online, what has worked for me, and how I hope to grow my current online income streams.

I encourage you to use this income report for motivation and as a way to boost creativity so that you can create your own income streams. This report is not meant to compare myself with others, and – since everyone has different skills and personalities – some income streams might not work as well for some people as they do for others. So please use this report as a guide and not a rule. In fact, I encourage you to experiment with your own income streams to see what works for you.

So here’s a breakdown (before taxes) of my residual income in January to the very last penny. I already deducted any fees associated with the each income stream, so these are purely profits.

Also, since it’s fun to see how I’ve improved over the months (we should always work for improvement), I calculated the difference in income between the two months so that you can see where my income increased or decreased in comparison to December’s income.

Content Income

eHow: $420.29
Demand Studios: $18.16
Triond: $0.24

Content Income Total: $438.69 | +$157.92 difference (56% increase)

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $3.11
Adbrite: $0.10

Advertising Revenue Total: $3.21 | +$2.35 difference (273% increase)

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $15.91
Freebie Trading Profit: $204.11
E-Junkie Affiliate Sales: $12.50

Affiliate Sales Total: $232.52 | +$180.71 difference (349% increase)

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $23.71

Product Sales Total: $23.71 | -$32.96 difference (58% decrease)

Total Residual Income: $698.13 | +$308.02 difference (79% increase)

February Goals

Each month I set goals to achieve so that I can eventually accomplish my goals for the year – and ultimately my long-term goals (mentioned in the beginning of this earnings report). So, each month of this year I’ll be slowly working up towards my 2011 new years resolution goals. To recap my new years resolutions, my three overall goals are to make $30,000 in residual income, reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire, and create several more ebooks by the end of the year.

This month I’m going to focus more on increasing residual income, though I still will be working on increasing Cash Campfire’s RSS subscriber count like I did last month. As always, I’ll have my progress posted on the sidebar of this blog.

Here are my goals for February.

Earn $750 in Residual Income

Last month I earned well passed $500 (last month’s goal), though I was less than $2 short of reaching a $700 milestone. This month I want to surpass the $700 mark and earn $750 in residual income. While this may not be $2,500 yet (the monthly income I need to earn in order to accomplish my $30,000 new years resolution), my plan is to slowly and gradually work my way passed $2,500 a month so that the total income for the year meets $30k.

The reason why I’m not aiming for $800 this month is because I have a strong suspicion that my freebie trading income will drop significantly (mainly due to the fact that my trading thread is no longer stickied, slowing down how many referrals I’ll receive – which directly impacts my affiliate income).

Here’s what I plan to do this month to reach the $750 mark.

Write 8 niche site posts (about 2 blog posts a week) for the Niche Site Duel (feel free to follow along)
Edit 10 eHow articles (about 3 articles a week) for the eHow Experiment
Write 4 Demand Studios articles (1 article a week) for the Demand Studios Work Challenge
Write 4 InfoBarrel articles (1 articles a week)
Write 2 Squidoo articles
Write 2 Suite101 articles

At the end of the month, I should have 20 new articles written (excluding Cash Campfire blog posts and newsletter updates) and 10 eHow article edits. However, not all articles will be used for the income alone. Some content sites allow backlinks in the articles you write, so I’ll be taking full advantage and using backlinking strategies to increase search engine rankings for various content when I can. And as many of you know, the higher you rank in search engines, the more potential money you make.

Increase the Number of Cash Campfire RSS Followers by 30

As you know, last month I attempted to increase my blog readership by 100. However, I came a little short. So I figured I’d lower the bar to 30 new RSS subscribers this month instead. As I mentioned in last month’s report, the climb up to 1k subscribers is pretty rough and slow. Though, once you reach that 1k mark (or so I’ve heard), your subscriber count starts to accelerate as more people start sharing your stuff and more of your content gets indexed by Google. With that in mind, I’m just going to go slow right now. While I may not be anywhere near 10k or even the 1k mark, I’m going to keep growing this blog at a steady pace.

This will also allow me to focus more on growing my residual income so that I can later reinvest my income back into my business once it picks up a bit.

Below are this month’s goals that, if completed, will help to increase my readership.

Write 2 guest posts
Increase search engine rankings for primary keyword phrase by backlinking
Create a pillar post
Get caught up on Google Reader

So you’ve heard my goals for the month, but what are yours?

Come on, don’t be shy – fill us in! I look forward to cheering you on in the comment section!

Oh, and on a side note, I’ve decided to take up painting again – so that will occupy me quite a bit during my breaks. I’m pretty excited. I haven’t done anything really artsy since high school, and lately I’ve been getting the strong urge to start back up again (I’ve always had a talent with charcoal, though painting with acrylics is a whole new challenge I can’t wait to start).

