With 2011 now a distant memory, it’s time to go back and look at my goals for 2011. That’s one major benefit of blogging, there’s accountability baked into everything I do. In 2011, I had set 5 goals, most of them business-related.
- Traffic to my Websites – Goal: Increase by 100%. Actual result: Increase by 21% – That’s a colossal failure, right? It could have been much worse. Google Panda hit many of my blogging colleagues and they lost traffic. I didn’t get the website I was hoping to off the ground, which was a direct consequence of #3 below.
- Revenue from my Websites – Goal: Increase by 50%. Actual result: Increase by 92% – It’s amazing what the right kind of advertising deal can do. By the end of the year, I was making in a month what I made when I was an underpaid software engineer that lead to the creation of this website five years ago.
- Continue to Fight Against MonaVie and other MLM Scams – This is a pretty big win.
In my goals, I also mentioned iJango, which was pretty much a straight-forward pyramid scheme. It’s no longer in business. Consumers who paid a one-time fee $150, plus $20 a month to have their own web store were left holding the bag.
I wrote about a new MLM, One24, which appears to be a straight-forward pyramid scheme. They threatened to sue me for defamation, but found that they had no grounds. So instead they had to create a podcast addressing my post, where they missed all the major points, especially the most important one of them hitting the FTCs guidelines of being a pyramid scheme. In fact, they tacitly confirmed it in the podcast.
It was a good year in busting MLM punks. However, they are like the Hydra, and they keep coming back. Scamming people out of their money is too profitable I guess. As my friend Vogel says, “we’ll just keep chopping off heads.”
- Write an eBook – It didn’t happen. I had put some significant effort into it, but when I tried to outsource a couple of items (formatting and such) it didn’t work out. It would have cost me a good amount of money and if I wanted to update it, it seems like I’d have to pay the formatting costs all over again. I either picked the wrong person to outsource it too, or need to do it myself.
- Get Healthy – Goal: Lose 15 pounds and weigh 165 pounds. Actual result: Lost 5 pounds and weigh 175 – I had gotten below the 170, but the holidays and playoff football games has put a few more back. I’m still pretty happy with the result.
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the year’s results. Like everything there were some ups and some downs. I would like to have hit more traffic and made that eBook, but those are overshadowed by the larger goals of surpassing my revenue goals and helping consumers steer clear of MLM scams. If I were to do the same in 2012, you’d see a very, very happy Lazy Man.
LM,
It is amazing that your traffic only grew by 21% but revenue jumped up 92%! What were some of your tasks to try and get you to 100%? did you have any?
I’d like to say it was from the sweat of a lot hard work or smart planning. Instead, I got pretty good advertising deal.
However, probably an hour after I wrote the article, I noticed my traffic start to dip significantly. I decided to look to see if there was another Google Panda update release, one that hit me this time. There wasn’t, but there was something new, Google’s Page Layout Algorithm.
Google says that users don’t like a lot of above the fold ads. I’ve had two in-person meetings with their AdSense team and they personally told me to put the ads there. I can’t keep both parts of Google’s internal teams happy since they are diametrically opposed.
It looks like I’m going to take a big short-term revenue hit since I’m likely to be losing traffic and have to remove ads. The ironic part is that Google wants people to do what’s best for users, but I think I’m going to have to make things worse in some ways because of this. Before people could read an article from beginning to end without ads. I consider that a good experience for the user. Now I’m going to have to look into injecting ads into the content further down the article to make up for some of the lost revenue. Additionally, I’d remove advertising for many of my loyal readers (people who come to the site just a couple of times a month) to give them a better experience. I’ll still try to keep that practice, but I have to rethink a number of things now.
Not to get all geeky but why not a plugin/code interjecting above the fold ads on just the search engine visitors since those are the guys who go for those types of ads anyway.
That’s pretty close to what I have now. However, since Google is viewing it from the user experience of someone coming from a search engine, that’s precisely the thing they want to prevent.