2012 Goal Wrap Up

Happy New Year!

I hope that 2013 is getting off to a great for everyone.

2012 is the first year that I ever set long term goals for myself. There are a number of reasons why it seemed like a good time in my life to take on the challenge, and it went well. I'm wrapping up my 2012 goals today and will roll out my 2013 goals later this week.

1.  Have 140 sales on Etsy in my randomcreative shop.
I set this goal with the expectation that having 100 sales for the year would still be considered a success, as I was striving to have 2+ sales per week. As of December 30, I had 94 sales for the year, which works out to approximately 1.8 sales per week. This is a significant increase from 2011. Also, I had quite a few more sales during the latter half of the year, which is exciting.

2. Introduce and continue to develop my new herringbone line and its charm/pendant components.
I did successfully introduce and continue to develop my herringbone designs and charm/pendant components. I have sold a handful of charms and pendants this year. I did sell one herringbone piece at one of my fall craft shows. This is the third year that I've introduced a brand new line for my shop that included a lot of build up and promo, and it's the third year that it's gone nowhere. As I'll discuss more later this week, I'm going to put more of a focus on expanding my existing successful lines. Of course I will not stop experimenting with new ideas, but I'm not going to another big build up for a new line like I have the past few years.

3.  Double my current long term earnings on HubPages.
I reached this goal very early on in 2012, which was really amazing. I did not hit it every month this year, but I reached it for the majority of the months this year. Back in January, I said that ideally I'd like to triple my earnings by the end of the year. Amazingly enough, I did this in both November and  December.

4.  Make at least one new greeting card design per week.
I'm pretty positive that I didn't make one new design per week, but this is largely because my music note design did well at shows during the fall. I put most of my focus the final few months of the year on keeping this design stocked. I still explored a lot of new paper techniques this year, which was fun and a good way to mix up my creative routine, and am glad that I hit on a winner that fits so well with my shop.

5.  Expand my craft show lines.
I'm still kind of in shock how much I was able to expand my craft show lines this year. For my 2011 fall shows, my only new item was button tacks. While some of my lines have been more successful than others, I have a lot of great success to build on in this area for 2013.

6.  Complete a minimum of 6 EBW challenges and 6 BBA challenges.
I met this goal before my October goal check in and backed off for the final few months of the year, largely due to my focus on client writing, the HubPages AP program, and craft shows. As many of you already know, I was also completely through with the EBW team well before October and quit in early December. I'm looking forward to participating in the BBA challenges again in 2013.

7.  Participate in 4-6 craft shows.
During 2012, I participated in two open houses and seven craft fairs. Some shows were much better than others, but overall, I consider it to be a successful year for shows and am looking forward to upping this goal for 2013.

8.  Starting making this blog more profitable.
I'm going to reiterate my comments about this goal from my last check in: I commented during summer check in that I'm making regular earnings from my blog ads and by regular earnings, I mean consistent, not large, amounts of money. Some people thought that this was snarky. Believe me, there are so many snarky things that I could say about this topic that I did not say. That wasn't my intent. I simply don't want a lot of comments asking me how to get rich with this type of blog because I'm not. I put a lot of time into my blog and am happy that it does pay off financially just a little bit.

9.  Better list making organization.
My goal probably should have been to not only better organize my lists but also put them digital form. The truth is that I find writing by hand very satisfying and am not planning to give it up in this aspect of my life any time soon. Regardless, I still did an excellent job organizing my list and keeping up with the new system all year. I even made adaptations to the system as needed.

Thanks for all of the support and encouragement with all of my endeavors during 2012! I look forward to sharing my 2013 goals in a couple days. 

How did your 2012 goals go?

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