It will be a learning process anyway (while I can sketch a whole room and have it come out pretty good, I’m not that experienced with paints). But even if my paintings turn out to be utter crap, putting paint brush on canvas is still incredibly fun – and that’s all that matters. And if I do end up painting something good, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and post them up here for you guys to critique.

Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be more than just a hobby.

Good luck!

Goals and Achievements – January 2011

Christina Crowe — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:02:40 +0000

Well, it has been a month since I started this series. I must admit – I didn’t make as much progress as I planned last month, though I did see some major accomplishments – the new Cash Campfire newsletter and ebook Jump Start Your Freelance Writing Career, just to name a couple.

I believe the main reason why I didn’t make a lot of progress was because I set my goals too high and so became discouraged after looking at the work involved. Then stepped in procrastination, and.. well.. I think we know the rest. I was also having back pain trouble, which prevented me from writing much for a few days. But, really, I only have myself to blame – and I’m ashamed because of it.

Photo by Search Engine People Blog (flickr)

But, this month I’m going to get everything back together, set more obtainable goals, and take action. Whatever happens, I won’t disappoint myself (and you guys!) like I did last month – I did just terrible, and the disappointment really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

This is just a warning that the following results from last month won’t be good, and I promise – with every breath in my lungs – to make it up to you and myself this month by starting over with a clean slate and completing every last one of my goals.

On a side note – since I have a 3 week vacation to California coming up on the 26th, I have to do a lot of planning in advance to reach my goals for this month to free up time during the trip. So I’ll be prescheduling many of my blog posts, and I’m accepting guest posts as well (free traffic for you).

If you want to help me out, feel free to contact me with your topic idea or guest post draft. I have no requirements other than to please not use affiliate links in your article (or I will take them out), focus your article on either freelance writing or entrepreneurship, and try to base your article on your own personal experiences (makes a better read and proves that you know your stuff – even if you’re just writing about how you organize your office desk space).

Now, before I get into how horrible last month was, first let me give you a brief refresher of my long-term goals that all of my efforts will eventually lead toward. Keep in mind that these goals aren’t permanent and may change if I lose interest in them later down the road (though I didn’t change anything about them this month – I’m still eager to see them happen).

Long-Term Goals

The list goes from most important to least important.

Move to California, buy a house, and start a family
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Have a 50 gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs
Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer

December Goals and Accomplishments

And NOW here’s the list you’ve been waiting for, with my earnings breakdown following the achievements and failures of last month.

As hard as it is to admit I failed to accomplish so many of my last month’s goals, I’m listing them anyway because I think it’s important that you also know the mistakes I’ve made to get me where I’m going – and not just my accomplishments.

Well… *gulp* …here they are.

Accomplished

Launch the eBook Jump Start Your Freelance Writing Career – ACHIEVED
Put up a better Twitter theme – ACHIEVED
Increase my Google rank for the keywords “freelance writing” and “entrepreneur” – ACHIEVED | Now I’m ranked at 297 (was 407) for “freelance writing,” and I’m not ranked for “entrepreneur”

Not Accomplished

Rank on at least the 10th page of Google for my primary keywords on all 3 niche sites – Missed
Rank on at least the 30th page for my secondary keywords on all 3 niche sites – Missed
Write at least 10 posts on each niche site (30 total) – Missed
Make at least $20 on each niche site ($60 total) – Missed
Write at least 15 articles for Demand Studios – Fell Short | 3 written
Make at least $20 in residual income on Demand Studios – Fell Short | Made $0.70
Increase my monthly eHow income by $100 – Fell Short | Earned $10.06 more
Edit 15 eHow articles – Fell Short | Edited 4 articles
Rank on the first page of Google with 10 out of 113 eHow articles – Fell Short | Ranked on first page with 3 of the 15 articles I was editing
Write 20 articles for Suite101 – Fell Short | Wrote 1 article
Write 30 articles for InfoBarrel – Fell Short | Wrote 1 article
Increase my residual income by $400 – Fell Short | Increased income by $104.95
Write 20 articles for Squidoo – Fell Short | Wrote 1 article
Write 4 guest posts – Fell Short | Wrote 1 guest post
Improve my Facebook fan page – Missed

My Lesson Learned

Do NOT bite off more than you can chew. I barely completed any of my goals because I set overly high ones to accomplish that only managed to discourage me.

December Earnings Breakdown

Before going any further, I thought this might be a fun image to share – it’s always nice looking at your continuous growth over the months. In this case, these are my earnings on eHow from January of last year up until last month. Click the image for a bigger view.

The point of this income report is not to compare myself with others, but to show you how I earn my online income. Here’s an accurate breakdown (before taxes) of my income to the very last penny. I already deducted any costs associated with the income, so these are purely profits.

