2006 was a bit of a strange year for me. It started very well, then I had to take 3 months off, then I had another period of excellent results and then it went downhill again…as I lost my way quite badly.

My Target for 2006

As regular readers will know, I set myself a target of $50,000 gross. I then broke this down into 365 days, meaning an average daily target of $137.

The results

I exceeded target by over $18,000.

Month by month

In January I released a good desktop based product which sold very well and continues to sell to this day. This was the entry for my own competition and is known as PLR Manna.

In February, that product continued to sell well. As well as this I started working on a system to quickly create adsense based sites. Unfortunately I was a little bit poorly towards the end of February and was forced to take March, April and part of May off whilst I was recuperating. This led to a very large reduction in my earnings…with April as low as $1900 (for the month).

The time off was well spent though, as I had many ideas for future services and products, as well as proof that my "Automated Income Streams" does work well in practice, as well as in theory.

I came back to my desk the second week of May, and contacted my programmer who was able to take some of my new ideas (and techniques I had been using for years) and make them into a new tool. This new tool to be used to create Adsense based sites quickly and easily. I ummed and aahed for a long while, debating whether or not to release this to the public…in the end I posted into one of the private forums that I am a member of, offering 10 buyers the chance to purchase at $1000 each. I had 3 buyers lined up within a few hours, however I had a clamour of people wanting to get their hands on the tool for a lower price.

This led to a `partnership` with the owners of Keyword Avalanche who agreed to do all the promotion for the tool in return for a 50% cut. Though I was not overly excited about it, I decided it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about how JV (Joint Ventures) work and get my name out to some of the bigger players in the Internet Marketing industry.

Of course, I had to weigh up those positives against the negatives of having my tool watered down in it's effectiveness and providing support to the buyers of the tool.

I decided that the positives outweighed the negatives and things went forward from there. Looking back, this was probably not a wise decision. This product is known as SEO SmArticle Composer.

In June, we had the football world cup, so a lot of my time was spent watching matches - each 4 years I take time off in order to watch as many matches as I can. However, on the business front sales of smarticle were going very well as a few of the "big" Internet Marketers were promoting it. I also made a couple of templates and sold them very cheaply…

Moving onto July, after input from a number of smarticle users it had progressed onto Version 2, and my programmer had implemented "templating". Now users are able to create different templates to suit their needs. Of course, this was a new market which someone had to fill, and so I did with a number of templates. These sold very well, and smarticle continued to sell - making July my best month of online earnings.

In fact, at the end of July I smashed through my $50,000 target for the year! This meant that any income from August onwards, was gravy.

This was bad, very bad for me - I started to lose my concentration on business. This can be seen quite clearly as I made $50,000 during the first 7 months of 2006, yet only $18,000 from August through December…

I had already stated one of my resolutions for 2006 was to create a subscription based service - so during August I started up a service for smarticle owners - providing a couple of templates and assorted bonuses each month for a low price. This service is still going now, with around 50 paying subscribers…

From September until November, I actually did very little. I made very few sales, I just lost my Mojo quite badly…the problem was that I reached target so early during the year. I even closed down my old oscommerce templates site as I didn't want to answer emails - it remians closed, but I will re-open it in the new year.

It's only this month, December, that I've got back on track - I have some ideas for new adventures to be implemented in the New Year as well as some ideas for breathing new life into some of my old sites.

Of course, I've only recounted a few of the main things that happened during the year - I also started lots of smaller sites selling products such as Click Bank Manna and Social Smart Submit for example, as well as numerous templates, eBooks and so on.

Conclusion

2006 was a good year.
I learned a lot about human nature and the (un)kindness of others.
I learned that it is easy to talk the talk, but not so easy to walk the walk.
I learned that it's important to create relationships with peers.
I learned it's important that we all have a different view of the same thing.

What of 2007?

As I already mentioned I have a few new ideas lined up. Adsense is not a part of 2007 at all. I will breathe life back into some defunct sites - this will mean updating a few products on my product based sites and changing my portfolio of Adsense sites over to CPA (Cost Per Action) sites. This will be an ongoing thing for the first quarter of 2007.