5 Reasons (Excuses) Why I Didn’t Reach My Million Dollar Goal As Planned

Over a year ago, I started a challenge for myself to make a million dollars from my blog in 365 days or less. Surprisingly I did not reach the goal, not even close. I knew it was going to be tough but I needed something to motivate myself to rise above my financial situation and move away from ongoing family issues.

It’s not so much that it had to be a million dollars per se, but that amount would definitely have given me enough of a head start where I would have the freedom to do the things the way I want in order to become completely financially free.

What I kick myself the most, is that I was halfway there some years back but let things slide when it started going downhill due to the economy, a marriage breakdown and my lack of financial preparation for unforeseen events.

I didn’t get in high gear and fight to save what I had, instead, I blamed it on the rain and basically gave up.

Although not an excuse, it is true that a lot of couples are not financially prepared for a breakup and that’s when the real financial chaos starts.

Related: Can You Make Money From A Blog?

 

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I guess that is what lessons are for, to learn from them. And some of us may take only one bad turn of events to take preventive action. While others may need many (hard) lessons before learning to manage their finances to avoid financial disaster.

The thing is even though a million dollars isn’t so easy to get, it sure isn’t the same value as it used to be. In some places, that is what you have to lay down just for an average-priced home. Here, the average price for a home is around $400,000 but still a sizeable chunk for home ownership.

Having a million dollars may also not be enough to retire with either (if you have no other source of income) without having some solid investments that have high-growth potential and paying good dividends. But it still is a lot of money that can give you ease of mind and freedom to do something with to make it grow, rather than just spend foolishly to make it disappear.

When you really calculate it, in order to earn a million dollars in a year,  it works out to $83,333 a month or $2,740 daily that you need to be making to get there. Not an easy feat especially if you are expecting your blog to grow at the speed of lightning!

Related: I Sold A Domain Name for $2500 Without Doing Anything!

What a million dollars would have done for me is to have a mortgage-free home and give me time-freedom to grow my online business plus money-freedom to not worry about paying the bills. To be able to do the things I want to do (when I want) and not the things I have (no choice) but to do because am not financially free.

Everyone wants financial freedom and it’s the ultimate goal to achieve.

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Here’s Why I Didn’t Reach My Financial Goal

1. Had unrealistic high expectations without preparation and a clear plan to follow. I was hoping the hype of the million dollar challenge and just the desire to succeed would have been enough but it certainly was not. Gimmicks rarely work and only go viral if it benefits your audience too. You need a solid plan to guide you, no matter what you want to achieve. Setting both realistic short-term and long-term goals is necessary to avoid failure.

Related: How NOT To Make Money Online – Take It From An Expert!

2. Didn’t write a post every day (as said I would) and slacked off. Not that writing a post every day was going to guarantee me a million dollars by the end of the year, I didn’t stick to my plan as I said I would. It’s tough to write a post every day as requires quite a bit of time and brainstorming as you can’t just slap it together, throw it out there and hope for the best. If blogging isn’t your full-time job paying your bills, then you don’t have that amount of time to dedicate to it. That’s also why is good to be at least a month or two ahead on posts so that you don’t fall behind. Although I did have some posts ahead when I started out, it wasn’t enough, as soon caught up to me because I couldn’t keep up.

3. Lack of social media promotion to get traffic to my blog. I was going to regularly update my instagram and facebook to grow followers but didn’t. Again time was the factor, not having enough time to devote to social media which a lot of effort is needed to get good results. Instagram alone was difficult enough, managing the two cat accounts I have (one for my cat and the other a featured cat account), never mind updating my own account.  So basically I stuck to pinterest because it was easier, as only a matter of creating a pinnable image for each blog post (grabbing one from unsplash and adding text to it in canva or a photo editor) and saving to my pinterest boards. Which also was not working as I didn’t do it the right way and have since changed my strategy (as explained in my 30-Day Pinterest Marketing Strategy).

4. Didn’t have an amazing product to sell or promote one effectively through affiliate marketing. I didn’t have a product to launch and maybe if I did, that could have helped. But again more time in creating something with time I did not have and no guarantee would have materialized to anything significant either. Nor did I focus enough time on the affiliate marketing end either as mainly concentrated on the one main product that wasn’t selling probably due to not promoting it effectively.

5. Not organized enough as had too many things going on that interfered in growing my blog. There definitely isn’t enough time in the day especially when you are juggling many things. By the time I found some extra time, it was bedtime. Organizing time is essential to achieving any goal. Can’t be all over the place. Although I do things in a routine every day but may be wasting time on the wrong things so not using the time available wisely. That’s where this powerful daily planner comes in handy!

