If I were into traditional New Years resolutions than I would have had my goals for 2009 posted Jan 1st and a wrap up on 2008 posted before that; however, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out where I can realistically be at the end of 2009 which I’ll discuss in my next post. First I want to cover how 2008 went and in my next post I’ll cover my goals for 2009 and beyond.

You can read my full 2008 goals post here, but I’m going to evaluate them all below:

Blog Specific Goals:

a. Get the custom blog design paid for and implemented Achieved March 18th

I did this early on as I knew that if I would eventually pay for a custom theme I may as well buy it ASAP and so I did.

b. Make $1000 a month from my blog (All income from my blog will be disclosed)

I only reached 25% of this target in my best month and although I didn’t offer advertising on my blog for the entire year I still didn’t come very close to this goal. After my case study on how much RSS subscribers are worth, I believe that in order to hit my $1,000 a month goal I’ll need at least around 1,000 RSS subscribers. (I’ll go into more depth about how I plan to hit my income goal in my 2009 goals posts).

c. Break the four digit RSS mark by getting to 1,000+ RSS subscribers

I only reached 20% of this goal and to be honest this proved much more difficult than I had previously imagined. I believe that through 2008 I wrote a lot of great posts, but I know that I didn’t spend enough time on promoting my blog, guest posting, etc. etc. (Again, I’ll go into more depth on my RSS subscriber goal in my 2009 goals post as well)

d. Hit the front page of Digg at least once

I made an attempt at this goal with my World’s Largest Digg button post, but in the end I just don’t have enough traffic and subsequently enough votes to get a significant run at making it on the front page.

e Break the top 10,000 Technorati mark

As of today I sit at 116,871 a far cry shy of 10,000 but I did start the year around 1,000,000 so I did still make a lot of improvements.

f. Improve and maintain my posting frequency and by the last quarter of 2008 I want to look back at Q4 and see at least 92 posts.

Well you all know how that worked out in December and I wasn’t posting daily on the other days of the month. So I fell short of this goal, but looking back I don’t think this was that big of a deal. Realistically, I don’t plan to ever post on a daily basis until I’ve quit my day job to focus on my websites full time.

g. Do a quick blogging tip every Sunday for the entire year of 2008.

I stopped doing these because although I believe they were pretty good, I think there are so many other resources to turn to for ideas on how to improve your blogging. Instead I want my blog to document my process towards self employment (again this will be discussed in my next post on 2009 goals).

For the other websites and forums I run:

a. Increase my online income to $2,000 a month (Blogging goal not included.)

Unfortunately, this one I did not hit. Although I was close on occasion my earnings have actually been affected by the economy a lot. I had a company that was paying me $250 a month just for text links in the footer on a few of my forums and other websites but they emailed me the other day to say they don’t have as many clients and as a result can’t pay me anymore.

b. Have at least one forum hit the 1,000,000+ page views a month mark

I didn’t hit this goal, although I did manage to close a deal to migrate one of my communities onto another companies platform which will improve my earnings drastically as well as the traffic too. (I will discuss this in a later post once the forum has been completely migrated).

c. Be mentioned on a major video game related website (i.e. GameSpot.com)

Not sure what I was thinking with this one lol. Perhaps my reasoning was that if I made it onto a major video game website it’d show my website’s success; however, how many top tier video game forums are ever even mentioned on a website like GameSpot? Very few. The only time I’ve found forums are mentioned on these sites is if they break a possible big video game rumor – which my forums aren’t focused on.

d. Only launch two more forums (So that I will focus my time on growing the sites I have)

I remember this goal was set up to be a limiter. I have a tendency to get excited about a new project, launch it and fail to follow up on making it a big success. I believe it’s part of my personality, but I have to focus hard on sticking with my ideas long enough to make them successful as opposed to quickly moving onto something else.

Conclusion:

So as I look back on 2008 I realized that I was incredibly ambitious and set a few goals a little too far out of my reach. I’ve already decided on what I need to do in 2009 to view the year as a success though, which I’ll discuss in my next post on 2009 goals. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed as I plan to layout something much more than just a simple new years resolution style goal post.