Personal Finance Goals (2009) - version 1

photo credit: Sergio Recabarren

I first wanted to extend a Happy New Year to all my readers at PFI. The past year (2008) is over and one that most people will hope to forget – at least from a personal finance perspective. I believe that this New Year will start off very rocky and the global recession will get a lot worse. However, I do believe that by the end of this year, we will have hit bottom and will start to see growth in our economy again. I plan on taking advantage of the endless opportunities available to me to create passive income streams that will provide the financial freedom that my family seeks.

As a result of these opportunities, I wanted to take the time to document my personal finance goals as well as the goals I have for PFI for the upcoming year. Each month, I can revisit my goals and provide a status check.

• Monthly Passive Income – My goal is to bring in $1,000 per month by the end of the year in passive income. I am moving towards phasing out streams of income that take large amounts of my time, so this monetary goal should only include passive income that is generated.
• eHow Articles - I plan to write an average of 6 eHow articles every week. This translates into about 25 articles per month and 300 over the course of the year. Since I have only written 22 over the course of 2008 (4 months), this is a huge increase in my output but one that I believe will produce excellent returns.
• RSS Count - I would like to have 500 subscribed readers to PFI by the end of 2009. At the time of writing this post I have 89, so I have some work to do. I need to average about 35 new subscribers per month in order to reach this goal. While subscribed readers are no indication of increased earnings through a blog, it does indicate the stability and popularity of your site.
• eBook - I plan to write 2 eBooks over the course of 2009.
• Carnivals - I also plan to host at least 2 personal finance carnivals this year which should help PFI gain some exposure.
• New Income Streams - I have a goal to create at least 5 new passive income streams on top of the current active ones I have in my portfolio.
• Comments - I have a bad habit recently in not responding in a timely fashion to comments on PFI. I think this is unprofessional and I need respond sooner. If someone takes the time to write a comment on my site, then I should have the courtesy to respond. My goal it to respond within 48 hours to most non-spam comments on my site. Depending on the content of the comments, I may not respond to each an every one.
• Visit Other Sites - I plan on spending more time interacting with other blogs and sites related to personal finance. I have a goal to visit at least one new personal finance site per week to learn new things and promote up and coming blogs.
• Social Networking - I will be focus on increasing my social networking presence, which has been a little erratic up to this point. I hope to use existing memberships to sites like eHow, PF Buzz, and SocialSpark to my advantage as well as Twitter (just recently joined and learning all about it). I will also investigate using Digg and Technorati more than I have in the past year.
• Optimization - I plan on concentrating on optimizing PFI. While it is difficult to quantify everything involved with optimization of this site, I have a goal to average 250 views per day to PFI. Over the course of the past 6 months, I have averaged 95 views per day according to the Wordpress.com Stats plugin.

This is a working list of goals that I will update frequently and revisit each and every month.

What personal finance and/or blogging goals have you set for the New Year?

Tagged as: Blogging for Money, goals