This year and beyond, most of us have plans to achieve better results but the question is how are you going to do that?

If we want better results this year, we must at least double our efforts in what we did last year and if possible, add more to it. We can't expect more results while doing the exact same thing we did in the past.

I decided before the start of this year to double my income and to accomplish this, I laid out a plan of action for myself. In this post, I want to discuss with you those things I'm doing with a little more effort and how they are adding to my income. I'm not asking you to follow the exact steps but if you are willing to see a change in your income, take some of my steps as a prototype.

How to double my income this year!

I have been blogging since August 2013. As a matter of fact, Basic Blog Tips and Ileane Smith are part of the reasons I'm blogging today. I don't want to get into the depth of the story but for the past 2+ years, I have made money online in 3 main ways:

1. Selling my own products/Service
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Google Adsense

The biggest portion of my earnings has come from the sales of my own products. Affiliate Marketing is second on the list and Google Adsense comes at the bottom. I couldn't have developed a strategy to generate more income this year without first of all knowing what works best so I can focus on and leap to a bigger ground.

Recommended: How To Make Money Blogging What we can learn from 21 Blogger's income reports

After considering some rough stats (which I cannot share here because they are not accurate), I have decided to do three things to double my income;

1 – Create at least one product this year

Product creators are the ones that go with a bigger chunk of the income. Though it comes with its challenges (product maintenance and updates), the digital world has made it quite fascinating to author a product and go away with money without tearing your hair out.
All my products I have created so far are digital with the latest being an ebook targeted at all bloggers willing to generate income from their blogs. Looking at how my blog generates income with Affiliate Marketing and studying some hidden things other bloggers are doing, I decided to release a detailed book, revealing my exact methods and what some other top bloggers do in hidings.. The book is 85 pages and has gotten some really impressive feedback
Though the release of Affiliate Marketing For bloggers has not added much to my income (due to lack of necessary promotion), it's a huge step towards achieving my gold.

NB: Celebrating my success, here is unique coupon code ONLY for BasiBlogTips.com readers: BBT9 Save up to $18.

2 – Pull more targeted Traffic

To be quite frank here, nothing works without targeted traffic.  Take note I said Targeted Traffic because that's where conversion lies.There are different ways to draw traffic to blog posts but this year, I'm going to focus mainly on two channels:

a) Search engines: Bloggers have said a lot of things about search engines. Google's constant change has created panic on the blogosphere. Most of us have decided to write and forget about search traffic.
No matter the changes, there is something if you do correctly, you must have traffic. I'm not frightened by all what people say. The simple reason is that Google is the monster and it only goes after its preys. I'm not one of them. On one of my guest posts on Zac Johnson's blog, I discussed four interesting ways you can get to Google page one without a single back link.

This is what has worked for me and I intend to focus on this method, rinse and repeat for more targeted traffic.

b) Emails: One of the most exciting things to do for your blog's growth is create an email list. It's the most stable source of traffic you can ever have for your blog  —  except when you are not building it appropriately!

I have two free reports on my blog I'm giving out to build my list. In the weeks ahead, I'll be adding more freebies and also implement the content upgrade strategy.

What I'm still thinking about is whether to install a popup plugin. Personally, I don't like when a window pops up and ask for my email while I'm reading something.
My position about this has affected my decision to get one setup on my blog. I prefer content upgrades to pop ups.
AWeber is an excellent email marketing platform. While I fully recommend it, I'm using INinbox which has tons of resources to handle any email marketing business.

3 – More Affiliate Marketing on my blog

Like I mentioned above, Affiliate Marketing is my second most active source of income. Naturally, if I want more income from my blog this year, I should focus on things that work already.
I have shared a lot of what I know already in my ebook I mentioned above and one of the things which I discussed in more details is writing Affiliate Product Reviews.

It's by far the best way to empower your blog with huge money making capacity but the problem is most bloggers just go about re-posting information from product page – Error!

In the last few weeks, I started promoting new products on my blogs. Because I do it the right way, my income is gradually building up;

NB: In product A above with monthly earnings at $0, this shows the clients I sent to this product ended up canceling their subscription. This is one of the things you should consider before putting in more effort in promoting a product.

Conclusion

So these are the three things I will do this year to double my income;

1. Create my own products
2. Drive more targeted traffic
3. Do more affiliate Marketing

What about you? How do you intend to increase your earnings?

Let me hear from you in the comment box. Please share this post on social media if you like it.