Meassuring Your Progress

One of the things that I do is set goals. I set them for example, achieving a new commission level or total sales for a period of time. One of the goals that I have been watching is how much time does it take to make a thousand dollars? That is a good question. Here are my numbers

1st $1000 - 455 Days

2nd $1000 - 300 Days

I'm nearly at my 3rd $1000. My goal was 275 days. My projections have me at 270 days. That should be on or about Jan. 23 2010. Why am I not improving at the same rate as before? I should. I am using more stock companies. I had 5129 opportunities for a sale (includes the same images on multiple sites) when I made my 1st $1000. I had 10155 opportunities for sales when I made my 2nd $1000. Currently I have 12375 potential sales opportunities. By the way, I consider an opportunity an image online. These numbers are the total images I have on all sites combined. Some of these sites are dudes and I no longer contribute to them, but still occasionally get a sell.

Here is my theory on why I am only improving by 30 days where the previous mark was an improvement by 155 days. Subscriptions. Our commissions have been lowered drastically because of the subscription model. When I made my first $1000, I did it with 1165 sales. My second was made with 1034 sales. Currently I'm at 1109. I'm estimating that I need to sell 191 more images to reach the $3000 mark. That number would have been higher had it not been for extended license sales.

At this point most of my commissions are on subscription sales. That means that I should now start seeing my time to reach my next $1000 level decrease with the more images I upload. Because we are still in a recession, my goal to hit $4000 is 250 days. However, my goal to reach $5000 will be 200 days after that.