Content Site Income

eHow: $273.22
Demand Studios: $0.70
Triond: $0.11
Firehow: $0.24
Constant Content: $6.50

Content Site Income Total: $280.77

Advertising Revenue

Infolinks: $0.86

Advertising Revenue Total: $0.86

Affiliate Sales

Amazon Affiliates: $27.81
Freebie Trading Profit: $24.00

Affiliate Sales Total: $51.81

Product Sales

eBook Sales: $56.67

Product Sales Total: $56.67

Total Residual Income: $390.11

January Goals

Phew, it feels good to get that off of my chest. I think you all deserve an apology (after all, you are the ones supporting me through all this – and I just let you down), so I’m really sorry for the horrible results above. I genuinely mean it, and rest assured that it won’t happen again.

From now on, I’m going to list monthly goals that compliment my new years resolutions. As you most likely know, I’ll be focusing on three primary goals this year – to make $30,000 in residual income, reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire, and create several more ebooks.

Each goal that I set for the next 12 months are going to lead to the three overall aims. To insure that I always stay on track, I’ll be breaking up my goals into those three categories. Some months, I’ll only focus on one of the three main goals and some months I’ll focus on two, but it will be rare that I’ll divide my efforts into all three categories or else I may risk burnout and have last month happen again. *shudder*

With that said, here are this month’s goals. So you can cheer me on, I’ll have my progress posted up on the sidebar (check back regularly).

Earn $500 in Residual Income

In order to reach my overall goal of earning $30,000 for the entire year, I’ll need to make $2,500 monthly. For the first few months of the year, I’m going to slowly work up to that $2,500 a month mark until I’m a bit over (in order to make up for the months when I was short).

So, aiming for $500 this month is a pretty tangible goal, since I’ll only need to make about $110 more this month. Next month, I’ll aim for higher as my monthly residual income increases).

Below are the goals that will help me to achieve this $110 increase.

Write 15 niche site posts (about 4 blog posts a week) for the Niche Site Duel (feel free to follow along)
Edit 11 eHow articles (about 3 articles a week) for the eHow Experiment
Write 4 Demand Studios articles (1 article a week) for the Demand Studios Work Challenge
Write 8 InfoBarrel articles (2 articles a week)
Write 4 HubPages articles (1 article a week)
Write 4 Squidoo articles (1 article a week)
Write 4 Suite101 articles (1 article a week)
Write 4 Triond articles a month (1 article a week)

When all is said and done, I should have a total of 43 articles written (excluding blog posts for this blog) and 11 eHow edits.

But, keep one thing in mind: While I’ll be writing a lot of content, it’s not just for the money I’d be earning. Many of the articles written for content sites will also be used to backlink my eHow articles that aren’t ranking well, this blog, and my niche sites to boost their rankings.

While on-page optimization is just fine and dandy, you can’t depend on that alone – you need off-page optimization as well, namely backlinks pointing to your content to increase its authority and rankings.

The only exceptions are Demand Studios and Suite101, since I either can’t link over to my own work (in the case of Suite101) or my links won’t get dofollowed (in the case of Demand Studios) – which means that I won’t get any link juice or search engine ranking boosts by linking to my content.

Also, I’ll be promoting affiliate products on my niche site and content site articles, so that will help increase my residual income as well.

Increase the Number of Cash Campfire RSS Followers by 100

In the first few months of the year, I’m going to slowly work my way up while building subscribers. From what I hear, until you make it to 1,000 blog subscribers (and nope – I haven’t made it that far yet), the climb is incredibly rough and slow. Once you reach the 1k mark, however, your blog starts accelerating, and building up your blog readership gets easier and easier as time rolls by.

Below are the goals which, if completed, will help me to achieve the above goal.

Write 4 guest posts (about 1 article a week)
Create a complete Facebook fan page
Finish reading ProBlogger (the book) by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett (aff link)
Finish reading Rework (aff link) by Jason Fried & David Hansson

Welp, that’s it! I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this month’s goals and achievements post. I spent several hours putting it together.

What are your goals for the month of January? What did you accomplish last month?

Let us know in the comment section! Whatever your goals are, I wish you the best of luck!

Goals and Achievements – December 2010

Christina Crowe — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:00:36 +0000

Hey everyone! As you know, I’ve been pretty busy for the past few months – mainly working on my eBook and introducing myself to new challenges (the most recent one was the Niche Site Duel).

But, even though my workload may have gotten a bit crazier than usual, I really wouldn’t have the motivation to work as hard as I am if it wasn’t for your growing and continuous support – so thank you!

Because you’ve all been so supportive, I want to give something more back. Namely, I want to share with you my goals and aspirations month after month – then describe my achievements, what areas in my career need work, and where I’ve failed or succeeded along my entrepreneur journey. My hope is that, by following my progress, you can be inspired (and motivated!) to make your own progress as well. Sharing my goals here will also help me commit myself to them and encourage me to push myself to achieve more.

