In January last year I decided to set goals for this blog instead of resolutions about myself, I did this because I’ve always seen resolutions as promises to yourself that are only weak promises that can be broken easily, plus I thought it would be a different.

Today I’m going to revisit these goals and see how many of them (if any) I achieved.

GOAL 1: Make More Money Than I Did In 2010

In 2010 I made $1423.93 and I did this without putting in as much effort as I’m capable of so I was very confident that I could easily make more money during 2011. The truth is I passed the 2010 sum within the first three months. I finished 2011 by earning a grand total of $6547.74.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Absolutely!

GOAL 2: Write More Content For This Blog

In 2010 I published 107 posts which I didn’t think was good enough so I wanted to publish a lot more in 2011. My aim was one article a day but I didn’t really believe deep down that I would stick to that so I unofficially changed it from “post once a day” to “post more than you did in 2010”.

In 2011 I published 153 posts, that means I posted an average of 12.75 articles per month. It’s an improvement but I’m hoping to be able to say that I’ve doubled that next year.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes, although it is still not good enough in my opinion.

GOAL 3: Give This Blog A Redesign

The best thing I did during 2011 was give this blog a redesign. I was apprehensive about it at first because Thesis costs money but I managed to persuade a friend to buy it for my birthday. There is a message there, when people ask you what you want for Birthday/Christmas, point them in the direction of a theme or plugin.

I am so pleased with how the blog looks now, I’m still tinkering but I think it is just about right as it is.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes and I did it for free thanks to a friend’s generosity.

GOAL 4: Step Up My Bid To Get More Guest Posts

Not only did I manage to publish more guest posts in 2011 but I think I went a bit nuts and posted too many, to the point where I was having to ask guest bloggers if I could hold onto their articles for weeks before publishing them.

I must think of a reasonable amount to publish so I don’t run into this problem again.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes I did but I got swamped in the amount of posts that were too good to turn down.

GOAL 5: Start Up More Blogs

During 2011 I started up five new blogs, hopefully by the beginning of February I’ll be able to start submitting them to sponsored post networks to make more money . I have even more domains waiting to be used.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes.

GOAL 6: Double My RSS Subscriber Count

I wanted to go to town on my RSS count during 2011 but I haven’t even made a dent in it. In my defence I have not tried to increase it, I’ve been spending the time on other areas of social media like twitter & Facebook.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: No, I think I’ve actually lost subscribers.

GOAL 7: Start My Mailing List

This was something that I kind of half succeeded at. I managed to start my mailing list in the sense that I’ve set it up and turned it on but that is as far as I have got. I haven’t sent anything out and I haven’t done anything to entice people to subscribe. I still managed to gain 35 subscribers though.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes & No.

GOAL 8: Double The Traffic

My goal was to get 2,000 unique visitors and 4,000 page impressions a month, In my last blog income report I hit 3,516 unique hits and 6,516 page impressions. And the stats seem to be more or less increasing every month.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Yes, with gusto!

GOAL 9: Submit More Of My Old Articles To Article Directory Sites

This was something I failed to do, actually I didn’t submit ANY articles to article directory sites in 2011. It is definitely something that will be on my list for 2012 because I aim to submit some to sites like InfoBarrel and earn more passive income.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: No, I failed miserably.

GOAL 10: Write More Content For Passive Income Directories

Again I failed at this as I did not submit ANY articles to any directories. I’m looking to increase my passive income during 2012 so posting to sites like InfoBarrel and Hubpages is definitely at the top of my list of goals for 2012.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: Again that would be no.

GOAL 11: Write At Least One Ebook

This was one goal that I didn’t even think about, which is surprising because I’ve been wanting to publish a book of some kind since I was 8 years of age. I think it is something I have to do if I want to entice people to subscribe to my mailing list.

Did I Achieve My Goal?: No.

So out of the eleven goals that I set myself for 2011 I managed to achieve six of them, failed four of them and one of them (Goal 7) was a stalemate. How did you do with your 2011 goals? Did you achieve more of them than I did?

I don’t like it when companies kick their customers and clients to the kerb without any sort of warning. I dislike them even more if it is a company that I have been with for a number of years and who I have actually made money for.

I have been doing business with Sponsored Reviews since November 2007, in that time I have earnt myself a grand total of $1005.55 ($20.00 of that was from bringing in referrals), when you take into consideration that they increased their share percentage to 50% well over two years ago that means they have earnt over $1000 from me as well.

I did not complain when they silently increased their share of the money bloggers earn from 35% to 50%, I actually thought it was a good idea for two reasons:

1. It would force the crappy bloggers to leave Sponsored Reviews, this meant no more having to compete with spammy blogs who scare away the decent advertisers.

2. It gave me the encouragement I was lacking to increase my prices for this blog. For a few years I was only charging $5 a sponsored post, with the 50% share put in place I was forced to take the plunge a lot sooner.

