My New Years Resolutions

Happy New Year everybody! I think 2008 was a horrible year for many people and I must admit, I’ve had better. In 2008 I was laid off, suffered large losses in my portfolio (but then, who didn’t?) and to cap it off, my beloved Yellow Jackets were slaughtered last night in the Chick-fil-a Bowl. Here’s hoping 2009 is a bit better. Many of my goals are ambitious to say the least, but I figure you might as well aim high. At the end of the year, I’ll review my goals to see how well I did.

Personal Finance Goals

I’m not one of those bloggers who reveals intimate details of their finances online, so the following goals will be expressed as percentages and not absolute numbers.

• Increase my net worth by 50% – This is actually a bit less ambitious than it sounds for a number of reasons. One, my portfolio is currently in an extremely depressed state. A modest market rebound combined with continued savings should get me close to this goal without any personal finance heroics. Still, meeting this goal will require me to watch my spending, get a new job within the next month, and increase my blogging income significantly over the next year.
• Save 30% of my gross income – This is difficult when you’re unemployed, but hopefully that will be rectified soon. At my last job, I was able to save a little in excess of 30% per month. Fortunately, most of my current prospects pay more than I was making before, so I should be able to meet or beat this savings goal. Of this savings, half will go towards retirement and half towards taxable investment endeavors.
• Buy a rental property by the end of the year – More likely to happen is me buying a new personal residence and turning my current condo into a rental. This also depends on finding a job relatively soon and generating enough monthly cash-flow from alternative sources (blogging, etc) to give myself a sufficient financial cushion.

Career

• Get A New Job – Preferably one that pays more than the last. Pretty much all my other goals this year depend on it.

Blogging

I now run two blogs, this one and Learn Spanish On Your Own. I’ll break down my goals for each of them separately.

Amateur Asset Allocator

• Increase blog traffic by 20% per month – Of late, I’ve been clocking in at near 30% per month. I expect this pace to be fairly easy to keep up for the next 5 or 6 months but after that, it will be a challenge to keep the growth rate up as I near this blog’s saturation point (best estimate is about 60,000 uniques per month). This is an ambitious goal.
• Bring search traffic down to 50% of overall traffic – At the moment, search traffic constitutes about 70% of this blog’s traffic with Google accounting for the great majority of that. I don’t like being so dependent on Google, so I plan to do something about it.
• Average 30 posts per month - This will require some weekend posting, which is fine.
• Write at least one article per week for article marketing - I’ve had a decent amount of success ranking for certain high-traffic keywords with article marketing in the past and plan to continue doing it. One quality article per week should be enough to get me 20-30 extra direct visitors and between 5-10 high-quality back links and perhaps dozens more low-quality back links. Over time, this will have a significant positive effect on my blog’s ability to attract search traffic.
• Generate $2000 per month by year end – This goal should be easily obtainable if I manage to meet my traffic goals.

Learn Spanish On Your Own

• Increase blog traffic by 20% per month – Like above, this should be easy to maintain over the next 6 months or so but will become increasingly difficult in the second half of the year. The overall market for Spanish learning blogs is much, much smaller than that for finance. That said, there is far less competition in this niche. In fact, I’ve yet to find a single major competitor. There are a few smaller blogs, but no 800 lbs gorilla. I plan on becoming that 800 lbs gorilla.
• Average 20 posts per month – I plan on posting slightly less for the Spanish blog than this one, mostly because there are fewer readers overall and fewer opportunities for “link love”-type posts. However, 5 days per week is still a fairly significant posting volume on top of what I’ll be doing for this blog. It will be a busy year.
• Write at least 2 articles per week for article marketing – Link-building is a bit more difficult in the Spanish niche since there just aren’t as many other blogs to link to you. For now, article marketing is my primary link-building strategy. Two articles per week should net me 10-20 high-quality back links, which I think is a good weekly clip.
• Generate $1500 per month – While the traffic potential for the Spanish blog is much lower than for this one, I believe the profit potential per 1000 visitors (eCPM) is actually significantly higher. I’ve already had great luck selling certain learning programs (such as Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur) that cost several hundred dollars each through Amazon (which translates into a high per-unit commission). My conversion rates are quite good, I’m just not driving enough traffic to those particular pages. This is my top monetization strategy for that blog.