My Online Earnings For 2012 - Total $2,300

Many people say that in order to achieve a goal you need to write it down so that you have it there in front of you and it is something that you can really aim for. It is also said that goals should be SMART - specific, meaningful, attainable, realistic and timely. So the goal I am setting is just that. My goal is to earn $500 a month from my online sources by the end of the year 2012.

I believe this is an attainable and realistic goal as I have already hit the target of earning $200 a month in September 2011 (although subsequent months were a little lower but hopefully moving back in the right direction). What I need to do now is to scale up those earnings with more work. In order to see how I can do that I need to see where the earnings are coming from and how I can increase these, I can't just expect for the earnings to increase without putting the work in.

You can check out my hub about reaching $100 a month here.

So for the later part of 2011, here are my earnings:

June $22
July $52
Aug $73
Sept $112
Oct $205
Nov $160
Dec $182

So my earnings at the beginning of 2011 were pretty much less than $10 a month for the first half of the year and these were mainly from adsense with a few small sales on Amazon. In June 2011 I started to build some of my own websites and developing content for those and I am still doing that now, looking for niches where I know about the subject and there is a good URL available for sale (preferably a .com with a good keyword)

So my earnings are split between HubPages, Adsense, Amazon (UK and US) and a few other affiliate sales.

• Around 80% of my Amazon earnings come through HubPages referrals and the rest through my own websites, twitter and facebook.
• Around 30% of my Adsense earnings come through my HubPages writings.

So in order to do this I will need to more than double my current earnings. This means that I will need to build up the content on my existing websites to get more traffic, write more articles on HubPages (I will aim to write another 100 articles this year, bringing the total at the end of 2012 to approximately 400) and also to build more websites.

My websites are built on Wordpress and the reason that I can build more of them at little cost is that I have an account with Hostgator that gives me unlimited Wordpress sites. So for $9.99 a month I can keep building more sites and all I need to do is to pay for the domain name. Check out my WordPress Hosting Website for more info on how to get unlimited hosting at Hostgator and more info about voucher codes. In particular you can use the code AZURE25OFF at Hostgator to get 25% off your hosting costs :-)

So far I have around 20 other sites plus some blogger blogs that have been going for a while. My sites are related to things I know about like art and golf so it makes it easier to keep adding new content which seems to be what Google wants right now. I try and make sure I add some kind of update to each site at least every couple of weeks, if not more often.

Here I will post details of my earnings month by month so that you can see how I am progressing (or not!) towards my goal of $500 a month.

Jan 2012: $587 - OK so I hit my target this month but it was an unusual month. My Amazon earnings were way down on previous ones. Adsense started slowly but almost caught up by the end of the month. But the big extra was that I sold one of my websites. it was doing quite well and I had quite a few so I decided I would sell one off as I was struggling to keep them all up to date. I will likely keep doing this this year, maybe one every 3 months or so.

Feb 2012: $128 - This month was a difficult one - together with some personal bad news which set me back somewhat I was also away for all but 3 days of the month. I did not do very much work at all on my websites and only created 2 new hubs. I did create a new niche website right at the end of the month so I am hoping that will start earning in the next couple of months. The majority of my earnings was from 2 places - adsense and creating a website on Wordpress for a friend.

Adsense earnings, although slightly down on January were better than expected. I had sold my highest performing niche site in January (although Hubpages is my highest performing individual adsense site) so I expected earnings to drop. They did drop but actual clicks were higher so I am hopeful that once budgets go up then I will get higher earnings on adsense again.

Mar 2012: $91 March was another slow month on the earnings front in terms of total earnings which were lower again. However, there were some positives in that my 2nd Hubpages account started to get much higher traffic and so my HubPages Ad income increased. Earnings on adsense for this HubPages account were low really so i have turned HP Ads back on for this account, however, I may now concentrate more on the other account as in the last 24 hours the two accounts have had pretty much the same views with this one having 10 times the number of hubs! Amazon earnings were again low, which is really what is letting me down right now, and the new websites have not yet kicked in with good traffic although one has some organic Google traffic already.