This morning I was looking through the current sponsored post offerings and I noticed that none of them were available for this blog, when I checked my list of blogs that I applied to Sponsored Reviews with I noticed this blog was missing. I checked the “rejected blogs” list there she was all on her own feeling cold, miserable and lonely.

I fired off a quick email to their support service (I use that term in the loosest possible way):

Hello.

My PR5 blog has suddenly been taken off my blog list and placed in the rejected blog list. I received no warning and reason about this.

Can you please explain to me why ineeddiscipline.com was moved to the rejected blog list?

Thank you.

To their credit they replied within several hours with the following information:

Hello

The template of your site doesn’t meet our requirements. It doesn’t have a blog archive section, also all blog posts must be located on the homepage with links going to the advertisers site.

Regards,

Judy

I was slightly confused because if you check my navigation menu you will see I have an entire page for my archives, and it has been there since 2007. I was also confused as to why they would now insist on me displaying ALL my posts on the homepage.

Hello,

Thank you for your speedy reply. I have listed the reasons ‘Judy’ gave and I have given my answer after them.

“It doesn’t have a blog archive section.”

My blog DOES have an archive section, in fact it has an entire page just for the archive section – http://ineeddiscipline.com/archives/ – it has been like that since 2007 and has NEVER been removed so I don’t know why you would claim I don’t have one.

“All blog posts must be located on the homepage with links going to the advertisers site.”

2. Are you insane? You expect me to show 447 (at the time of writing) posts on my blog home page? Do you have any idea how horrible that would make the blog look and how slow that would make the blog load?

I have been a member of your network since 2007 and I am deeply disappointed that I was not even given a warning that my blog would be taken down, let alone for VERY shaky reasons.

Please explain this because I don’t understand how you have come to the two explanations in your email.

Thank you,

A couple of hours later I received this reply:

Hi Laurence, (DON’T CALL ME LAURENCE! – Dean)

I apologize for not contacting you. I do see the archive section. We definitely do not require all posts to be on the homepage at the same time. We do require the post to be placed on the homepage for a minimum of 24 hours with at least one link to the advertisers site. Then it must be archived.

I have re- approved your site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thank you,

Judy

So I am going to ascertain by that reply that whoever rejected my blog did not look at my blog before rejecting this blog. I’m not sure why I was lectured either as I haven’t written a sponsored post on this blog since November 23rd.

Hi Judy,

Thank you for re-approving my blog.

I would like to know who rejected my blog because whoever it was is definitely not doing their job properly as it is painfully obvious they did not even scan my blog let alone look at it for any length of time.

I’m also not sure why you would feel the need to lecture me on the practice of leaving your sponsored posts on the homepage for 24 hour. I’m well aware of this and have always stuck with this ruling.

If this is the real reason why the blog was rejected then I would like to point out that I have not written a sponsored post for you with this blog since November 23rd 2011.

I thank you for putting my blog back and sorting the error out quickly.

Dean Saliba

I had obviously annoyed her because she replied within 30 minutes with this beauty of a reply:

Hi Dean

There is a QA process for all blog sites, they are continually monitored. There is a negative rating by an advertiser that stated links were not posted on the homepage, that is why the site was disapproved.

Once again I apologize and your site is currently available.

Thank you,

Judy

I had a quick check and found the rating she was talking about:

Hi Judy,

That negative rating was left in July 2008! I think your “QA process” needs updating or replacing.

Thank you,

Dean Saliba

My support ticket was promptly closed.

I like to believe that I’m slightly different from the other entrepreneurs who are trying to make an income on the internet (I don’t know why I keep saying ‘trying’, I’ve actually been doing it since 2007!) and one thing that I have noticed was that they only seem to list their successes.

Although they would like you to believe they have all been successful first time with their ventures, a lot of them have had some massive, and at times quite epic, failures to get to where they are.

As I said earlier I like to think I am different so I have decided to list some of my past failures. Some of them are very embarrassing and I have a feeling that I might wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night regretting this for many years to come.

1. Sweet Shop In My Bedroom

This was the first thing I ever tried to do to make money. I was 10. Sadly it wasn’t anything as elaborate as people who set up online sweat web sites. Basically I went to a shop and brought a load of sweats, crisps and soft drinks and sold them to my friends and siblings from my bedroom who were too lazy to walk to the shops in town.

As I was young I naturally ended up eating most of them myself.

2. Stationary Company

When I was 13 I decided to start a stationary business. I had unlimited access to free stationary (pens, pencils, papers, rulers, staplers, etc) so I really thought I was onto a winner.

I advertised by printing up flyers and popping them through the letterboxes of businesses in my local area. One of them got to the housing association, who my father rented our apartment from, and they threatened legal action as it was illegal to run a business from their apartments. Oops!

