How Are Your 2018 Goals Going? Checking In and Taking Stock
Can you believe February is already almost over? How the hell did that happen. The end of Q1 is quickly approaching and I wanted to share how I'm doing on my goals for 2018. When creating my goals for this year, I tried to make them as specific as possible, making sure that they were achievable and I could put a plan into place for how I would achieve them.
Here's where I'm at with my goals so far:
Grow Freelance Income.
I started out 2018 really strong because i got a few new freelance clients for my digital marketing side hustle at the end of 2017 and the very beginning of 2018. Because I work with small businesses who typically only have a marketing budget to pay for my services, if they encounter cash flow challenges, marketing can be the first thing sacrificed. So, as a result I lost two clients and had another client scale back their services in the first two months of 2018. While this is not ideal for me, it's not a deal breaker either. The benefit of freelance work is that I have diversified my income, so I still have freelance income from my other clients, but this has set me back in achieving my freelance income goal for Q1 of 2018. Time to look at getting a few new clients and work on growing my other sources of income which brings me to my next goal.
Grow Etsy Shop Sales.
I've mentioned before that I have an Etsy shop. It often gets pushed down the priority list because my freelance clients take precedent over growing a shop that only brings income in sporadically. BUT I also recognize that I'll never grow shop sales if I don't put some time and effort into it. This is a goal that I have really let slip in the first two months of this year. Now, with losing some freelance income, I feel like it's even more important that I put more focus on the shop to really see how much income it can bring in each month. This will further diversify my income and if I can create more instant download stock products that sell regularly, I can develop a new passive source of income which would be fantastic.
Grow and Monetize My Blog.
I have been working towards this goal, but not as much as I would like. I've been posting here regularly and promoting more on social media. My website traffic is starting to grow slowly and steadily and I've gotten a couple of subscribers. So growing the blog is happening, although it's slow and steady for now. I want to continue to build my subscriber list and I would like to see more subscribers signing up, so I'll be focusing on creating some lead magnet content to encourage sign-ups for valuable and free content. I have not really done much to monetize yet. I've been sprinkling in some Amazon Affiliate Links but they haven't brought me any income yet. I'm thinking of ways I can realistically monetize this blog. I'm really not interested in running ads, but maybe if I start working with affiliate link programs for tools and services that are relevant and beneficial to you side hustlers? This will be something I need to think about and test a bit in March.
Right now I use Asana to keep track of all my tasks but for March I'm going to try to be more diligent about sitting down at the beginning of each week to look through my tasks and prioritize them. I think this will help me ensure that I'm getting everything done that I need to while also keeping my bigger quarterly and yearly goals in mind.
How are you doing on your 2018 goals?
