2012 marks the year of the blog. What makes 2012 so special?

I’ve been blogging Good Financial Cents since 2008. My wife started blogging on Blogspot earlier in the same year (I migrated her blog House of Rose in ’09). Together we’ve been blogging for almost seven years.

She’s been more of the family/mommy blogger, whereas I’ve blogged completely about personal finance (with a little bit of In-N-Out Burger thrown in here and there.)

I have managed to make money from my blog, not only by getting new clients for my financial planning firm but also from Google AdSense and a few affiliates. My income was reaching very respectable levels just with AdSense before Google came up with their algorithm update named Panda or otherwise known as the big evil bear. With Panda, my traffic was slashed by 60% to 70% right along with my Google AdSense revenue. Ever since, I’ve been scraping by trying to figure out the next steps.

Why have I have named 2012 the year of the blog?

Two reasons:

Number One. Last fall I made a big change in my financial planning practice, which now allows me to blog more freely. Although I gave up a substantial amount of income to make this a reality, in my belief it’ll be worth it. Well worth it.

Number two. We finally reached the point financially where my wife was allowed to quit her day job. Her duties now include help raising our three awesome boys in addition to becoming my social media manager.

Note: I initially came up with the title of an executive assistant, but she absolutely hated it. Social media manager was more to her liking. Final score: Wife – 1, Husband – 0. Don’t worry…..I’m used to it. 🙂

How Are We Going to Do it?

Not having to worry about her day job will now give her the freedom to be able to blog and focus on our online efforts even more. Many of her duties will include helping get this blog going, executing linking strategies with my other blogs, and also becoming the main video editor for my YouTube channel, Good Financial Cents and Soldier of Finance. She might not realize this yet, but she may be putting more hours in with me than she did her old job, but my thinking is that she’s going to enjoy much more.

In addition to the existing blogs that I’ve already been maintaining for the past couple years, I’ve also established a few other niche blogs that I feel will be a great source of income going forward. I’ll share more of those details in coming posts, so be sure to sign up to our newsletter to stay tuned.

Let’s Make it a Challenge!

When I got the email about the 30K blogging challenge, I immediately signed up. I’m a big believer in accountability, and I thought what a perfect timing for such a challenge.

While the goal with the challenge is to make $30,000 over the next year, my hope is not only will I reach that goal, but we’ll kill it.

Between the strategies I have in place and now having my wife as my partner, my goal is to make at least $100,000 net from all my online efforts.

You’ll be able to keep tabs on this with our monthly income reports that we’ll be starting soon. (Kudos to Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income for being the authority in this transparent strategy.)

We look forward to providing you with future updates, and thanks again for coming along for the ride.