Before moving on though, I just want to say that most of the goals you’ll see will be long-term goals. So I probably won’t see major results until several months down the road. Also, since I tend to easily lose motivation if things get too repetitive or dull, I have a lot of ongoing challenges going on.

To some people, working on so many projects at once is a big mistake and a foolish thing to do. I’ve found that I’m much more likely to stick with something and keep working towards my goals if I’m faced with change however – the reason for the variety of ongoing challenges. If I ever tire from a project, I can just continue working on one of my other projects. Results may come slower, but I’d much rather have slow results than no results at all. Everyone works differently. I’ve found that constant change keeps things exciting for me. This is just the kind of person I am.

Without further ado, I’ll get right to my goals. Once the month is over, I’ll talk about what I’ve achieved for the month of December and then describe my January goals. I hope you enjoy the new Goals and Achievements series!

Long-Term Goals

Since I have so much that I want to accomplish, I’ve decided to just list my top 5 long-term goals, with #1 being the most important to me.

Move to California, buy a house and start a family
Have a 50 gallon aquarium complete with tropical fish, snails, live plants, and aquatic frogs
Make $5,000 a month in passive income
Reach 10,000 RSS subscribers here on Cash Campfire
Have an Alienware laptop or desktop computer

December Goals

Here are my short term December goals that, when completed, will move me closer towards reaching my long-term goals above. This month I’m mainly going to focus on the passive income, since having the money to support myself and ultimately buy a house so that I can finally settle down and start a family are the most important to me right now.

The following is a breakdown of what I hope to accomplish this month.

Niche Site Duel

Many of you know that I recently joined the Niche Site Duel, started by Pat Flynn and Tyrone Shum. Though I’m 2 months late, my main goal is to rank #1 in Google for the keywords I’m optimizing all 3 niche sites for. I hope to accomplish this by my third month since the domain name purchases.

For December, I plan to…

Rank on at least the 10th page of Google for my primary keywords on all 3 niche sites
Rank on at least the 30th page for my secondary keywords on all 3 niche sites
Write at least 10 posts on each niche site (30 total)
Make at least $20 on each niche site ($60 total)

Demand Studios Work Challenge

It’s been a while since I last updated the Demand Studios Work Challenge. Originally I created the challenge to improve my Demand Studios performance so that eventually my article limit (the number of articles I could write at once) would increase and I would be chosen to write higher paying articles.

I’m going to continue with this challenge and pump out more quality articles. However, this time I’m going to focus less on how high my scorecard numbers are and more on the residual income.

For December, I plan to…

Write at least 15 articles
Make at least $20 in residual income

eHow Experiment

The eHow Experiment was something I started in hopes of increasing my monthly income with the eHow articles already written (since writers can no longer write for eHow directly) by editing published articles and making them better with higher quality search engine optimized content.

For December, I plan to…

Increase my monthly income by $100
Edit 15 articles
Rank on the first page of Google with 10 out of 113 articles

Double O Club

I got the Double O Club idea from Felicia Williams of the No Job for Mom blog. The overall challenge is to maintain $100 in earnings a day.

I’m no where close to earning that much right now, but it’s a comforting thought. In addition to Demand Studios, eHow and affiliate income, I plan to earn the money by writing for various content websites.

For December, I plan to…

Write 20 articles for Suite101
Write 30 articles for Info Barrel
Increase my residual income by $400 (includes the other residual income goals)
Write 20 articles for Squidoo

Cash Campfire

I also want to work on this blog a bit and increase its subscriber count as well as the income coming in.

For December, I plan to…

Launch the eBook Jump Start Your Freelance Writing Career
Write 4 guest posts
Put up a better Twitter theme
Improve my Facebook fan page
Increase the Google rankings for my primary keywords (freelance writing and entrepreneur)

I won’t deny that this month is going to be a very busy month for me with all the writing that I plan to do. As my goals are, I plan to write a total of 119 articles (about 4 a day) in the month of December, not including the number of scheduled posts for Cash Campfire, and edit 15 articles for eHow. This might seem a lot, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to do it, especially since I’ll be writing about things that interest me.

It’s kind of funny. After looking over my goals, I noticed that many of them interconnect or compliment one another. For example, my eHow and Demand Studios goals compliment my Double O Club goals, since the income I make from my eHow and Demand Studios articles will contribute to the income I want to earn for the Double O Club membership.

Because most of my goals build upon one another, especially the passive income goals, I’ll be making a huge jump in achieving my long-term goal of earning $5,000 a month in residual income. That fact alone is pretty inspiring.

What are your goals for December? Can’t wait to hear them!