Friday Wrap: A change of direction and things to do in 2012

This last week has been a very good week I launched my new site Staying in Thailand and it’s coming along very nicely I’ve also been reading a lot of other people’s sites and have noticed a flurry of posts with goals for 2012 I normally take a pass on this type of thing and that’s probably why my business has been failing. Motivated by all the guys and gals throwing around such large numbers, it’s made me think about what I should be doing, or should it be what I want for myself, more so as I now know what its like to just survive and travel and be semi retired.

When I was a lot younger I regularly set some very high goals for myself, most of the time I didn’t meet those goals occasionally I would fall a little short or even quite a lot short. What I’m realizing though is that by setting goals I would achieve far more than I would have with no goals at all.

So I have decided to dedicate this Friday’s post to the things that I’m aiming for during 2012 It would be real easy to sit down and add a few financial totals. The simple fact is I have been around long enough to know it is more about setting out a whole bunch of things to do, the financial totals will then pretty much look after themselves if you do those things.

#1 Creating content writing pages, this is not something that I enjoy doing; it is probably the thing that I’m least skilled at. I am finding though that I’m able to create content a little more quickly than I was a year ago and it’s not quite as painful each time.
My first goal is to create at least one new page of content every day for the whole year 365 pages. Simply doing this should increase my basic income by about 50% based on the number of pages that I already have in my portfolio. $6000

#2 Contact at least five other website owners each week, who could be interested in advertising on one of my websites, this goes back to the whole basis of ask and you shall receive, otherwise you get zilch $5000

#3 Finalize launch and promote my new product / service at www.zeromatch.com Keywords with little Competition that I created $3000

#4 Regain the authority that two of my websites once commanded before October enabling my base income to return to more than $1000 a month. $12000

#5 Find and maintain some small consulting jobs. $2500

#6 Start and maintain a small eBay business that generates $2500

#7 Sell some of my websites $5000

#8 Hire a full time VA – $6000

Total for all this is $30,000 for the year.

Whats real weird is just by writing down different things to do, the total I would have thrown out $20,000 on a good day, just jumped by 50% and no one single thing above is in anyway aggressive most are pretty conservative.

On a more personal note I like to get more technically savvy “think Google reader and the likes” I’m still kind of a dinosaur in these area’s only having recently ventured in to the realms of podcast’s, rss and more.

Travel to at least two new countries this is also weird considering that I was expecting to be traveling all over the world when I left America two years ago.

Lastly travel back for a holiday to England and America before June of 2013.

This is a whole lot of goals and feels like a total change in direction from where I was sitting 6 months ago, it feels good though and kind of exciting having a whole lot of stuff on my plate to do, something I’m much more accustomed too. I tried the not having to work and being semi retired over the last 18 months and found it to be not a great choice for myself. Here is to a busy 2012 year of the Dragon.