————————————————————————————————————————
Welcome to My Personal Finance Journey! If you are new here, please read the “About” or “First-Time Visitor” pages to find out more about us. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for visiting! Keep on learning!
————————————————————————————————————————
In January of this year, I wrote a post detailing some of my blogging goals, targets, and dreams for the year of 2011. When I did this, I also added a reminder on my Outlook calendar to track our progress pertaining to these goals each month.
I have been sort of bad in that while I have been tracking these goals offline, I have not published an update on my blog since April (only so many hours in the day, right?!).
My goal for today’s post is to rectify this!
By tracking blogging goals, I am hoping that it provides us with more accountability and visibility to what we are doing and where we want to go with this community/blog.
So, here goes! The blog goals for 2011 are as follows, with progress updates given in bold type, current as of July 2011.
- Obtain Alexa ranking of 200k or less. Dream goal = 100k. Currently, we are at 91,000. We were cruising along pretty steadily at 110,000. However, we have since dropped due to some good visits as a result of our Lost Decade guest post at Yakezie.com as well starting up the Tour de Personal Finance.
- Read and interact with (comment) 5 partner blogs per day. Currently below this average, but hope to improve. However, we have been doing well these past few months at reading through every post submitted to the blog carnivals that we’ve hosted..
- Continue active participation as a proud Yakezie Personal Finance Blog Network member. On track. Have posted a total of 1437 comments on the Yakezie Forums advising, learning, and interacting with others. Also, I have now coordinated ~8 advertising campaigns, bringing in a total of >$5000 revenue (and counting!) to partner blogs and have hosted the 4th Yakezie Blog Swap. I also helped to screen part of the ~1049 essays submitted to the 2nd Yakezie Writing Contest.
- Publish 3-5 blog posts per week. On target for this average currently. I’m very proud that I’ve kept up the consistency! I think I’ve found my “comfort zone” in posting frequency with posting one post per day Mon-Fri (with the exception of holidays). Having a break from posting on the weekends really gives me a chance to sit down with some quiet time and write good content!
- Obtain 200 unique visitors per day average by end of 2011. Currently averaging 203 per day. I was up to 307 average per day back in March before I had to focus more time in to my graduate program’s classes. I’ve heard from some of my blogging friends that traffic levels are very seasonal, with big drops happening in the summer. So, it will be interesting to see if traffic picks up in the fall/winter months when people are more often around their computers!
- Host all personal finance blog carnivals (Festival of Frugality, Best of Money, Tax Carnival, Carnival of Personal Finance, etc). Have hosted all blog carnivals that have allowed me! If any one out there needs a host in the future, just send me an email!
- Grow Carnival of Passive Investing to point where someone would be proud to host it. Have now had 7 editions of the carnival. Three were hosted by me, and the last four were hosted by Canadian Finance Blog, A Rich Life, Free Money Wisdom, and The College Investor. The top articles in the last two editions (May and June) were selected by two passive investing book authors – Larry Swedroe and Rick Ferri. We were very honored to have their help! The July carnival will be hosted by Wealth Informatics. Submit your passive investing posts by clicking here.
- My next moves for the Carnival are to a) continue getting passive investing authors involved and b) start reaching out to financial journalists (maybe from Kiplinger’s or Money Magazine, etc) and/or financial reports on TV. We’ll see how it goes!
- Continue to spread word about benefits of passive investing over active investing. Get involved in BogleHeads forums as well. Need to do this more. I have done a good job organizing the Carnival of Passive Investing, but have neglected visiting the BogleHeads forums. However, I just placed an automatic weekly recurring reminder on my Outlook calendar to try to increase my participation.
- Write and publish 1 guest post for another blog per month. On target with this goal. Have guest posted once this year on Free Money Finance, twice on InvestorJunkie.com (a review of Sharebuilder and a review of Vanguard), once on Yakezie.com, once on Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, and guest posted a total of five times during the 2nd-6th Yakezie Blog Swaps.
- Create an eBook on one of the following topics – a) Ways to be Frugal b) Investing Strategy c) Steps to Buying a Home. Ongoing, but have not yet started.
- Possibly transfer blog to WordPress hosting???? This is still a maybe. I am leaning more towards not going to WordPress. I know that it limits me from doing some things, but with weekly manual backups, I feel safe using Blogger for now.
- Create newsletter – “X Number of Weeks to a Frugal Lifestyle”. Ongoing, but have not yet started.
- Two free giveaways / contests during 2011. Have hosted 4 giveaways so far this year – a $25 Amazon gift card to the best cheapskate story, a $25 Wal-Mart gift card for the best passive investing article from the March 31st Carnival of Passive Investing, an H&R Block At Home giveaway of 5 tax software codes, and 3 sets of 500 free business cards from Allbusinesscards.com.
- Put together material to present to groups and or classes on personal finance. Ongoing, have not done yet.
- Attend blogging, marketing, finance, or real estate classes at local community college or nearby conference locations. Need to search for seminars. Found classes offered at local community college in blogging and marketing. Have not made any progress on this yet.
- (New as of July, 2011) Submit blog posts to 5 blog carnivals each week to expose my blog to new audiences and build links. Have been doing well at this for the past 3 months or so. Hope to continue!
- (New as of July, 2011) Successfully execute Tour de Personal Finance in July this year and each July in the future. For 2012, plan further ahead of time to gather more entries (max = 64) and get some sponsors involved. If get sponsors, donate 50% of the earnings of the event to a charity chosen by the yellow jersey winner of the event. 1st round of Tour de Personal Finance going on right now!
How about you all? What goals did you set for 2011? How are you progressing in achieving them?
Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy of http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2622/4207563765_954cd50863.jpg
