End of Year Report for 2011

Another of trying to make money online has passed, so time to review my progress. This year my focus has been on trying to earn money as an affiliate, although I have earned money through other means as well. I have tended to move away from using Squidoo to earn money through Clickbank. This, it seems, was a good move as Squidoo are getting stricter on what you can put on your lenses anything deemed "overly promotional" will be locked and subsequently deleted.

Instead I have tended to move more towards making money from Amazon and setting up a number of review sites. A couple of these performed fairly well over the Christmas period so this bodes well for the future.

I have been guilty of flitting from one thing to another over the last year and I think that my earnings have suffered as a result. I did become a little more focused in the final few months and I think this did help my earnings.

So here are my totals for the year (previous year's total shown in brackets):

Clickbank: $184.74 ($364.08)
Amazon: $129.74 ($0)
Adsense: $101.22 ($101.42)
Private Advertising: $423.70 ($60.00)
Surveys: $296.43 ($358.09)
Squidoo: $30.10 ($54.32)
EBay: $426.90 ($232.44)
Swagbucks: $40 ($45)
Zlio: $1.67 ($0)
Hits4Pay: $25.18 ($0)
Blogsvertise: $25 ($25)
MyLikes: $1.65 ($0)
Quickpenny: $40.66 ($0)

Total Earnings for 2011 = $1726.99

Earnings for 2010 were $1367.30 so an increase of $359.69. A bit of an increase, but certainly not enough to radically change my life!

Let's just also review my targets from last year:

1. More One Week Marketing campaigns. I only actually did one more over the whole of last year. The reason for this is that I put a lot of time into the one I did and it did not produce any sales at all. As a result I became disillusioned with using Squidoo as a basis for selling products.
2. List Building. This never got going. I had intended to use Squidoo as a basis for building a subscriber list, but decided against it given their recent tightening of their rules.
3. Create and sell my own product. Nope, didn't manage this one either. My wife was going to create an ebook which I was going to sell for her, but this hasn't yet got off the ground.
4. Create more niche sites: I achieved this although my original intention had been to make money Adsense from these. Most of the site I have made have been more focused on making money from Amazon. Some of these have been quite successful, but some have not. I have learned that it is better to work more on a few sites and get them to succeed rather than to try and spread my efforts over lots of sites.
5. More Squidoo lenses. I have become a little disillusioned with Squidoo over the last year and have come to the conclusion that it is better to have your own sites.

For the coming year I intend to focus on:

• Focus on my new blog for which I intend to become a complete go-to resource for my niche. I intend to build content and traffic over the coming months. Alongside this I intend to build a related subscriber list.
• Further build content and traffic on my existing niche sites. Some of these sites are also suitable for list building so this is something else I intend to pursue.
• I may build more niche/review site, but only when I am satisfied that my existing sites are performing the best that they can.

This is a much smaller and more tightly focused list of aims than previous years. And this, I believe, is more likely to lead me to success in 2012.