A Look Back at 2010

I feel that it is important to make short term and long term goals.  But I also think it is important to look back and see what happened over the course of time and whether or not those goals were met, why they were not, and how they might have been changed and altered.

So before posting goals for 2011, I would like to look back at my post of goals for 2010 and compare those goals to my actual experience over the past year.  If you want to look at the original post from December 2009, you can access my goals for 2010 but I will reproduce them below and then provide commentary in italics:

• 250 total articles on Life123. I plan on writing about 20 per month on average and maintaining a steady pace throughout the year.  Life123 suspended their author compensation program within a week or two of establishing this goal.  As a result, I was only able to publish a limited number of articles on the site.  To Life123's credit, they paid the maximal possible income to each author who had published so I received a one-time payment of $400 for 20 articles.
• 150 Xombytes (articles) on Xomba. That would require about 10 per month. I also want to post links on Xomba almost every day of the year. I plan on posting links to all of my articles that I have written so far plus adding all of the new ones. I currently have a spreadsheet that tracks what links I have added to my writings on Xomba, Shetoldme, and Snipsly. I need to do a better job of linking when I don't feel like writing.  I have done a lousy job of linking this year.  I also did not publish many more articles on Xomba.  I don't feel that Xomba has turned out to be a great source of residual income for articles and so I decided to focus my limited amount of time elsewhere.  I have placed backlinks, but not nearly the number that I should have or could have.
• 150 articles on HubPages. I have 115 so that means I will just sprinkle some here and there during the year. I would like to see my HubPages results improve.  Finally I was able to meet a goal.  It turns out that the majority of my effort has been spent on HubPages this past year.  As a result, I have 172 total Hubs so at least I can point to some positive results for 2010.
• 50 articles on eHow. I have 38 right now. I would like to add some to see if that helps the earnings there. Despite not writing anything for a few months, eHow continues to earn some money. The site has great potential, and I hope that maybe the break will have allowed me to get back into it.  I still have 38 articles since the compensation program changed at this site as well.  My income at eHow seems fairly consistent but that is it.  It really isn't growing and I really don't expect it to grow much either.
• I plan on continuing to write every 2 or 3 days for this blog. That would mean 10-20 posts per month. I will be linking to these posts as well and trying to bring traffic to this blog.  Overall, I have published just over 80 posts this year which is less than 10 posts per month.  I am not too upset since I would only want to publish if I have something to say.  I do think traffic has increased although I would like to have seen it increase a bit more.
• I hope to get up the nerve to create a niche website. I have a few ideas but would like to make a little more writing content first. But now that I am putting it out there, I will be forced to attempt to deliver.  I didn't create a site in 2010.  I know I should, but I didn't and that is all I can say.

I will post my goals for 2011 in the next post.  In the meantime, I am curious to know if anyone else has taken the time to look back to see how 2010 went for online income.  This is always an interesting time of year for reflection as well as planning.

PS--I have published a Hub on "Swimming with Dolphins" in Cozumel from our recent cruise and vacation in case you missed it elsewhere.