3. Online Music Club

Here in the United Kingdom we used to have a music club called Britannia Music Club. They would send you a booklet every month with the latest albums and you could buy them through the post from the comfort of your own home. If you brought enough at the full price they would let you buy some at really cheap prices once or twice a yeah.

My idea was along the same lines but online. I was new to the internet and didn’t know a thing about promoting, I simply set up a free webhost account with Geocities and got a free CJB.net domain name. Surprise surprise no takers.

4. Dating Site

I noticed that people were making a lot of money with dating web sites and I wanted a piece of the action. I had just read about how Markus Frind had created Plenty of Fish for nothing so I thought I could do it as well.

I knew a bit more about promoting by this stage, and I found a free script to run it with, but sadly I only attracted men from India and nobody paid for a premium membership account.

5. Football (soocer) Message Board

My brother started a football message board and asked me to take it over because he did not have the time. We already had a domain and the forum script in place so I promoted the forums wherever I could and as often as I could. I even paid a couple of ad networks to run advertising campaigns.

The revenue we were generating was not great but the membership was growing nicely, at a point we had over 3000 members who had generated around 500,000 posts. The only problem was the members were never satisfied and were always complaining.

They didn’t want ads, they wanted prizes for posting, they wanted more expensive skins to choose from, the moderators wanted to be paid, etc. It got to the point where I was spending pretty much every hour of the day working on the forum. In the end we were hacked so badly that it cost us a lot of money to repair and the members were long gone.

6. Tapp Out Radio

Ah Tapp Out Radio, my unloved baby. I wanted to try my hand at running an internet radio station but I didn’t want to have to pay those extortionate fees radio stations are forced to pay to promote music. So I played unsigned music and talk shows.

I spent a lot of money creating the website, purchasing broadcasting servers, broadcasting equipment and I paid voice artists to create stings and promos for the station. The problem was that not many advertisers were willing to do business with a station that aired music nobody had heard of.

The servers were hacked badly and I decided to cut my losses.

Now I’ve admitted my mistakes, how about you admit yours?

This morning I received a nice surprise as I was casually updating some of my blogs that I own, I discovered that Google had given us an early Christmas present by updating Page Rank.

Some of my blogs stayed as they were but four of my blogs climbed in PR. My personal blog went from PR2 to PR3, my professional wrestling blog jumped from a PR3 to a PR4 and my hosting blog increased from a PR2 to a PR3.

But most pleasing of all was the Page Rank for this blog, it rose majestically from a PR3 to a PR5. I have never had a blog or web site with a Page Rank higher than 4 before, so I am very pleased about this.

The last time Google updated Page Rank was in August, I believe, and they increased this blog’s PR but then a week later halved it. The blog had gone from PR2 to a PR4 but was then reduced to a PR3. I’m hoping the same doesn’t happen this time.

How did you do?

I came across a couple of reviews recently for a web site called Traffic Express, the reviews were posted on blogs that I consider to be popular and carry quite a considerable amount of clout in the MMO niche.

So I thought “if these guys are highly recommending them then they must be reliable and decent.”

Traffic Express boldly claims that they can help make your blog, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, or Facebook page, go viral. It claims to analyse your current traffic and will then supply you with relevant traffic that will double or even triple what you are currently receiving.

Again, because two rather big players in the niche were promoting this site I decided to ignore the horrible design and layout and give it a go and signed up for one of my smaller blogs. I installed the plugin and left it running for two weeks.

In that time three things happened:

1. They plastered my blog with links to their site. Backlinks for them.

2. They kept wiping my account every couple of days.

3. I received no traffic from them what so ever.

After 2 weeks, and about the 5th time of entering in the details, I decided to remove them.

If they can not handle a blog that pulls in a couple of thousands hits a month then how will they handle one of the bigger blogs? They are a complete waste of time and I strongly urge you to give them a wide birth.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked via this blog is “How can I make money with my blog without spending anything?” Believe it or not this is still possible.

Below is a video from Stephen Beck that will show you how to go about it.

http://stephenbeck.com/products/make-money-free-blog/

Stephen made a six-figure income working part-time while attending seminary and now he wants to help show you how he did it!

In this short video he shares his 6 step formula for creating money with free blogs.

http://stephenbeck.com/products/make-money-free-blog/

After the video Stephen offers you a fantastic special bonus, just scroll down the page.

Several months ago Bloggerwave was sold, I don’t like it when small companies I am involved with are sold because it normally means the company will be scrapped and shut down. An email was sent to all members promising that this was not the case and that Bloggerwave would be bigger and better than ever.

It took about a week for the new owner to go back on his promise.

The site was taken down and the url now directs to a dating site called MillionaireMatch.com. I have emailed Ulrik Svane Thomsen, who was in charge of Bloggerwave, as his name still attached to the domain if you search the whois information of the domain.

