Made $1000 Online for the Third Month

I have been working hard to maintain and increase my blogging income after making $1000 in November and making another $1000 in December. In fact, I entered a challenge to try and make $30,000 online for 2012 which would mean that I have to generate $2500 each month on average in order to make that goal. I knew that wasn't going to happen right away since I had just crossed into 4 digit territory, but I did feel like with a lot of effort and a second blog that I could grow throughout the year and hit monthly targets that would get me to that eventual goal.

While I did make $1000 for the month and published the earnings report on my newest blog, I did miss the overall January target by $95.69. Now it is possible to make that up during the year, but it will require continued growth. So far, however, I am wondering if it will even be possible to hit my target for February.

Online income can be notoriously variable and February has been a little slow out of the gate. Unfortunately, I don't have any real prospects pending at this point so I am thinking that I will just have to spend the month working hard and building up my blogs, letting the chips fall where they may. I am encouraged to know that other bloggers see revenue occur in a roller coaster type fashion so we will just have to see what happens.

The good news for January is that my income from the HubPages Ad Program exceeded my targets by 50%! I have been making a conscious effort to spend more time writing Hubs and interacting on the site which has paid off tremendously. I must have also had one of my articles move in the search engines since my Google traffic to my Hubs has more than doubled. I am sure that the added traffic has played a big role in being able to make more money.

In order to hit my goal of publishing 400 Hubs by the end of 2012, I need to publish about 17 per month for the rest of the year. I would like to get a head start on that total and publish 30 during the month of February. I know the summer will be busy, and I don't want to feel the added pressure of trying to write during the nice part of the year when I would rather be playing golf and softball.

It is also my goal to get the next 100,000 views during this year. It took me 2 years and 7 months to get the first 100,000 so I would like to see if I can get it done in 12. That will also help the overall earnings through HubPages. In order to do this, I will need to average 282 visits per day for the rest of the year. Luckily, there were several days in January where I was able to do this. There are also some that are less. The improved search engine traffic and extra effort during the year should make this fairly easy to achieve.

One of the highlights for the month of January was the results that I saw with AdSense. Having two blogs has definitely been a major factor in making more money with ads. My AdSense revenue from HubPages has fallen off a cliff and there is no longer any at all from sites like Xomba or She Told Me. The majority of my income has been solely from the two personal blogs that I own. The good news is that a solid month of February would mean that I will get another payment since my January income was the best in almost one year (pre-panda days). At this rate, assuming that I can grow traffic to my blogs, I might be able to count on monthly checks from Google. That would be awesome!

Well, I had hoped to get more written this weekend, but it doesn't look like it will happen. Hopefully this week I can get a few more posts written for my blogs and some more Hubs written as well. After all, before I can hit those goals, I have to put in the work.