Why make goals?
Without a purpose or direction it is hard to move forward. Let’s say you decided to take a hike. You usually decide to follow a trail. Whether the trail loops or if the trail comes to and end and you have to make your way back, you know where you are going, there is a start point and an end point. If you decide to wander off the trail there is a good chance that you’ll get lost.
How does any of that have to do with anything? Well let’s apply it. Without goals your blog is wandering in this wilderness called the internet. It doesn’t know what it’s looking for or where to go to get it. Once you set goals you’re setting up trailmarkers for your blog. You’re giving your blog a path a trail to follow. Without it your blog will just be wandering in circles not knowing what to do with itself.
What type of goals should I make?
Well, that depends. To start, ask yourself a few questions.
- What is the purpose of my blog?
- Do I want to monetize my blog?
- Do I want to increase traffic to my blog?
Once you figure out what exactly you want to do with your blog, you can start making goals to achieve that vision. One thing to note is that this trail usually doesn’t end. It keeps going because you keep seeing that your blog can become better and better. It’s like an addiction, once you find success you want more of it. If you need to get addicted to anything, success is a great thing to get addicted to.
Blogging From Scratch goals.
For this blog I will be setting a few goals for the month of December. My main vision is to increase traffic and interest in this blog. I don’t just want visitors, I want quality visitors that truly are interested in the content of this blog.
- 500 RSS subscribers (at the time of this post we sit at 399)
- 350 unique visitors per day average (at the time of this post we’re at about 278, which is a fake number due to the amount of traffic from the site being on sale)
Now you must be wondering why I didn’t set any monetary goals. There are a few reasons. First most of this month’s ad space has been sold already by Riyanne. Secondly, I feel that I want to focus on having a good audience before pursuing revenue. This is just a personal preference. I like to give advertisers what they pay for, this allows me to establish a long relationship with my advertisers.
Another thing you won’t find in my goals are things such as how many posts I want to post or anything to do with the development of my blog. My reason is, for me, those belong on my tasklist. The difference between a goal and a task is that a goal is something you WANT to achieve, while tasks are something you NEED to do. As a blogger I am expeceted to write high quality posts and maintain the blog. I will go over tasks in a future post.
Goals, a life truth.
There is no set way of making goals. The main point of this post is to help you realize that you need to have a path to follow. Anyone can relate to this because this is a life truth rather than just a blogging tip. Although your path might change along the way it’s a lot more pleasant to stay on a paven path rather than wandering treacherous terrain.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 3:28 am and is filed under Site Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Good post, I have a major goal and than there are subheadings under the major goal, for example lets say I want to increase traffic to my blog, sub-heading’s may include to get more followers, more drop traffic, more readers. Doing it that way helps to see the whole picture and helps to build the steps it will take to accomplish the goal.
Terri healthymomss last blog post..Build-a-Bear cake
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Aha nothing like making goals and actually sticking to them! You have set some steep goals for yourself! I guess that should act as an inspiration to some of us.
You are right goals are a must and we must work to achieve them.
I have gone through your book partly…its very good. I have learnt a lot reading it.
lvss last blog post..Technology: Problems and Prospects
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Really nice explaination. Ya every body has one goal what he want from hs blog . Some make just to earn dollars thas the mind set of begginers and some want to make it seo and some Just do to share there extreme knowledge to help others and do for there passion.
So i Appreciate your post and say one should have a goal on to how to achive it.
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Thanks for being sponsor @ That Blozzz One Year Anniversary Blog Contest
Regards,
Brillie
http://sims2house.blogspot.com/2008/12/that-blozzz-anniversary-blog-contest.html
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It is necessary to make a goal in life , without goal we can not make success.
Thanks for good article
Shakti Singh Dulawats last blog post..When petrol price degrade
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I always find the most important thing about setting goals is making sure they are realistic and achievable so that you can complete them and set more ! :O)
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It is that time of year again to be thinking of goals for the new year. Thanks for reminding me!
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One awesome way to hit goal #1 is sponsoring a blog contest.
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Very well written post.
I currently only have one blog, but to be honest, it’s not going that well. I made some mistakes and had to learn a lot about successful blogging. At first I didn’t have any goals, so also no achievements.
Now I’m working on a second blog that should be live in about 1 month, and I will for sure set regular goals and use your tips.
Thank you for the article!
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[...] December I made a bunch of goals, I unfortunately did not meet any of the goals, however, I feel that I made a lot of progress. I [...]
Why make goals? It’s because these goals serve as a target for us to work harder.
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