To see more End-Of-Year stats for LeadSafeMama.com for 2019, click here.
It’s really important to set goals —
sometimes focusing on reaching my goals is all I have to keep me going!
For as long as I can remember (definitely since I finished college, in December of 1990, and possibly for years before then too) I have spent the week of New Year’s defining my goals for the upcoming year. Until our total loss house fire in 2002 I was pretty “religious” about starting a new actual “Goal Book” each year – a hardcover notebook, with plain white pages – fresh paper, fresh cover for the new year! I would put all my personal and business goals in there – financial goals, family goals, and others.
In more recent years, because my readers are an integral part of my business, I have been sharing my yearly business goals, as well as my progress towards them, here on my site — because that externally bolsters my accountability for living up to my own expectations [and ground covered towards my ultimate goal: “educating all parents” about the issue of childhood Lead poisoning!].
My business goals each and every year for my advocacy work:
In recent years (and really over the past decade), my business goals have spanned these six realms (with the order of priorities sometimes shifting in one direction or another):
- Doing everything possible to provide accessible, straight, accurate, and complete information about the issue of childhood Lead exposure to every parent in the world (not just this country) .
- Exposing new corporate bad actors, and holding as many companies accountable for wrongdoing each year as possible (to help shift the paradigm regarding corporate accountability for polluting our planet.)
- Having my business and advocacy work cover the full costs of the work (including covering the costs of my legal team), to enable me to continue doing what I do.
- Having my business and advocacy work generate a salary — one that is enough to (eventually) maintain a comfortable life for my family (and for my children, long-term.)
- Having my income cover educational travel (cultural immersion experiences / and unplugged vacations!) with my family each year (eventually).
- Having my business earn enough that I can afford to offer work to other parents [mostly to other mothers — as they have fewer opportunities] wanting to return to the work place after years at home with young children, and who want to do work that helps families in some way!
I will cover my “advocacy goals” (programmatically, vs. from a business perspective) in a separate post — and will link it here as soon as that post is written.
So how do you know you are on track, Tamara?
The most important goal is “goal #1” — reaching every parent in the world with this message. If that goal is reached, all other goals will follow (both programmatic and business/financial). To this end, I have a lot of fun following my stats here on the blog as a way to measure my progress. I mean, frankly – to have reached nearly 2,000,000 individuals in more than 200 countries is one calendar year (2019) is absolutely phenomenal, and I am so thankful for the support you gave me that made this possible!
There are about 7.53 billion people on the planet today — and about 2.86 billion of those people are estimated to be parents at this moment… (based on various web searches!)… so while 2,000,000 is really just a drop in the bucket, I “declare” that I’m definitely on the path towards reaching my goal! 😉 At a rate of 2,000,000 people a year, I would reach all of these parents in just about 1000 years (taking into account the potential for increase in reach each year – lol) 😉
Nearly 2,000,000 people….It is truly hard to believe this has actually happened.
My husband has always been a fan of the “language is generative” philosophy of Martin Heidegger — so of the mind that this apparently miraculous growth happened because I rather boldly “declared it into being” as a possibility (on January 11th of last year), and allowed myself to be inspired and guided by the light of that declaration/new possibility along the path of actions required to fulfill that seemingly outsized vision.
But wait – what – when / how did you declare your goal for 2019 to help make it happen?
Well if you dig around in the “stats” category of my site a bit, you will find all sorts of different graphs and charts… I have written so many of these posts that even I forget sometimes what I wrote or what I declared on any given day. But yesterday I was digging around in my stats [looking for an EOY wrap-up for 2018 which I don’t seem to have!] and found an interesting post (interesting to me at least!) that I wrote on January 11, 2019. Here’s the link to that post.
In that post I used the January 2019 views so far that month (the first 11 days of the month) to predict that, if things continued at that rate (which even I myself thought at the time was – as Spock might say, “highly improbable, Captain”!), I would reach 3,664,775 unique page views by midnight on December 31, 2019. Well, in putting that in writing and publishing it here on my blog – I declared that as “being possible”, swung for the fences, as they say in baseball — and, as it turned out, I EXCEEDED that “crazy”/“unrealistic” target, rounding out the year with 3,826,782 unique page views in 2019! [You can read more about that here!]
My “New Math” for 2020…
Continue reading below the image:
New (declared!) 2020 Page View Goal: 12,102,420
So using that same crazy logic from January 11, 2019 (the projective math shown above and at the top of this post) based on the traffic / unique page view numbers here on the site as of this afternoon – today January 6, 2019, the estimated EOY unique page views for LeadSafeMama.com *could* end up being 12,102,420 page views for the 2020 calendar year! Wouldn’t that be amazing?!
If that happens, that would mean reaching possibly as many as 6,164,000 parents with this message this year — and it would also mean that my business could possibly have gross earnings of $121,024.20 in advertising + affiliate income from my writing in 2020 (with an average earning of close to one cent per page view from my advertising and affiliate income combined… I’ll have a more accurate number for that shortly, based on actual 2019 EOY numbers!)
The little voice of reason in my head is cautioning me that “that’s nuts —you don’t want to overreach”, because “you don’t want to be disappointed in the end (you prefer to be ‘pleasantly surprised’!)”, so I compromised (officially – yesterday – in this post linked here) – and set my goal at 6,000,000 unique views for the year (using a different metric/ entirely different rational for that goal).
…So anything in the 6,000,000 to 12,000,000 range for unique page views in 2020 is the (spectacular and quite unprecedented) target for this calendar year!
Here’s to hoping that working hard enough to make that happen doesn’t kill me! Lol!
Regardless of how things turn out, here’s to an exciting 2020! As I have said before, I’m looking forward to enjoying the journey (helping so many families along the way), as well as meeting these goals (to help increase awareness and ensure that my business model is self-sustaining)!
Thanks again… for everything!
Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama
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