Well, it has officially been half a year of going it on my own. Let’s take a look at the usual monthly charts, then spend a little time talking about the big picture.

First up, let’s take a look at the total revenue versus goals:

Looks like we’ve hit a bit of a wall, with July revenue coming in right around June’s unfortunately low level. This calls for evasive action. More on that below.

Here’s the breakdown of where the money came from:

This is generally a good breakdown, now we just need to get the volume of every piece to be bigger. Lots bigger.

The revenue shortfall is not nearly as bad as it seems when you measure up the total six-month goal with actual revenue:

You can see that up until July, we were actually still exceeding the overall goal.

With the apparent stagnation in mind, we sat down and mapped out some (hopefully realistic) goals for the next three months, as well as specific methods for achieving those goals. I’ll be sharing those in the coming days.

What about an update on the specific goals I listed last month?

1. Quarterly Newsletter by July 15. – fail
2. Photography website by July 15. – fail
3. Three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31. – fail
4. One advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31. – fail
5. Merchandise shop by July 31. – fail

Yup, I failed to complete even one of them. A heaping helping if failure—yum!

I made good progress on the newsletter, but found that deciding what goes into the first one is taking longer than I had hoped. Once I get it launched, future editions will take much less time, since I’ll just be filling out a template.

New advertisers were signed up, but not as many as I had hoped. I may have to invoke the dreaded “cold call” to really begin improving performance there.

I only did a minimal amount of work on the merchandise shop, but part of that work was to assess the money-making potential, which was determined to be quite low, so that’s been pushed down to a lower priority.

As far as goals for August, I’ve got more to say about that than I care to cram into this post, so come back later this week for updates on that front.