ANNUAL REVIEW 2023 AND GOALS FOR 2024

Another year has quickly gone by and what a year 2023 has been. Like most other years it is time for me to review 2023 and set (copy) the same goals from 2024 as I didn’t achieve most of those goals.

These are the articles I published in the previous years:

ANNUAL REVIEW 2022 AND GOALS FOR 2023

ANNUAL REVIEW 2021 AND GOALS FOR 2022

ANNUAL REVIEW 2020 AND GOALS FOR 2021

Looking at the goals from the previous year, I managed to hit some of these goals but let’s recap the goals I wrote down for 2023. I think for 2024 I will only write down 2-3 and try to focus on those.

• launch a course on building affiliate stores
• launch a podcast on dope tech (awesome technology in Australia)
• launch a new product for WordPress
• build more muscle mass and drop my body fat from 19% to 14%
• do at least 5 continuous muscle-ups
• increase traffic to this website by 50% and another website I manage
• increase YouTube traffic and hit 2000 subscribers
• increase affiliate commissions
• spend more time with family and go for at least 2 holidays with OJAM.

Let’s review 2023 and see what I have achieved:

WEBSITE TRAFFIC

Like the previous year, the traffic to this website has dropped as none of my blog posts have gone viral. There is only one or two articles which still consistently gets traffic but besides that, there hasn’t been any major boost. The number of clicks has dropped but the number of impressions has increased. Also, the average position has also increased.

Here are some stats from Google Analytics. There’s some data that is missing from Jan to April and I’m assuming this is because there was a migration to GA4:

You will also notice that on this website, I have added Google Adsense. I decided to add another revenue stream and see if the website can pay for itself based on Google Adsense. I have only enabled this at the end of December 2023 so I will be able to report back to see if I was able to generate any money from this but based on another website A Whimsy Life, Google Adsense has already covered the cost of the domain.

The average session duration and the Bounce rate have both slightly decreased.

I wrote 46 articles in 2023 which is much lower than the previous year of 65 articles. The plan was to write 2x more articles but this didn’t happen as I only stuck to the schedule of writing 1 article a week on a Tuesday. However, I have been writing and publishing articles on other websites such as Advertise Me, Hype Lab and Build Affiliate Stores consistently. The plan is to use more AI tools to generate more long-form articles in 2024.

For my main business website Advertise Me I have written more long form articles and they are now ranking well for 3 words searches however for the keywords such as Digital Signage and Digital Solutions they have dropped. Here’s a snapshot of the rankings:

Overall, the business website has generate more leads but I believe we didn’t publish enough content and we need to either do 2 articles a week or more. I need to convince my co-founder to hire a sales and content marketing person to do this job. With business we acquired more medical centre clients this year who wanted to use our medical roster system to display doctors and visitor posters. Since we hired our full time full stack software developer, we launched a new Bed Management System cloud based tool and also improved our ePosters interactive poster system. We’ve also made some major improvements to our digital signage software and digital wayfinding solutions.

YOUTUBE TRAFFIC

YouTube traffic, revenue and subscribers have all increased however I did not reach 2000 subscribers. Getting subscribers is not easy and I did end up publishing more videos (including shorts) which in effect increased the views and watch hours.

Even though the views and watch time hours increased, the estimated revenue dropped by 19% compared to the previous year. I have noticed the daily revenue doubled in the past couple of months especially when I tried publishing at least 1 video a day.

INCREASE AFFILIATE COMMISSIONS

Like the previous years, tracking my affiliate commission is cumbersome since I’m on different affiliate platforms and therefore won’t share my commissions. However, I have noticed that one of my affiliate partners which I was promoting changed their tracking period from 30 to 7 days and this impacted my commissions. I might look for other affiliate programs that have higher tracking periods and are recurring.

I have been busy with my main business hence the reason why I haven’t had time to look at affiliate marketing programs and maintaining affiliate websites.

MUSCLE MASS AND WEIGHT

In terms of health and fitness, I’ve kept up with the running every day and still constantly do daily bodyweight workouts. I feel as though my pace has slowed down a bit further compared to last year because I’m trying to avoid an injury.

I have at one stage reached 14% body fat but then gradually increased to 16/17%.

Yes, like the picture above, I’ve still been running and have been running every day for 4 years. You can read my running journey here: RUNNING. Some of my other fitness goals I achieved this year were:

To run under 5 min per km pace before end of the 2023 year (December)

Run 21 km in December

I also wanted to do a clean muscle up in December. I didn’t train for this and used sheer explosive strength to do it. I managed to do it because I’ve been doing pull-ups on Mondays but I haven’t been able to do continuous muscle ups. Not sure if I plan to continue doing these as one of my goals is to be able to do a handstand and making 5 hand steps. Here’s a video of me doing the muscle up for the first time last year and I decided to do it again because my watch was in the way. The second one was much cleaner.

I don’t have photos of me at the beach but here’s one at a pool.

Another picture of me during one of my runs at Noosa beach.

NEW PRODUCTS AND WEBSITES

As mentioned above, we launched a few new products for the business. In particular new modules for our digital signage platform. I also launched a new website called Hype Lab. I have been purchasing a few new domains which I hope to launch this year so watch out for this space. You can always subscribe to my newsletter to receive all the latest information of these product launches.

EDUCATION

I was enrolled in 2 Tafe courses but decided not to continue with these as they involved a lot of group work and also video recordings. I didn’t have the time to do this and I eventually just studied for 3 certifications, Security Operations Analyst Associate, Azure Administrator Associate and the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. These were much quicker and easier to obtain compared to the Tafe courses. I am maybe thinking of doing the Google Cloud Associate Certification in 2024 but that all depends if I have the time. You can check out my Credly profile or my LinkedIn profile if you want to see my latest certification achievements.

SPEND MORE TIME WITH FAMILY

We haven’t been to many family holidays in 2023 as we are planning to save some money to go overseas. Also, my son who was in year 10 started tutoring, which meant we couldn’t really go away on the weekends.

GOALS FOR 2024

For 2024 I want to make the goals very simple and achievable:

• Business – generate an additional $10k in monthly revenue
• Side project – launch a course on building affiliate stores and launch another website/app
• Fitness – learn how to do a handstand and take 5 hand steps without falling
• Health – improve my sleep. I have been monitoring my sleep and it’s poor

What are your goals for 2024?

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