It's that time of the month again... the monthly goal update. Not sure that anyone actually reads and/or likes these, but I do, so that's the main thing!

As we all know from reading last months update, August 2007 kicked all kinds of booty for Swollen Pickles, with record highs across the board. I know what you're thinking, can that ground breaking success be replicated a second time??

Short answer... not quite.

1. Develop Swollen Pickles into a website that can generate $200 per month.

Last month Swollen Pickles snuck over the goal line with a grand total of $203.04 for the month. Unfortunately August couldn't be reproduced, but Swollen Pickles still managed to bring in $152.15 for the month.

Here's the breakdown:
Adsense: $22.14
AuctionAds: $0
PayPerPost: $48.31
Text-Link-Ads: $5.25
PayU2Blog: $75
Kontera: $1.45

The down side of this break down is that a majority of the income comes from what I'd call "non-passive" sources. By that I mean with both PayPerPost and PayU2Blog, I have to actually do something in order to make the money. Ideally, I'd like to be able to bring a lot more passively (from sources like Adsense and Text-Link-Ads).

I have to say that I've been a bit disappointed with the way Text-Link-Ads works on this site. I opted in for post level ads, and as of writing this the only posts available for sale are the same ones that were available when I first signed up. This is a loooong time ago. After a number of emails to support, I'm no closer to getting the problem solved, so I'm stuck with a handful of posts available from a total pool of well over 500 now. If they addressed that problem, I'd hopefully start bringing in some more money from them.

AuctionAds is another under performer, and this seems to be an across the board thing.
You'll notice that I brought back Kontera as an experiment to see how it would work with StumbleUpon traffic. The verdict - it sucks no matter where the traffic comes from.

Still yet to see anything from Commission Junction, and DealDotCom, although I'm hoping to see that kick in this coming month as affiliate numbers build. Sometimes I think it would be handy to have a rabid John Chow like audience that'd sign up to anything that I told them too!

2. Develop Swollen Pickles to the point where it receives 15,000 unique visits per month.

Now this is probably why I'm most disappointed with the earnings for this month. September was the biggest month in terms of traffic to this site by far. A grand total of 20,869 unique individuals graced this site with their presence in September, thanks largely to the work of Bob Saget. Saget got stumbled and then accounted for 50% of the months page views. Bringing in numbers like that, who wouldn't want to roll with Saget?

3. Develop digitalburn.org into a website that can generate $30 per month.

After the $36.32 from last month, this sites income has gone back to sucking with a total of $15.63 with that coming from Adsense and Text-Link-Ads. DigitalBurn has been hurt the most due to the recent coma that AuctionAds has lapsed into.

4. Develop digitalburn.org to the point where it receives 7,500 unique visits per month.

Unfortunately digitalburn.org did not have the help of Saget, and could only muster up 1,751 visits.

5. Achieve my goal weight of 80kgs, which would give me a BMI within the “normal” range.

If I said that I had a pair of pants that I labeled "comfort pants" would you assume this goal was going well or not?

6. Buy an Xbox 360 (yes I know, counterproductive to no.5, but I need one!).

Halo 3 is out and I'm getting an itchy trigger finger, just waiting for the end of term... waiting...

7. Write and record three new songs including lyrics and vocals.

Still need to write lyrics etc. for my one completed song (listen to it here).

So there we have it for another month. Let's see how October pans out.