My Work Goals for 2011
February 3, 2011 Posted by Tyler CruzI was originally planning on publishing this post shortly after my Revisit of my Work Goals for 2010 post, but rapidly became backlogged with guest posts and paid reviews which I needed to get up.
As a result, I am creating and publishing these goals already a month into the year, leaving me only 11 months to achieve them. Perhaps that will give me more of a driving force to really focus on them this year.
I haven’t had the best track record for achieving my work goals in previous years (2008, 2009, 2010) but hope to change that in 2011. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been starting to get that entrepreneurial spark again. I can’t exactly explain it, but hope to demonstrate it in action instead.
Tyler’s Work Goal List for 2011
Here are the 5 goals I would like to achieve by the end of 2011. If I can meet 3 of them, I’ll be very happy and 2011 will have been a great year. I have listed them in order of ascending difficulty (not in the order of which I would like to achieve most):
1. Publish 140 Blog Posts
This is probably my most interesting goal, as it is also the most simplest. Unlike my other goals, where I need to do a lot of creative things in order to achieve them, all I have to do in this goal is to simply post more.
I’m sure that almost all of you will probably be happy with this goal. Many of you have been telling me for years to post more. It’s also something I know I should be doing as I tell others that you need consistent, regularly updated content if you want to have any success in a content-based website, and so I should follow my own advice.
In order to achieve this goal, I will need to refrain from always spending so much time on all my posts, and making them so detailed and long. This post, for example, will have taken me 2 hours once I finish it.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ll definitely keep up the quality of my posts and have good detailed long ones like I usually do, but I’ll also throw in some quick short posts as well.
How did I come up with 140 posts? Why not 100 or 150? Well, I counted up the total number of posts I published each year, and made the chart below:
| Year | # of Posts | Average # of Posts per month |
| 2010 | 82 | 6.8 |
| 2009 | 136 | 11.3 |
| 2008 | 202 | 16.8 |
| 2007 | 250 | 20.8 |
| 2006 | 89 | 7.4 |
| 2005 | 60 | 5 |
I found this very interesting. First, to answer the question above, I chose the number 140 because it’s more than 2010 and 2009. I didn’t make it 251 in order to beat 2007, because 140 is already close to double what I did last year, and would be therefore too drastic of a change for me to make.
140 posts in a year works out to an average of 11.6 posts a month – roughly 1 every 3 days, so it’s certainly feasible and will be a great increase over what I did last year.
Looking back at the chart though, it’s really interesting to see just how much I dropped in post frequency since 2007. Did I really average a new blog post every 1-2 days back then? Wow.
It’s also very interesting to note how post frequency seems to have a near direct correlation with traffic and growth. My RSS had the highest rate of increase in 2007, but plateaued over the past 18 months or so. Traffic and income also plateaued declined in 2010 as well.
By dramatically increasing my post frequency, I hope to increase all metrics of my blog including traffic, RSS, Twitter followers, and income.
2. Reignite and Improve PublisherChallenge
PublisherChallenge was a huge success when you consider that I built the site in about a year and in roughly that same time, members on the site generated a total of approximately 1.3 million dollars.
So what happened? Nothing, really. Some of the affiliate networks decided to cut down on their advertising and marketing budget, such as MarketLeverage for example, and I just never got around to contacting other networks to fill in their places. It’s really as simple as that.
There were a few band new networks who contacted me wanting to run a competition, but I didn’t know them well enough to want to promote or endorse them.
I had actually been working on a new competition the past few months with a brand new network (I know the owner, so know I can trust them) which I was (am?) very excited about, as it’s not an affiliate network, meaning that you don’t have to be an affiliate marketer to enter the competition… you can just add their ads on your blog, for example. Unfortunately, they are still working on perfecting their network so it may still be a few months before this particular competition goes live.
So, I think I will find a replacement network. I really like the idea of using an ad network (CPC, CPM) as opposed to an affiliate network (CPA) as it really opens up who can enter the competitions – especially bloggers.
In addition to simply running competitions on the site again, I also have a few improvements and new features planned for the site.
3. Revitalize PokerForums
I failed this goal last year, but really need to do this and so am adding it as a goal again this year.
Poker Forums had been my biggest money maker since its genesis in 2004. 2009 was the first year in which it slid down to #2 (narrowly).
