MamaBlogga

I wrote about setting goals for your blog in August and got a lot of good responses. Now that New Year’s is rolling around, it’s a good time to think about setting goals for your blog (and, of course, other areas of your life, too, if you want).

As a very quick review of my previous post, blogging goals (like all other goals) should be:

• Recorded
• Specific
• Measurable
• Personal
• Discrete
• Achievable

As part of recording my blogging goals, which are also very manageable (very important for busy moms!), I left a comment over on the post What are your blogging New Year’s Resolutions? at Misc Mum:

Blogging goal: comment on 10 different blogs each week (not for work), at least 2 of them blogs I’ve never commented on before.

Feel free to share your blogging goals at Misc Mum or here!

You might also enjoy reading Setting blog goals for the New Year by ProBlogger.

Today I got to meet Wendy Piersall of eMoms at Home! Woot! Oh yeah, there was a conference on blogging, too, somewhere in between conversations with Wendy.

If you’ve never met Wendy, in person or online, run (don’t walk) on over to eMoms. It’s the ultimate resource for WAHMs (and WAHDs)—especially for information on starting your own business, entrepreneurship, overcoming fear (and life’s hardships) and more. Plus, Wendy is a total sweetie! (This never, EVER hurts!)

Not sure why we’re so red . . . maybe we were just laughing?

Okay, so the Blogging for Business conference was fun (although it made me feel bad for not making very much money off my blog. Now where is that old monetization strategy?).

Okay, enough buzz words about blogging—you guys are going to get to hear plenty more about that. For my full write up of Wendy’s excellent keynote, see my post on Marketing Pilgrim today.

But if you don’t feel like reading all that, I’ll pluck out the parts that are most pertinent to personal bloggers. (The brackets are there because I’ve rephrased it to take out language about your business and your customers.)

Let’s get personal: Why did you . . . start this [blog]?

• To pursue a dream (passion)
• To make a difference in people’s lives
• To fill a need in an under-served market

In other words, you were passionate and/or you wanted to help!

Blogs don’t benefit business unless they BENEFIT YOUR [READER]. You have to have that passion, the cause—what’s in it for your [reader]? What are they looking for? What do they really need? Why did you go into [blogging] in the first place? Because that’s why your [readers] will come to you, spend more with you, and seek you out.

Questions to answer for yourself

• How can I help my [readers]? What do they need?
• What personal stories, ideas or experience an I share on my blog that will encourage people to connect with [me]?
• How can my . . . blog be a true reflection of [its] founding inspiration (passion, making a difference, filling a need)?

Blogging is about community—it’s about connecting with other people. I started this blog (on MamaBlogga.com, at least) to help connect with mothers who are struggling to feel fulfilled in motherhood to help them (and me!) find fulfillment.

So why did you start to blog? And is there anything I can do to help you feel fulfilled in motherhood?

What is blogging success? Is it subscribers? Comments? Writing honestly? No matter what you define as blog success, it’s important to set out at least one specific goal for your blog so that you have something to work for and can see how far you’ve come.

So, what should your goals be? It depends on what you want to work on and where you want to grow. There are lots of areas that you can set goals in, for example:

• Writing: more personal, more on-topic, more frequent, etc.
• Organization: posting on a schedule, better using categories
• Comments, visitors & subscribers: more.
• External blog rankings: Technorati, Alexa, Google PageRank
• Search engine visibility: ranking for your blog name (if it’s fairly unique), ranking for your name, ranking well for keywords that you’re targeting

Realize when you set goals that you can’t completely control all of these factors: you can’t make people subscribe to your feed or comment on your posts. So if you set more than one goal, be sure to include at least one goal that you have control over. On the other hand, don’t set more goals than you can handle or remember.

Your blogging goals should be:

Recorded
I’m sure you’ve heard the platitude that a goal that’s not written down is just a dream. So write them down. Put them in a place where you can find them, see them often, and hopefully be reminded of them often.

Specific
“More subscribers” is too vague—if one person more person subscribes tomorrow, is your blog a success forever? Use numbers where they make sense: the number of posts per week, the number of minutes your visitors spend on your site.

Measurable
Whether the measurement is quantitative (like pageviews) or qualitative (like more personal writing), make sure you can appreciate a difference. “Increase my blog’s stickiness” isn’t measurable; “Increase the average number of minutes my visitors spend on my site” is. On that note, if you’re measuring something like daily unique visitors, make sure you’re equipped: use a web analytics program, like Google Analytics. (See my Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers to learn more!)

Personal
You and your blog are unique. Set goals that are suited to you—things you want to achieve; things you know you need to work on.

Discrete
By that, I mean they need to have deadlines attached: in 30 days, in 3 months, in 1 year, etc. This is not as crucial, but really increases how hard you’ll work to achieve your goals.

Achievable
Set your goals high, but not so high that it’s nearly impossible to achieve. Going from 100 to 1000 readers in a month would be hard (depending on your blog, of course). Look at what you’ve achieved in the past: if it took you 30 days to go from 50 unique visitors a day to 75 unique visitors a day, it would be probably pretty easy to get to 100 unique visitors a day, but much harder to jump to 150 unique visitors a day. Set your goal somewhere between there, based on how much you want to challenge yourself.

Not the end of the world
Last year, ProBlogger wrote a lot about blogging goals (they even had a group writing project about it!). As he set New Year’s Resolutions for his blog goals, he said:

The goals are not things we whip ourselves over in the coming months when we fail - but they help us to focus on the year ahead and move into it with a positive outlook.

So set goals to help your blog grow. Work toward them. But, as in motherhood, work toward balance, too—don’t work so hard on them that you don’t enjoy blogging anymore!

For more tips from experienced moms, visit Works-for-me Wednesday at Rocks in my Dryer