March Writing Goals Update #2

Freelance Writing Goals #2

This is the second update on the blog since I displayed my ambitious writing goals at the very beginning of March. I was going to write one around the 15th, but that was my brother's birthday, some jobs came up I couldn't ignore, and it was my 50th blog post on this blog, so it seemed like a good time to throw in a "clip show" of a blog post looking back over where this freelance writing blog started and where it's going. But now the month is almost 2/3 of the way through, and I thought I'd add another brief update on my writing goals. By the way, if you're new here, feel free to look through older posts for freelance writing website reviews, tips for beginners, or any of the other information that this blog provides for people interested in advice for freelance writing for beginners.

So I'm not going to go point by point this time, but as the days are going by, I'm definitely beginning to feel the squeeze. My chances of finishing all the goals? Pretty much none, but I think that's what we all assumed at the beginning of the month when I made them. Still, overall I am encouraged by the amount of work I've done and the progress I'm already seeing. This month I fell just short of having my first $20 AdSense day, which was really cool since my previous best was $14 that happened one day in early November of 2009. Overall, traffic to my AdSense sites are up 28% and within the next 3 days I'll surpass my previously best month. Will I hit the 100% in one month goal? I'm guessing not because traditionally AdSense tails off quite a bit at the end of the month - but it's going to be a close one, and the fact that's even true is encouraging - not to mention that passive income is only going to grow as the new articles and pages get stronger, meaning the end of the month payments are going to continue to get bigger and bigger. With passive income, that is always a plus.

The $5,000 in one month freelance writing goal discounting all passive income, editing, and consulting work actually appears to still be in play. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say I'll end up a few hundred short (especially since the Internet around here has been going out for hours at a time) but it's a number I could very easily hit if I added the consulting fees, passive income, and payments for editing work in.

The doubling my eHow income is actually on track to hit. I don't even want to go into how many articles I had to churn out to make that happen. With even just a little SEO work those could end up paying off big time in a couple of months.

I've done daily creative writing. I'll have at least a couple of zombie short stories finished, and many pages of fiction spread out through the other projects. Getting back to writing creatively daily has been nice, and I've done a lot of revision work on my novel, preparing it for another round of send offs. Easily I've done more creative writing and revising of my creative work this month than January and February combined.

With the creating passive income properties, the numbers are mixed. If you go by a what I have to average per day, I'm behind on both InfoBarrel and HubPages, but I've written more of both this month than the first two months combined, and the 100 each goal are both within striking distance, so we'll see how those finish up.

I'm ahead of pace for the Squidoo lenses, and very excited about them once again for two reasons. One is that because of the "info links" that are added, my lenses are about 70%+ more profitable than they were before. The second reason is that based on how some of my lenses are performing way beyond expectation, I may have found an untapped niche that could end up making a HUGE difference in my monthly and yearly passive income numbers.

I've already done something in the range of 60+ Xomba bookmarks, and am within striking distance of hitting my goal of 30 for the month.

I'm a little behind on the blog posts, UAW articles, and script writing, but really making progress on everything else.

At this point in the month, I can say those 2 days where the Internet when down for 10+ hours killed me. It wasn't just the lost hours, but those were days I was really fired up and just ready to absolutely kill it. The emotional impact of being hyped up and focused, and then having the legs cut out from under me, that just really crushed my work ethic for about a 5 day span, and in all honesty, there wasn't a lot of work done (comparatively) in that time period. In fact, I was really sluffing. Which really opens up the possibilities of what a single person can do when they can stay focused and on task the whole time...and have a reliable service provider.

So this last stretch of 11 days will definitely be really interesting. I'm focusing better for the home stretch and am prepared to really hammer everything out during this time to see what happens. The one other thing that is probably worth mentioning for the goals: I do article marketing for backlinks, and those articles were not included in my monthly goals - even though I've written over 120 of them so far this month.

So yeah, I'm feeling pretty darn good about where things are going. Even if you're not the insane goals type, if you're looking to get into freelance writing (or even if you're established), figure out one or two concrete goals for next month that can help you take a really definitive step towards your overall freelance writing career goals. It's absolutely stunning what can be done when you focus in specifically on a couple of solid concrete targets.

So that's it for now. I'm going to try and finish my Demand Studios review by Monday, and an updated Associated Content review by Wednesday. Beyond that, we'll just see how things roll. Thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment!