2018 Plans and Updates

I try do a blog post at the start of the year to outline my goals and review my previous year's. Back in 2017, I had set these goals:

6 new products
$2,000 a month
24 Blog Posts
50 Email Subscribers

The first target that I planned to achieve of 6 new products seems very over-ambitious thinking about it a year later. Considering the amount of time I spend working on a single product, which can sometimes be up to three-four months, was a bit unrealistic. I feel at the time, I was thinking more about smaller products that don't require so much dev work.

In 2017, I managed to create 3 products: Status Checker, Pro Schools and Social Network. The latter two took months of development to get done. I also updated a lot of my older products, which took up a huge amount of time too. I'm definitely going to stick to updating my existing products in 2018 as I feel there is a lot of room for improvement.

I did manage to hit the $2,000 a month target. I hit $2k 8 times in 2017, and twice over $3k. I more than doubled the amount I earned in 2016, which is definitely down to the fact I went full time at CodeCanyon.

Blog wise, I wrote a total of 38 new blog posts, not including the posts written for my Recommended section. I also reprogrammed the entire blog from scratch and moved away from WordPress, which took up a lot of time but was definitely worth it.

Elite Author

I also finally hit Elite Author status on CodeCanyon after doing it for three years and selling over $75,000 worth of products.

My email subscriber list sits at 35. To be honest, I haven't really pushed this side of the blog. I didn't really write any exclusive subscriber content or give incentives for people to subscribe.

Overall, 2017 was very successful for me. Transitioning to full-time work on CodeCanyon was a huge gamble and I've been able to get back to how much I was earning from full-time freelancing when I quit that.

For me personally, I was able to live in the south of France for half the year, visit America for the first time and I've learnt a huge amount about the world of blogging. I feel that increasing my online skills will help me diversify the business more.

I did have some more tough news to deal with in terms of my personal family and I feel next year will only get harder. But I'm going to try and not let it affect me as much as possible.

2018 Plans And Targets

2 New Products
$2,500 per month
24 Blog Posts
Increase Traffic to 500 Hits per day
Increase Ad Revenue to $50 per month
Work 100+ hours a month for 9/12 months

These are my new targets for this year. 2017 was such a strange year for me since I spent half of it away from my family in another country. This year hopefully will be a lot more simple, though I am planning on moving sometime in the latter half of the year.

First I want to talk about 100+ hours a month target. There has been no doubt I've been slacking when working on CodeCanyon products. When I first did this full time, I was working really hard to get myself to a sustainable level. Once I hit that level, I didn't push myself or my products to get to the next level. This is what I hope to achieve this year.

My main target this year with CodeCanyon is to keep my products up to date and make them be competing with the best ones on there. I'm changing tact from releasing new products all the time to keeping a core set of products up-to-date and feature-rich. I feel this will help me have more consistent sales over the course of the year.

The two products I want to make next are personal ones that I've wanted to do for a long time. One is to do with SEO and the other is to do with managing writing. Both are probably not big money makers, so when the time comes to making them, I may have to do some of the work in my spare time. But I have some cool ideas for them that I haven't seen elsewhere yet so it'll be interesting to see if they will do well.

I think writing at least 2 blog posts a month is a good target. I'm going to stop doing Monthly Income reports around April/May time when I finish the second years worth. They've been fun to do, but they are now starting to feel like a chore. I'd much rather work on interesting content that helps people or explores a new topic. It'll also help me reach the 500 hits per day target too since the Income Reports hardly bring in any traffic, apart from subscribers.

I would love to increase the blog's ad revenue to $50 a month. That would pay for the web hosting and also the domain name fees yearly. It means I'll have to work on my Recommended section a little more but I'm happy to do that since my current efforts have seen an increase in revenue.

Right now I have two side-projects I'm working on that I do in my spare time when I can be bothered. They aren't anywhere near completion or looking like turning into actual money-makers but I always have a passion for them, so when the moment comes, I work on them in my spare time.

Let's hope 2018 can be even better than 2017! I'm going to work ever harder this year so hopefully we'll see better results!

Peace!