Online Writing Goals for 2013

I've been writing online since 2009, when I first began producing articles on Hubpages. From there, having been advised not to put all of my eggs into one basket, I've also branched out to begin publishing pages on Squidoo, Zujava and Wizzley as well as making an occasional blog post on Redgage as well.

Since that time different articles have had various different levels of success, dependent on the way in which a person measures success. At my height, I was making roughly $200 a month between Hubpages and Squidoo. As of December, 2012, I am making roughly $50 a month across all four platforms, and am disappointed with the results of my labor.

As previously mentioned, in 2013 I would like to be making $500 a month across all platforms. I believe that this is reasonable, and if you look at it as an average of $100 per platform, it becomes even more obvious that this is something I should be able to accomplish.

The problem is that the obvious average here isn't reliable. Being able to make $100 a month on Redgage is currently far outside of my reach. I believe that it is reasonable to say that if I make $200 a month on each of Hubpages and Squidoo and $100 a month on Wizzley, I've reached my $500, while using Redgage and Zujava in an ancillary fashion meant to support my primary endeavors. (Redgage is a small earner to begin with and Zujava is too new to have built up a real monthly income for distribution, and therefore these two are currently ancillary options). Hubpages and Squidoo have both been earning for me over the past three years and I am comfortable setting a goal of $200 a month for each in reaching for my goal of $500.

Since I'm newer to Wizzley, I'm still building up a reader base and gaining knowledge on the use of the platform.

One step toward completing my financial goals is to develop an action plan. In order to develop an action plan I need to have some kind of idea of smaller goals that will assist me in reaching the goal to be making $500 a month writing online by the end of 2013. The following are practical goals that will hopefully lead me a step closer to reaching my financial goal by building my portfolio and keeping my content updated and fresh.

1. Create at least one informational hub of 1,500 words or more per week. This hub should be informational in its nature and should not focus on sales, but should instead focus on good keywords and a long-tail topic around which I can build a further series of hubs.

2. Create at least three short commercial hubs a week. These hubs don't need to be anything more than 300-400 words and should focus on a single product to promote. Usually these hubs will relate to produce reviews of some sort or another and will be related to the aforementioned informational hub.

3. Create at least one new lens a week on Squidoo. Squidoo is a much more difficult platform to use and it takes longer to create a lens than it does a hub. I feel that this is a reasonable goal. Lenses should be formatted similarly to the way that I'm doing hubs, and should be cross-linked with the hubs for maximum traffic.

4. Create at least two new Wizzes a week. Wizzley is quick and relatively easy with a lot of features. At this point I'm up to seven pages a week, or one page per day across three platforms, with two more to go. This is a lot.

5. Create at least one new leaf a week, with a goal of three. Zujava is fast and it's easy, but it also isn't making me any money. I've been using it primarily to promote my links to other platforms, but I think that I could get this platform working for me, so this is important.

6. Use the blog feature on Redgage at least once a day to assist in promoting links to hubs, lenses, leaves and wizzes. Short written blogs with inline links to other written pieces not only give me a chance at getting points for knowledge content on Redgage, but they also promote my other pages. It's a win-win situation!

In order to achieve my financial goals it is necessary to follow some steps in order to ensure that the best possible traffic is coming to my pages. To this end, there are several things that I feel are necessary so that I can make the most of my online writing endeavors.

1. Use mindmapping to establish what I want to put into an article (or series of articles) before it starts.

2. Use Trello in order to plan my post timing and to keep myself on a schedule.

3. Tweet my new articles within one hour of posting, after twenty-four hours of posting, and again seventy-two hours later.

4. Post new articles to Facebook (both the fan page and my personal page) and to Google+.

5. Make sure that my Twitter link is on all my pages, or that there is a feed on all my pages.

6. Interlink related pages in order to get the most out of high-quality traffic.

7. Include produce links on every new page (that counts for credit) in order to provide the most opportunities for shoppers to buy.