Once upon a time, it was making as much as $11,000-$12,000 per month. At the time, I was scared about having all my eggs in one basket (even though I already owned 6-7 sites at the time) and wanted to diversify my portfolio.
I ended up going overboard, which left me no time to work on the site, and it has suffered as a result ever since.
The good news is that there seems to have been a bit of a resurgence in the site recently. Old active members have returned and new, passionate and energetic members have arrived. I hope to jump on this opportunity in 2011 to bring it back into the popular, high quality poker forum it once was, in both activity and poker-related discussion.
I may do a large revamp of the the site, porting the current setup and design to the brand new vBulletin Suite 4.0, streamline the advertisements for better advertiser exposure, and clean-up dead areas of the site and/or port them over to the new custom pages within vBulletin Suite.
I also hope to get grow the content and activity on the site, perhaps by setting up weekly poker tournaments and bringing back news to the site, hiring freelance writers.
In addition, I also have some unique and innovative ideas and features that might bode well for the site.
4. Finish RobotWarz
Ugh. RobotWarz. Probably the worst experience I’ve ever had in an online project.
I won’t get into the details of it, but basically I’ve had nothing but problems with this endeavour due to the developers.
This goal is simple: to finally finish RobotWarz and have it up and running to the public. I’m not even attaching an “average $500/month income” statement to this goal as I did last time, as all I really want now is to finally finish this project!
While most of this goal is out of my hands, I still made it a goal as I do need to make sure this happens this year. If that means firing the current developers and hiring yet another team, then so be it. The point is that this is getting beyond the point of ridiculous now and something needs to be done about it.
I’ll be very interested to see what I say about this goal 1 year from now.
5. Grow Movie-Vault to 100k Unique Hits Per Month
This is another goal that I failed in 2010 but hope to achieve in 2011.
I did an extremely successful entire revamp of Movie-Vault in 2009 and early 2010 which was a major undertaking and badly needed to be done. Last year, while I had wanted to focus on both traffic and content, I only ended up getting the content going, although I did put a decent effort into growing traffic via social media and a few paid campaigns.
Movie Vault is now an awesome site with great content. In fact, just yesterday we were at a red carpet premiere and did a video interview with Helen Mirren and John Hurt.
All the site needs now is traffic and exposure, and that is what I hope to give it in 2011. I already have a number of things in the works, but in order to achieve this goal I am going to have to really focus on getting our presence known out there on the interwebs.
My main plan at the moment is very simple – to simply contact a crapload of movie and movie-related websites, and see how we can partner together. Perhaps I will get my developers to make our news and/or reviews into special XML feeds that webmasters can use (with backlinks to our site), submit some of our unique news posts to larger sites, etc. but we just need to get ourselves out there.
I may also harness our extremely popular forum community, which receives 300-600 new posts a day, to help spread the word of our site (through referral contests, taking advantage of social media, etc.).
Those are my goals for 2011. Let’s see how many I can achieve!
And how about your SEO projects?
All The Best
Since I am outsourcing 100% of my SEO work, I didn’t make it a goal as I have no direct control over the results.
Great goals and looking forward to some action!
You should probably just fold Robotwarz.
Why throw good money after bad?
Well when you’re already in so much, it makes more sense to just finish it rather than scrap the whole thing. That’s partly what is so frustrating… the game is very near completion…
You “think” its almost done, but once it’s “completed” , then you start playing the game of “finding and fixing the bugs” , which is a long process, plus probably tons of additional coding that will need to be done that you don’t know about until its live. I agree, scrap the whole thing.
I know how hard it must be to drop a project that seems close to completion. The reality is that this project is eating up your time and creating unnecessary frustration. Sometimes you have to accept when a project is a failure. Perhaps it is at least worth putting on the backburner until you accomplish your other goals. Obviously creating a game turned out to be a bigger challenge than you anticipated.
Good goals Tyler. $10.000 + from pokerforums? that is a GREAT amount! I would really focus on that as you already got that, so it is possible again! Try to get some of those poker stars back into negotiations!
Hope to see robotwarz up and running too this year 🙂
Some good goals and an impressive revenue from a forum, i have a gaming forum with 45,000 members and i wish i got those numbers 😛
Nick
Great goals Tyler. I like that this time around they are much more manageable. In the past a lot of your goals were too broad or too optimistic. Now you’ll actually be able to reach most of those goals and get some satisfaction from that. The real challenge will be giving enough attention to each goal throughout the year.
