Some of you may have noticed the badge in my sidebar, but I wanted to officially announce my entry into the Online Money Bloggers $30k Challenge!

This challenge is the brainchild of two fellow Yakezie members, Derek from Life and My Finances and Corey from 20s Finances. Basically, a bunch of bloggers will be competing (in a friendly way!) to reach $30,000 in blogging income in 2012 - or $30k more for bloggers who already make that much. Along the way, our progress will be aggregated on the OMB website, and we’ll all be posting about our efforts, successes, and failures on the OMB blog.

I’m pretty sure I’m crazy. Do I hope I make at least $30k in 2012? Of course! But do I think I can actually do it? I’m not sure! I have several plans to increase my online income, especially since I’ll be blogging/freelancing full time in 2012, but I’m not sure how successful I’ll be.

The worst case scenario is working my butt off all year and falling short of my $30k goal. And if that happens, I’m okay with it - I know I’ll be learning from some extremely talented and ambitious bloggers, and it’s up to me to implement that knowledge and turn it into a way to pay the bills. I can actually survive on less than $30k, so the world won’t end if I don’t make it.

That said, I love competitions and I don’t like to lose. So hopefully this will be the push I need to work hard and earn some money!

I encourage you to visit the Online Money Bloggers site periodically and keep up with the progress of the challengers. I’m sure it will be interesting to see the various ways we come up with to get paid!