Well, my year is nearly at an end, and barring a minor miracle during December, my goal of earning £10,000 a month isn’t going to be realised.

At the start of the year I figured I would need 700,000 page impressions a month to earn somewhere in the region of £10,000. I haven’t got those 700,000 impressions yet and so it’s not too surprising to find my monthly earnings well short of my target. I’m somewhere around the 100,000 impressions a month mark.

Jason Calacanis reckons you should make between $5 and 12 per thousand page impressions (RPM) and given his inside knowledge across a good number of websites I wouldn’t argue with the man. That would make $3,500 to $8,400 a month revenue for 700,000 page impressions.

With niche markets I believe it is possible to earn a lot more than $5 to $12 RPM.

For example, one of my sites has served around 100,000 page impressions so far this year and has earned about $3,400 doing so (I’m using dollars to make it easier to compare my example with Jason’s rule of thumb). That’s an RPM of $34.

The problem with niche websites however is that the traffic potential is - by definition - limited by the size of the niche.

The good news is that with my 100,000 impressions a month, I’ve been able to earn just under £2,000 a month on average. So I think my initial guess of how many page impressions I would need wasn’t far off the mark.

Even better news is that I have planted plenty of seeds that should sprout into plenty more page impressions come 2007.

One of my sites for example currently averages 2,000 unique visitors a month, but that’s without any help from Google. And any website owner will tell you how important Google search traffic can be to your bottom line.

There was a time when you could have a site listed and ranked in Google in a matter of days, with you reaping the rewards just as quickly too. Those days have gone though and now it’s a game of waiting for Google to acknowledge your existence and rank you accordingly.

It’s certainly worth the wait given Google’s dominance in the search market and by next summer I expect that same site to be averaging 15,000 visitors a month.

So what next? Is this the end of my mission?

No way!

When registering some domains the other night, I took a look at Bob Parsons’ blog (he’s CEO of Go Daddy) and his 16 rules to try to live by. The one that stuck out for me was number three.

When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think. There’s an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

So the game must go on. Come 2007, my ticker starts again and I’m once again a man on a mission. Only this time I will be able to build on what have achieved during 2006.

As far as this month goes, I’m going to spend it taking a good hard look at each of my websites currently touting for business and also at my portfolio of domains (which has swelled to over 900 now) to see which ones should progress to the development stage.

The luxury of a whole month of plotting and planning is something that I have never had before so I hope to make the most of it. And of course I’ll let you know how I get on.