Yup, the short break I’ve been taking is finally over. My wife left town last Thursday morning but she spent Wednesday night at a friend’s house. She’s still out of town, not coming back until Saturday, but since I’ve basically rested until, well, yesterday I figured it was time to get back to my regular schedule, of sorts. And I figure it’s a good time to see how I’ve done on my goals for this year, which I posted and talked about at the end of December.

To save some time, in case you don’t want to go back and check out that entire post, let’s see what my goals were for 2011:

1. Earn $5,000 on the internet overall.

5. Increase my influence through this blog towards helping other business goals long term.

How have I done? Actually, I haven’t done bad I have to say.

For #1, I’ve actually earned around $2,300 in the first half of the year. However, I’ve had a couple of affiliates not pay me so that means I’ve probably actually banked closer to $2,000. That’s still not bad, as it means I’ve probably already tied my best year of making money online and I still have half a year to go. Most of it has been made through Adsense on my medical billing site, but I’ve also had advertisers on my finance blog and my anti-smoking site.

For #2, well, I had a feeling that one might be a pipe dream anyway. Adsense took away my right to earn anything through them on this blog, although I pretty much made nothing from them in the years I had it here anyway. Since I stopped adding products with every post I took away my opportunity to make money that way. I have made a couple of product sales of my products, but I’m not sure if they were made by people coming from the links here or not so I’m not giving it any credit. So, that might be a pipe dream goal since there’s few things I market only here that I’d know for sure were responsible for sales.

For #3, I was cruising along for awhile there when Google put its Panda update through and my Alexa ranking started to tank. Right now I’m hovering around that 100,000 magic mark again, so my actual goal will be to get to at least 90,000 by year’s end at this point.

For #4, I actually wrote a pillar post, my two-part series on Better Blogging. I’m actually probably going to turn that bad boy into a small book, adding other things I’ve written to truly flesh it out, though I’m not sure when that’ll come as I have another project to work on first. At this juncture I’m not sure what other topic deserves to be a pillar post, but I really enjoyed writing that one. It’s too bad that it didn’t get the attention I feel it deserved, but that’s how it goes sometime. If the guy who inspired me to write it is correct, by this time next year it could be one of the most popular posts ever on this blog; we’ll see.

For #5, I realize that it’s not really a measurable goal so I can only think about what I’ve written and what I’ve done to see if I’ve at least taken a shot at it. And I think I have actually done it. Though I’ve yet to get a speaking engagement or any other work out of it, I’ve made a small difference in a few posts. I’ve talked about race already more this year than I have in the past, and a couple of those posts ended up being well read and shared. A couple of these posts have been shared on Facebook and got a pretty good response as well. And if I believe Post Rank I’ve had some posts do really well this year. Did they make a difference in someone’s life? Only others can really answer that one, but I know I’ve done my part.

So I still have a ways to go for some of these goals, I’m on the right track for others, and I still have half a year to tackle it all. It should be a very interesting second half of the year; I appreciate everyone who sees where it all ends. For those of you who planned some, how are you doing with your goals so far?