Setting Realistic Goals For Your Blog
To be a successful blogger you have to start with a plan that sets out your goals for the blog and describes how you intend to achieve them. The difficulty for most people is that they have no clear idea of how to measure success in the blogosphere and the wide array of statistics that the internet generates makes choosing the right metric to measure your efforts by confusing. Often bloggers only plan the start-up phase of their website and then don’t know where to take it, resulting in the many dormant websites that proliferate in the blogosphere.
It takes time to build an interesting enough blog to attract a steady flow of traffic and so it is much easier to set many smaller, short term goals for a blog than it is to be constantly focused on the long term plans for the site. The best way to progress towards the ultimate goal for your blog is to set realistic goals as milestones along the way. It is much easier to set a goal of attracting 100 unique visitors a day than it is to aim at attracting 10,000 hits per month. This kind of thinking generally holds true throughout the development of a blog, and setting challenging but achievable objectives should be at the heart of every blogger’s plan from the beginning.
The focus of every blog is the content and having a steady stream of interesting, informative and valuable content can be very challenging. For a new blog with few connections in the blogosphere it will be very hard to attract new readers with very few posts. The first goal of every blogger should be to have a reasonably sized archive of articles for visitors to peruse. The way to build this sort of catalogue is to set a schedule for posting new content, and bloggers that succeed are the ones that know how much they can produce and plan around that, rather than trying to push themselves to create more content than they have the capacity for. While it is optimal to try and make a post daily, especially on a new blog, it is rare that new bloggers will have that much to write about and many blogs that start off in a flurry end in burnout.
Statistics often seem to drive the internet and bloggers can become obsessed with visitor numbers and bounce rates even though there is very little that they can do to directly affect them. It can be useful to set goals for the number of page views per month as a measure of your growth, but it is better to take a more general view of the statistical goals that you set. Rather than being focused on the numbers, look at the general trend and plan for ways to keep it growing. Don’t try to hit specific mathematical marks that don’t mean much anyway.
The most specific goals that you set for your blog should be the most immediate ones. Setting a goal of making a dozen posts in the coming month, or of expanding the social reach of your blog over the week’s blogging activity by sharing it on Twitter or Facebook, is an effective way of breaking down the work that you will have to do to generate a following and improve your page rank. It is also important to remain flexible to take advantage of opportunities and to abandon non-productive activities as you move towards achieving the goals that you set for yourself. Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight so the most important goal that you can set for your blog is to persist and to be patient.