I didn’t make a lot of money with them but I am rather said to see that they might have bitten the dust as there are worse networks still running.

Does anybody have any more information about this?

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted a post on this blog by Ivin Viljoen. He had become rather concerned that I had done a disappearing act and was out of contact from pretty much everyone online and nobody had heard from me.

I’d like to reassure everyone that I am not dead and I am very much alive & well.

So Where In The World Have You Been?

I haven’t been murdered, kidnapped, or even checked in to see Thyroid doctor austin, I have in fact been doing a couple of things.

1. Social Life

I have been trying to have a social life. I have a girlfriend who lives quite a long way away from me and I have friends who I don’t see enough of, I have found it very difficult to juggle my online work with seeing them.

It is obviously quite rude to be sitting there working when I’m meant to be spending quality time with my girlfriend, or having a laugh with friends.

2. I Went To My First Internet Conference

At the beginning of the month I went to a 3-day conference called Internet World. It was my first conference and was my opportunity to try and learn from people and companies who have made an impact online.

I think I have learnt a lot and I met a number of people who I believe will be able to help me gain a better understanding when making an income online.

I started publishing guest posts to try and help for when I’m unable to publish my own work. I know this is only a short-term solution.

So relax guys, call off the search team, I’m still alive and well.

Watch the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA2IXlGYWvI

Odd title I know. But I am really getting worried. I think Dean may be missing or something happened to him.

Why do you think that?

Well, I sent emails through this blogs contact page. I sent a message to Dean through his Twitter account this morning but there is no response. As far as I know, Uk bloggers are active at the time of this post. There is activity on his Twitter account but we all know a Twitter account can be automated, so he doesn’t have to be there to do anything. I saw a post from him on 2 May which would indicate that it was the last time he came into the blog. He also mentions an email he read so we could probably presume that’s the last time he checked in.

Why am I looking for him.

Well, Dean won a competition and the last time we spoke there were still some things we were going to do together. But mostly, I’m just worried about him. He isn’t the kind of person who doesn’t answer comments or respond to emails from his contact page. He is a professional blogger and the only correspondence from him was the automated email I received thanking me for getting in touch with him.

Why am I doing this?

I’ll tell you why. I have been commenting on another blog and he has last posted in early February. A friend of mine told me that I don’t know what happens in people’s lives and therefore shouldn’t judge them. She said this because I was furious that the person started a contest but hasn’t followed through. So I am concerned. Not so much for him, but for Dean. You see, I consider Dean a friend, and we respect each other. Therefore I am worried about him.

I am worried about him because on the platform I started bloggin at in 2006, we would find prominent bloggers just dissapear into thin air and we thing ‘well, life happens!’ Usually when I quit a blog (and I retired a couple), I usually tell the readers about it. A professional blogger however, would normally announce a haitus or a sabatical in a post to let eveyone know what’s going on. Thing is, on that p[latform when people just dissapear, we find that soem have actually disspeared – like issing presons diddapeared. Other have actually died and no one ven knew. Can you see why I am concerned why I haven’t heard from Dean from almost three weeks now?

I know Dean is a busy man, but he’s so proud of this blog and it’s progress, it’s odd that he would just leave it like that. Hopefully I am justy panicking and nothings wrong.

Can you help?

I wonder if you can help me in any way. Perhaps you have;

• Spoken to him in the last two weeks or so?
• Seen him somewhere in London in the last two week?
• Received comments from him on your blog recently?
• Received correspondence from him on Twitter. This would be a real time response to a Tweet with his Twitter handle.
• Any kind of Sms or email correspondence in the last week or two.
• Anybody in London in touch with missing persons?

Please know, this is NOT a joke, sham or marketing ploy. Hopefully Dean reads this post and let’s his friends and fans know he’s okay and just caught up in life.

Late last year I wrote a post about receiving an email from Saurabh Nagar regarding his WordPress plugin called BlogpressSEO. It was quickly exposed by several big bloggers (as well as me) to be incredibly dodgy. You can read the post here.

As I was away for the long weekend I was checking my emails this morning when I noticed an email from him. It was exactly the same email that he had sent me last year, inviting me to download and install his Extremly Powerful, Tested and Ethical WordPress SEO Plugin (spelling error included, shame he didn’t test his spell checker).

It seems that Mr Saurabh Nagar is still trying to peddle his dirty little plugin.

If you receive an email from this man then please do not install it. Not only will it get you banned by Google (they hate link schemes) but, more importantly, there is a back-door built into the plugin that allows the author of the plugin (or anyone who has access to info@blogpressseo.com) to log into your admin panel WITHOUT YOUR PASSWORD. That means they just have to enter the admin email, the one they have just sent to themselves.

If you have installed this plugin then there are some steps you should take to protect yourself, they can be found here.