My Goal

Back on August 9th, I wrote that my goal was to make $300,000 by December 31, 2007.

With 3 days to go, I am $299,994.75 short of that goal. So, unless I manage to earn about $100,000 per day for the rest of the year, I am not going to make that goal.

Back then, I had figured that I would have my eCommerce site completed by the end of September. That would have given me three full months (October, November and December) to earn the $300,000 both with my eCommerce site and also with other ventures I would begin to work on.

The eCommerce site remains under development. I admit that I have not worked on it at all, aside from some mental ponderings, in these past couple “holiday” weeks. I hit another minor stumbling block, and I just haven’t spent a lot of time working it out.

I haven’t been too worried about it either. I have work to complete for a client by year’s end, so I need to work on that more so than the eCommerce site. I am, of course, anxious to complete the site, but it is also a welcome break to not dream in code for a while.

This weekend, I’ll be working on the aforementioned client’s job, as well as putting away the Christmas decorations, so I probably won’t get back to work on my eCommerce site until next weekend, the first weekend of 2008.

So, I will revise My Goal’s deadline once I complete my eCommerce site. What I’ll probably do is figure on about three months past the completion date.

New Blog

Earlier this month, I announced that I would be starting a new blog. I registered Sciphon.com, which I thought was a cool name. The topic of the blog would be Science Fiction, and I pictured a siphon that would siphon up science fiction news and stories. So, it was “sci” instead of “si” in siphon.

Mind you, this was not going to be a “scraper” site. After proofreading the previous paragraph, I just realized that the siphon description might give the wrong impression. It would not be running on some bot-script or anything. It would the same as this blog here, except I would have been writing about or linking to science fiction related news and stories.

I’ve decided, at least for the time being, not to start this new blog. I already have a science fiction site, and I think it’s probably best just to revamp that in some way rather than to start up yet another blog. Another option was to just have a “blog within a blog” on this blog, where I would post all the science fiction topics. Instead, I’ll just work on the current site.

My Flagship Website

Also, after completing my eCommerce site, I want to overhaul my flagship site, which currently earns some pocket change with Google AdSense. When I was updating it regularly, I had some decent traffic and positions in the search engines. But, I haven’t updated it in two years.

The problem is that I had painted myself into a corner. I had decided to go bilingual with the site: English and Spanish. I also had a goal of releasing new content simultaneously in English and Spanish, so that you could seamlessly switch between the two and so that both language readers would see the same content.

In the coding of the site, I had designed it to handle multiple languages, and had even gone ahead and had one story translated into French. I was definitely optimistic!

Then, I lost my Spanish translator. He just dropped off the face of the Earth, apparently. Shortly thereafter, I found a new Spanish translator. After a while, she got busy with other things and put her translation services on hold, and apparently never got back into it again. The second translator was more expensive than the first translator and subsequent translators that I have found are significantly more expensive than the second translator.

Thus, I have not had anything translated since the loss of the second translator, which has meant the site has sat idle. My hope was that, as I built traffic, I would earn enough from the Spanish side of the site to at least cover the translation services. At the first and even the second translator’s rates, I could afford to continue to invest in the translation services in the hopes of generating a greater income once the site began to take off. But, that’s not too feasible at the current translation rates that I have found.

I see now that there really isn’t much of an option but to set aside my goal of simultaneous language releases, and just publish new content in English only until I can earn enough from the site to pay for the Spanish translations too and start building up content on the Spanish side. English-only is certainly a better option than no updates whatsoever. I have a better chance of earning money with new content than with a site that doesn’t get updated.

My Secret Project

I previously mentioned my secret project here and here. Thankfully, Mike Aragona appears to be still on board.

I would like to go with Option C (as mentioned in this post). To do that, I estimate I would need to have a minimum of $20,000-$25,000. A far cry from $300,000, so it should be easy, right? Ha! If I want to bump it up to Option D, which was not mentioned, but would be like Option C on steroids, it could easily be a minimum of $100,000 or more. Heck, I could run it up into the millions…

Yeah, I have big dreams.

Hopefully, 2008 will be the year I start making some of them happen.

What Will 10,000 Bloggers Do?

I briefly hinted at this one in this post. I have the post written. I just need to change the dates and set up a special website. I am eager to give this one a go, but I have had it on the backburner behind the eCommerce site. It’s simmering, but I have to finish my eCommerce site!

Insert Closing Header Here

Yeah, that was intentional. “Conclusion” sounded lame. Anyway, that’s my brief little update. I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, and I don’t necessarily set my goals in a neat little 12-month calendar either. But, it’s as good a time as any to update my goals, especially since the end of the year is drawing to a close and people are no doubt wondering if I’ve forgotten to update my “Goal” section in the sidebar. (I haven’t forgotten, sadly.)

Anyway…

Believe. Act. Achieve! And Be Ubiquitous too. And try to get some sleep.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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