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Related: Do You Want The Lifestyle Of A Digital Nomad?

What I’m Doing Differently Now To Achieve My Financial Goals

Being more realistic about my financial goals and working at a pace I am comfortable with. You just stress yourself out and end up accomplishing nothing if you try to push yourself too hard. So best to say to myself, let’s try a smaller goal (whether it’s a  $1,000 or $5,000 per month) and work towards achieving that instead. Baby steps before the big steps!

Write a blog post weekly rather than daily. Is not necessary to write daily and by pressuring myself to do that just leads to failure in accomplishing it. Of course 2 or 3 posts a week is ideal and, if time permits, I will try to do that but is not necessary. I rather have one quality in-depth post than slap together 2 or 3 (just to get it out there in a week) that I would have to go back and spend more time to adjust anyway. Rather use the additional time optimizing and promoting older posts.

Related: Earn $1 A Day From Every Blog Post You Write

Do more SEO (search engine optimization) on my blog posts. Although I do get traffic from google, I still need to increase it so some fine tuning is needed, especially on some of my older posts. I use All In One SEO wordpress plugin but I heard Yoast SEO is a good one too. They are the two most popular ones. I’ll stick with All In One SEO since I like it and been using it over the years for other sites I’ve had. Just need to tweak it a bit to use it more effectively. I’m not going to bother as much about the backlinking aspect (although does help if done right) in getting google rankings and PR. With google’s algorithms changing so frequently you cannot keep up to it anyway. I believe is best to put out quality content, do keyword targeting and internal linking to other posts within the content…and just let google find you.

Focus more on getting social media traffic primarily from Pinterest to my blog. The days of concentrating on traffic from google alone are gone (as your search engine rankings can change and drop at any time), that is why social media is an important aspect to target for traffic to your blog. And Pinterest is a powerful search engine (like google) with it’s 250 million users so have to optimize my pins and pin daily there to reach that traffic to my blog. I truly believe once that is achieved, my blog income will grow rapidly because many bloggers are making money from pinterest traffic alone. That is why I am now trying Tailwind’s free trial in helping to schedule and save time in my daily pinning efforts.

Promote products from some affiliate programs that I can make money from but at the same time are beneficial to my readers. You can’t promote just anything for the sake of making money but that you yourself would use and it provides value or solves a problem for your readers. A few of the ones I am promoting that I do recommend to use are:

• Bluehost: A solid reputable company that provides reliable hosting which includes a free domain name, ssl certificate and a 1-click wordpress install at a special discounted price if you purchase through my link. A self-hosted blog is the best way to go if you want to grow and succeed in your online business.
• Amazon For Business: Who doesn’t shop on amazon? By opening an amazon business account you get special business-only price savings, quantity discounts, easy price comparisons, prime shipping and more.
• Shareasale: An affiliate marketing network that has been long around (over 18 years) with numerous affiliate merchants to choose and promote products from. You first need to open a shareasale account to become an affiliate for the popular Tailwind Scheduler for Pinterest and Instagram.
• ConvertKit: An email list is another way to get continuous traffic to your blog and have a target audience you can promote to. It’s how many bloggers grow their blog and online business. To build your email subscriber list, you need an email marketing tool that is easy and automated. ConvertKit’s email marketing software is targeted to content creators so is a top choice especially for bloggers, podcasters and authors.
• Grammarly: A must-have automated writing assistant for any blogger or content writer. An online grammar checker that enhances your writing by scanning text for grammatical and punctuation errors. Grammarly’s free version corrects most spelling and grammar errors, with an option for its more advanced features through the paid version. It was a big help catching mistakes in this post!

Yes, there are some bloggers making a million dollars (and more) a year from their blog, but they didn’t get there in a year’s time. For most, it required much more time and dedication.

In reality, if one can make $5,000 or $10,000 a month from their blog, that is a great income and is achievable. And you can scale it from there over time.

I haven’t given up on reaching my million dollar goal, it just won’t be as fast as planned. I am happy with the direction my blog is going. I am now doing various strategies to increase both traffic and income, which has been working.

Have you reached your financial goal and if not, what steps are you taking?

If you found this article helpful, PIN IT ON PINTEREST!

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*Please note there may be affiliate links in this post where I may make a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you purchase. You can review my disclosure for more info.