So how many of you were like me and pretty much unproductive the past 2 weeks? I did a little bookmarking here and there and that was about it. I gave my odesk writers the past 2 weeks off and let them know I wasn’t planning on using them the week of Christmas and New Year’s since I wasn’t going to be very active. They were most understanding and I think relieved as they expressed how busy they were with the Holidays as well. They sent me nice heartfelt emails and e-cards wishing me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’s.

I surpassed my goal for earnings in December. My goal was to hit  over $500.00 and I did! I somehow managed to earn $717.80. of course that was not all from adsense, my actual adsense earning was only $276.73 but I somehow managed to get some affiliate sales that earned me the rest. Now that it is January, I really feel time slipping away. I need to make a consistent earning of at least $1300.00 a month by April. Of course more would be better but that’s the magic number for now. I think my overall goal for 2010 will be to be earning about $3,000 a month. If I were earning $3k a month, I would then be able to afford my mortgage all on my own without the need of roommates to help. That’s what I really want the most…to be roommate-free and have my house back the way it was with peace and quiet and no one to get upset with because there are dirty dishes piled in the sink that I didn’t use. Welp, sorry about that tangent but its the little things that I can appreciate the most in life. lol

So the good news is I earned a decent size amount from December, the bad news is that 3 days after Christmas I had to take my car into the shop to get the timing belts replaced which cost me $829.00. Ouchie! The good news is, I only had to put about $300 on my credit card and paid the rest in cash. Thank you google, thank you Paypal!

So word on the street is that Xfactor may be making his niche sites authority sites. All I know is that he said something about uploading 10-20 pages of content a day and he didn’t supply any indication that was building new sites. So I assume he means he is uploading new pages to his previous sites that are already ranking to earn even more money. This also encourages me to want to spend more time adding more content to my previous sites. Of course you can’t always assume that a site with loads of content is going to guarantee you to earn big and discount a smaller site’s earning potential because it doesn’t has as many pages of content. One of my xfactor sites seems to be solidly earning $5 a day on its own now and yet I have a blog with over 80 posts that only earns about $.50-1.50 a day. lol

I think the best approach for me right now is to do a little of both. Continue to build 2-3 sites a week while uploading fresh content with new keywords to target on my already exisiting sites.

Oh yea, I hit a new high for my adsense earning a few days ago. I hit $25.69 for the day. Just two days before that it hit $20.07 but the rest of the days for the week ranged between $7-$10.

An interesting thing Mike shared with me about a few weeks ago as I approached being burned out was he said not to worry about article marketing my sites. He said that he can often rank a site on its keywords alone and simple bookmarking. So with my last 3 websites I purposely did not article market them or run UAW. I only bookmarked them with digg and then ran book marking demon on them. they are showing only about 2-5 backlinks in google webtools which are from the bookmarks but one site is sitting at #10 on page 1, another site at position #5 on page 2 andthe final site is #1 on page 2. I think if they have time, they will move up to page 1 on their own, if not, I know that just 1-2 article marketing backlinks will do them some good. So Mike was right, if you choose your keywords wisely and really are particular about the SOC you can rank with little effort.