Apr 2012: $133 At the beginning of April I switched over to the HP Ad Program from Adsense and this proved to be a good move as my HP Ad earnings were definitely higher. Added to that my other profile in Hubpages continued to do really well, exceeding the earnings on this profile, with only 10% of the hubs. On the possible downside I believe some of my niche websites have been hit by the Penguin update and so earnings may slow down again next month. All in all I think that if I am to make $500 a month I will need to sell a website to do that so that may be on the cards for May or June. I set up one more niche website so hope that will start growing in the next few months. One that I set up in March is now getting organic Google search traffic.

May 2012: $147 A slight increase in earnings was due mostly to the success of my other Hubpages profile - in fact I made payout on that profile this month on its own (just!). Views are increasing still on that profile and I hope that to show further increases in June. There were no extra earnings this month on top of Adsense, Hubpages and Amazon so these were up by a significant amount. Still no site quite ripe enough for selling yet!

Jun 2012 - $185: So June started off really well on my other HubPages account with earnings reaching a pinnacle of $5 on one day. However, just after this I found out that my best hub had been copied and my views dropped like a rock to almost nothing in the space of a few days. However, I had accumulated a good amount of earnings before this which boosted this month to a higher level than last. Adsense from my websites was reasonably static but I also got good Amazon sales from the other Hub account which helped.

Jul 2012 - $185: So after taking down the copy of my hub, all of a sudden my other account went back up to the high levels it had been at before, about a third of the way into the month. That account was averaging $2-3 a day so kept the monthly earnings reasonable. Added to this a good number of small sales on Amazon gave me around $25 although adsense earnings were a bit down from the month before. With $27 from Clickbank I almost exactly equaled last month's earnings!

Aug 2012 - $237: Another increase in earnings this month particularly on my other HubPages account which topped $100 for the month for the first time. Also some good Amazon earnings, mostly from that account, and a few extras from ClickBank. I didn't really do anything extra this month - I created a few new hubs and have started updating the ones in this account that have Zzz's next to them that I think are worth keeping. Still need to come up with a new website but have been busy working on my house renovation so really haven't spent much time on websites this month.

Sep 2012 - $231: I was lucky this month to go above $200 as it was looking like the month was going to be down by at least 20% from last month, if not more. My other account died for a week, came back at full force and then was killed again by the HubPages Outage last Friday morning. However, this account had a great month as I had a hub the had massive hits for 3 days, earning nearly $30 in just one day on this account. So I need to figure how I can do that again! No ClickBank earnings this month and about 20 of the 34 or so Amazon orders were shipped so that will give me a headstart on Amazon next month hopefully. I started updating my snoozing hubs but that chance didn't seem to make much difference. I need to write more hubs for sure but I am lacking in ideas right now so that is a struggle! In addition to that if outages like Friday happen again then I am looking at maybe moving to Wizzley and doing some articles there so that I do not have all my eggs in one basket.

Oct 2012: $102: So, at this point I am considering giving up on Hubpages and maybe all of my online activities. When the Hubpages servers went down for 4 hours a few weeks ago and nobody really seemed to give a damn about the impact of it, it hit my accounts hard. From that point on, my high earning account dropped like a stone to the point where yesterday I got just 11 views in one day. Before the outage I was close to 2000. This also impacted my Amazon sales and hence the very low figure for October. Whether or not I continue with Hubpages, I will decide in the next few weeks.

Nov 2012: $118: November was a continuing month of disillusionment in online earnings! I left everything alone and pretty much did not do anything to my websites or Hubpages accounts. The other account continues to have low views (although slightly increased recently to over 100 a day) so I have switched that one to adsense only as it was only earning minor cents on the HP Ad program. One bit of good news is that I got invited to the YouTube partner program and I will be writing a hub about that shortly.Earnings were slightly up this month due to a couple of ClickBank sales.

Dec 2012: $166: Back to an increase in earnings again, mostly I think due to additional earnings from being a YouTube Partner. Am still not totally happy about the way things are going with HubPages but have again not put much work in this month as I have had other work to do in real life! At least I am getting extra money regularly so will keep hanging in there!

Total Earnings for 2012 - $2,302
Costs - $359
Net Profit - $1,943