My Online Earnings Target For 2012 - $500 A Month

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:
Jun 2012:
Jul 2012:
Aug 2012:
Sep 2012:
Oct 2012:
Nov 2012:
Dec 2012: