TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Revisit of My Work Goals for 2011

June 12, 2012 Posted by Tyler Cruz

At the beginning of each year, I create a list of work goals that I hope to meet by the end of the year.

I normally try to post an analysis of how those goals fared at the beginning of the following year. However, I only posted a total of 5 posts during the first 3 months of 2012, which left me extremely backlogged in the types of posts I needed to get up.

As a result, this revisit of my 2011 goals is 6 months late! But better late than never, right?

I might have just skipped publishing this post altogether if it weren’t for numerous people inquiring about it repeatedly in the past.

You can see my past "work goal" revisit posts for the years 2008, 2009, 2010, as well as read my original My Work Goals for 2011 post as well.

And so here then, is my recap of my 2011 work goals:

1. Publish 140 Blog Posts

Result: Fail

This was a very good goal for me to have as it was easily measurable and most definitely doable. In fact, it was the easiest out of all of my goals to accomplish.

On order to make it, I would have needed to average around 12 posts per month.

Actively aware of the goal and trying to meet it, I started out really well, having published 10 posts in January, and 12 posts in February.

Unfortunately, though, my average declined over the rest of the year to around 7-8 posts per month, which ended up to a total of 99 for the year.

Below is a chart of my post totals over the past 7 years:

While I didn’t make this goal, I did post more in 2011 than in 2010, so my goal did at least accomplish some increased post frequency.

It’s hard to think that I could ever catch up to my 2007 days though, when I posted an average of 20-21 posts per month!

2. Reignite and Improve PublisherChallenge

Result: Fail

This goal was completely and utterly missed. I didn’t do a SINGLE thing to PublisherChallenge in 2011. Absolutely nothing.

I don’t know what else to say… I simply didn’t work on PublisherChallenge at all.

3. Revitalize PokerForums

Result: Not Applicable/Debateable

I gave this one a good shot.

I had spent a good amount of time working on revamping PokerForums’s design so that it would be up-to-date, be better optimized for ads with more streamlined advertiser exposure, and conform to vBulletin Suite 4.0 so that it could be turned into more of a full-fledged website.

I put in a fair bit of time and effort working with my designer on the new design, and actually saw it through to completion.

My plan was then to get it coded and made live, and then start to transform the site into more of a complete community as opposed to simply a forum.

I was definitely giving this goal a good shot, and this was all done within the first 8 weeks or so of the year.

However, I actually ended up selling the site in early March, which I talk about in my post: I Sold My Largest Money Making Website.

Since I sold the site, this goal can’t really be labelled as Success or Fail, although I was certainly on pace to make this goal before I sold it.

In addition, I sold the site for a very good price.

Part of the sales agreement was that I couldn’t publicly disclose the exact amount of the transaction.

However, I’ll just say that it was definitely not a fortune, but at the same time, based on the last 3 months income prior to sale, it would have taken me 30 years to make that same amount from the site (assuming income stayed at that level).

4. Finish RobotWarz

Result: Fail

Another outstanding fail.

RobotWarz has caused me more headaches and stress than any other project I’ve ever worked on before, and that is saying a lot.

It has been the worst experience I’ve ever had in an online project.

Basically, I was stung by two different developers, both who looked good on paper and promised me the world, but completely ripped me off and left me with absolutely horrible code.

What sucks is that I spent an enormous amount of time and effort looking for suitable gaming developers, including extensive interviewing and shortlisting, so it’s not like I just hired the first gaming developer I saw.

I spent an incredible amount of time working on providing very detailed and professional documentation as to how the game is to function as well as inner-game mechanics.

I also somehow let myself get sucked into basically being the project manager for the project, as well as the tester.

RobotWarz currently sits unfinished. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it… if I’ll ever get back to working on it again one day or not. It’s certainly not on my priority list of things to do right now though.

Lesson learned: If you want to develop a game, at least one that is well done and polished, you’re going to need to go with a dedicated gaming studio and need a budget of at least $30,000-$50,000 for a relatively simple game (we’re talking roughly the level of Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies here!).

Game development is not cheap!

I tried to go the cheap route and got what I paid for.

5. Grow Movie-Vault to 100k Unique Hits Per Month

Result: Fail

Yet another fail, I’m sad to say.

2011 was so far ago now that I can’t even remember what all I did on Movie-Vault during the year. Apart from the occasional bug fixes, though, it wasn’t much.

The main thing I did was try to improve its SEO through the use of RankPay, which was yielding results until the Panda update hit and basically sandboxed the site for the terms we were aiming to ranking for.

The movie content niche is a very tough one to get into, as the competition is stiff (IMDb, RottenTomatoes, etc.) and the payouts are amongst the lowest out of any topic out there. The upside is that you have a massive demographic, but it’s still a really difficult niche to get into I’ve found.

I’m sure I’m just doing something wrong. Maybe not partnering with enough other sites and whatnot.

I believe part of the problem is that I lost my passion for movies. Sure, I still enjoy watching movies, but once upon a time I was a real film fanatic, even briefly considering film school at one point (this was before I made over $100/month from the Internet). Overtime, I just gradually became less and less interested in movies and so did my passion for the site.

That’s probably the real reason I didn’t make the goal. It’s hard to force yourself to work on stuff that you have no desire doing. It’s why you should always do something that interests you.

In any case, I didn’t make the goal.

The Year In Review

Well, that’s 4/5 (or 5/5 depending on how you look at it) of my goals that I failed to meet.

While I didn’t make a single one of my goals in 2011, that doesn’t mean that the year was a total flop.

It was nice to fly out to Florida and meet up with PeerFly and AmpedMedia, which is something I wanted to do a bit more of – networking a bit more in person. I grew my number of Twitter followers from 1,000 to over 10,000. And as I mentioned earlier, I Sold My Largest Money Making Website, which gave me a big lump sum payment.

But best of all, in late September, I decided to give affiliate marketing another little try, and by October I was starting to see some good results. In November and December, I was already hitting new personal records left and right, managing to grow to nearly $1,300 in one day by late December. That had cemented even far greater improvement on my campaigns in 2012.

All in all, 2011 was a pretty decent year, despite not having made any of the goals I had set out.

No 2012 Work Goals

Due to my past yearly work goals failing in general, I decided to not set any up for 2012.

For whatever reason, setting goals to achieve throughout the year just doesn’t seem to have any positive effect on me. I think it’s due to a number of reason, including:

1. Forgetting about them
2. No penalty or reward incentive for not making/making the goals
3. Things changing over time (such as my selling of my poker site, for example)
4. Too many projects and goals to focus on
5. Goals too ambitious; 2011 was my easiest year of all, but it was still a lot of work

I may try to pick things back up in 2013, but really, I just think that setting yearly goals is not for me. I do much better when I focus on a single thing at a time, and I have no interest in setting just a single goal for a year.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed all my failures in 2011