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.

We’d appreciate your opinions on these following names. Please vote for which one you like best. If you think you have a better one, we welcome your suggestions!

Here’s our criteria for a name: it needs to be creative, short & memorable; with no specific references to real estate or photography. Although, it does need to sound nice with the words photography and design (for example, having something like “Photo” “Design” or “Studios” appended to the name).

The Naked Loon pokes online fun at Seattle
If you’re a germophobe, a naked cyclist or a burned-out dot-commer, you’re on The Naked Loon target list.

Prepare to be mocked.

Tim Ellis, a Kenmore Internet entrepreneur, brainstormed his travesty hit list of people, places and stereotypes before launching his online satirical newspaper The Naked Loon. Think The Onion, but hyper-local and less crude.

Now if only there were a simple, reliable way to turn media attention into dollars in my pocket.

I’d like to extend special thanks to Noelene Clark for taking the initiative to contact me and for penning and excellent piece. Thanks, Noelene!

Here’s my favorite (available here—at the moment):

Click to Enlarge

Awesome. The Naked Loon at the top of the heap of over a thousand stories.

Update: This one is pretty sweet, too (search link). 6-year-old me on Google News = Pure Awesome.

First up, the total revenue versus goals:

See the purple bar over June? See how it’s not only lower than May, but also lower than April? Yeah, that’s not good.

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

Nothing particularly noteworthy about the mix here, other than to point out that the fundraising drive carried over into June with moderate success, but clearly still not enough to make up for my apparent total laziness on the business side of things.

July will bring some interesting changes, as my wife Jeni will be getting in on the business. With her training in visual art, photography, and interior design, and my experience and contacts in the local real estate market, we realized that real estate photography would be a perfect fit. I’ll be assisting her with my real estate knowledge and also by setting up a website to sell her services.

In order to help me get things moving, allow me to lay out some very specific goals for the month of July.

1. Launch the Seattle Bubble Quarterly Newsletter by July 15.
2. Set up a basic website for Jeni’s photography by July 15.
3. Sign up at least three new advertisers to Seattle Bubble by July 31.
4. Sign up at least one advertiser to The Naked Loon by July 31.
5. Open merchandise shop for Seattle Bubble & The Naked Loon by July 31.

I’ve also got some major improvements in the works for Seattle Bubble, as well as a couple of entirely new ideas that I think have great potential, so I’ll be sure to post updates here as things progress. Hopefully I’ll get back on track in July.

This week’s list looks a little like this:

Monday

• 1 Seattle Bubble story
• 2 Naked Loon stories
• Add sidebar to Seattle Bubble Forum
• Make 1 ad contact

Tuesday

• 1 Seattle Bubble story
• 2 Naked Loon stories
• 1 Thatch Mound post
• Make 1 ad contact
• Work on Seattle Bubble maps database

etc…

At roughly halfway through the week, I admit that I’m a bit behind. Clearly I didn’t make a post here yesterday, and adding the sidebar to the Seattle Bubble forum took a little longer than I had hoped it would. However, I was intentionally aggressive with the week’s goals when I made the list, and I’m mostly satisfied with where I’m at so far.

Working for yourself without the “threat” of disappointing a supervisor, it can sometimes be difficult to find the motivation to do more than the bare minimum. Making aggressive, detailed lists like this is my method of self-motivation. I’ll update you in a few weeks to let you know what kind of results I’m getting.

However, thanks to fundraising drive at Seattle Bubble (which I admit is a bit of a cheat), I was still able to meet and even exceed the raw revenue growth goals for the month. Let’s have a look.

First up, the total revenue versus goals:

Revenue in May was over 1/3 higher than April, which is a slower growth rate than the prior month, but still totally acceptable in my book. Especially when you consider that we still came in 20% over the minimum goal, and even slightly (5%) above the moderate goal. Nice!

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

Obviously not the ideal mix, and definitely not one that can be relied on long-term. However, the fundraising drive did help tide me over through a month in which it was difficult to be very productive.

The real challenge will be getting back into the swing of things this month, and growing revenue with a renewed passion.  I’ll be looking into making better use of Google Ads, finally getting a subscription newsletter off the ground for Seattle Bubble, and also sending out as many advertising contacts as I can to try to get more direct ads going.

First up, a look at the total revenue versus my goals:

Nice! Total revenue nearly doubled from March to April. The money made last month was just over 20% of what I was making monthly at the previous job, and almost enough to pay the bills (shaded blue area). As you can see, I’m still a good amount ahead of the minimum goals.

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

Now that’s more like it. The purple slice for “Direct Ads” that disappeared last month came back with a vengeance. This is great news, especially since I feel like I’ve still only barely scratched the surface of the potential in direct ads. I’ll be working hard this month to grow that revenue stream even more.

I achieved April goal of bringing in at least 15% of revenue from Direct Ads, but failed to expand into the realm of subscriptions and direct sales. That goal carries on into this month, along with the goal of growing the Direct Ads by at least 25%.

The to-spend list is just a list of the major projects I’m working on, and a number of hours that I intend to spend on each project this week. Here’s what this week’s to-spend list looks like:

• Seattle Bubble - 10 hours
• Naked Loon - 10 hours
• Project Madison - 10 hours
• Thatch Mound - 3 hours

The number of hours don’t add up to 40, and that’s intentional. I want to give myself some room to be flexible, so this method just lists the minimum number of hours for each project.

I’ve written this list on my whiteboard, and as I track my time spent during each day, I’m just making tick-marks next to each item to count up the total hours spent

At the end of the week I’ll write another post to address whether I accomplished my goal hours, and whether it helped me be more productive this week.