The very first post I wrote covering goals was over a year ago on my goals for 2008. For the most part I was unsuccessful on almost every goal. But should I count 2008 as a complete disaster? Of course not. I learned an incredible amount about blogging, internet marketing, and partnerships with large companies (more on that in a later post). But in 2009 I have something to work towards:

April 2011 I will be self-employed

Let me explain. Currently I am the only one working and in a full time sales role while my wife is back in school getting her masters degree in occupation therapy. After she graduates she has 9 months of on the job training before she can get a job in the OT field which will be in April 2011.

So my goal is to be averaging $32,000 a year from running my websites by the time April 2011 rolls around. Where did I come up with $32,000? Well, this is currently my base salary at my job. I get commission on top of my base salary along with some other money from time to time; however, $32,000 was all I was earning when I first got the job and along with my wife’s income from a lower paying job we were able to live off of that just fine. If I can reach an average annual income of $32,000 a year by working part time on websites than think of how much more I can make when I quit my job to focus on it full time!

This is a very ambitious goal for me because while I’ve learned a lot about earning money off of websites, blogging, affiliate marketing, etc. the next two years is the time I need to seriously apply it. That’s not to say I haven’t been using a lot of what I’ve learned before in what I do now but I absolutely need to hit this goal. It’s been something I’ve thought about ever since I got my first Adsense check 3 years ago.

I will not quit my job if I hit my earnings goal before April 2011 because part of the reason why I chose that date is because of the fact that I want to make sure my wife and I have health benefits at all times so anything above and beyond that goal will be gravy. I will not provide monthly updates on my income as a whole; however, I will continue to post earnings updates from my blog.

The first step in 2009:

My earnings goal by the end of 2009 is an average monthly profit of $1350 (which comes out to just over $16k a year). If I can hit this target by the end of 2009 than I’ll be half way to my goal, but technically because with the internet it’s often very easy to scale your earnings (i.e. make even more money off of the same website with nearly the same amount of work) I’ll be in an even better position to hit my goal. Keep in mind the April 2011 $32k average annual earnings is just my minimum goal and I believe I can do better than this.

I will document my journey through this blog and focus on providing more practical examples of how I’m making money and what’s working best. If you think this sounds like a good goal and want to follow along as I work towards achieving it please subscribe to my blog.

What do you think of my plan?

Sept 9th 2009 Update: As you can tell by some of my recent blog earnings posts I am well on my way to surpassing my goal. In fact, I am looking at potentially quitting my job before my April 2011 timeline! (Especially since I’m on track to do over $32k in 2009 anyway!)