Great to put a list of your goals in writing. I look forward to an update on how the goals are coming in the future.
– Robert
Waiting for 2012 for another post about your failed goals..lol..got used to it.
Good, believable goals, Tyler. Thanks for posting them. By far the most important one for me is your goal for more posts of your own. I only ever became a reader becuase we connected, idea and personality-wise. If I have any real criticism of the blog it would be that lately there has been way too little of Tyler.
I vote you pursue the Robotwarz project. As you said, you have a lot invested. I am not sure I’d ever undertake such a project to begin with, but if I had, I sure as heck wouldn’t drop it this far down the road.
There is way, way to little originality online. Too many people just try to put a different spin of what someone else is already doing. You’ve created something unique and it deserves the chance to succeed or fail on it’s own merits, not becuase of ‘second guessing’ and suffering ‘buyer’s remorse’.
I’d also recommend you read through Seth Goodin’s (yeah, the creator of Squidoo and many other profitable Internet projects) blog. Seth has a pretty consistent mantra that has served him well … get things done to the point they are ‘good enough’ and then SHIP .. open them up.
More is lost by waiting to get those last details ‘just so’ than is ever lost by shipping a product that’s only 85% finished, or wherever you feel RobotWarz is at now. Lop off some features, remove some options, simplify if you have to, but ship it and let the ‘Net decide how good it is.
Or so Dave opines.
AKAIK youv’e got the answer in one!
I’m surprised that you didn’t put any goals to achieve a specified dollar amount.
I used to in previous years, but purposely didn’t this year as I wanted more specific goals. You could argue that a fixed dollar amount is a specific goal, but what I mean is a goal that has a direct answer in how to achieve it. By simply having “make more money” as a goal, I am not really helping myself.
Hi Tyler,
Last year I started reading your blog. I became a really big fan of it and eventually read all the way through to current day, but was hesitant to sign up because you were updating less frequently. Now I see the extra effort you’re putting in and I decided to finally register. I’ve really enjoyed your blog so far and can’t wait to see how you do this year. Good luck 🙂
You have very realistic goals. I think you wrote so much back in 2007 because you were still building your brand. Now all of that old content is great because it keeps bringing in visitors for you.
I have too agree with you about the outsourcing it saved me about 4 hours of daily work now i got more time to develop my projects, And very nice set of goal im looking forward to read all these 14 posts this year:D
140 is definitely a good number of blogs to target posting. Looking forward to reading them all. 🙂
Those sound like attainable goals for the year. I always find it kind of hard to set yearly goals for myself but I am try and getting better at it year by year. You have given me a lot to think about thanks.
I really feel like your movie website is gonna get real big in 2011, not sure about the poker website, but with the right moves I am sure you can make 2011 a good year for yourself.
-Jean
er, you can use the internet archive to check on old post totals and it doesnt look like movie vault is getting “300-600” posts a day. at a rough glance it looks like its been struggling to average 200, and just poking into the forums for a moment it looks like almost all of that is from random game threads where the replies are one word or something.
you talk about movie vault like its only problem is promotion, but the content is pretty mediocre. the news is sporadic and you can find better anywhere else, and the reviews are more numerous than particularly well written. even when its good (and sometimes it is), you can find reviews and news absolutely everywhere. you need to offer something people cant get anywhere else. right now it isnt doing that.
Whatever goal you set for your work, all work needs a start and an successfull end. Set time for your work that certain task need to be finished within the time set. Make sure you have enough time allotted to accomplish your goals, but at the same time you should have an end date in mind as well, or you may find they tend to drag on and on, until you can barely remember why it was you were looking at accomplishing that particular goal.
[…] Cruz might already be a month behind, but he is finally getting around to outlining his work goals for 2011. His goals are certainly more numerous than mine, but his track record for annual work goal success […]
Wow, what a good list of goals. I am sure you can achieve most of them… 🙂
Those are optimistic goals but I won’t be surprised if you reach them. You really have a lot of knowledge about Blogging, I love it. Blogging isn’t for everyone but if you provide efforts, you will succeed.
140 blog post looking forward to read them all.
Revitalize your PokerForums thats great news because lots of people are now in poker.
Inspirational!
I guess I can and should step into different niches.
I was always scared about getting out of my favorite niche but seeing you..it seems to be possible enough.hehe.
Really good idea! If you want good success then you have to decide the start and end specific time period as well as goal for your work.