- Clarify the business goals for your blog
- Commit to blogging goals for long-term success
- Why create an “ideal reader”?
- How to identify your ideal reader
Beyond goals about what you want to get out of blogging, it’s a good idea to set goals for what you’re going to put into your blog.
You can’t force readers to come, or to subscribe, or to buy your product, or to call you for an interview. Those are areas you can influence but ultimately, they’re out of your control.
What you can control, though, are the actions you take to create an online environment that increases the probability of success and influences your readers, potential and existing clients, and the media.
The big benefit your “blogging input goals” will provide is a structure for the consistent small actions that will build a solid base for long-term success. Blogging is like any other type of marketing: if you put serious effort into it only when you’re not getting results, but abandon it when you get busy, you’ll create a feast-or-famine situation, a roller coaster of unpredictable results.
Steady actions result in steady growth, and that’s the goal—steady doesn’t have to mean “plodding.” Everything is accelerated online. You can see results quickly and experience continued success by having a plan and following it.
So what kind of goals should you set? Consider things like:
- How many posts you will write each week
- What day(s) you will write them
- How many blogs you will read (more is not always better!)
- What other kinds of topical information you will consume (magazines, books, etc.) and how often
- How many comments you will leave on other blogs
- How much time you will spend per week on other kinds of promotion (be specific!)
You’ll probably develop a better idea of what these tasks will require when you read my book, but I encourage you to write down your initial goals.
Start on the conservative side; you can always increase later if you want, and it’s much better to consistently meet less-ambitious goals than to be overwhelmed and do nothing. Your goals need to be sustainable to make any difference.
My other advice for input goals: raise your goal only after a couple weeks of exceeding the goal you already have. It’s very common for new bloggers to get caught up in the excitement of blogging and be very prolific—the normal result of thinking about something regularly. But as blogging becomes more routine and other duties press in, it can be surprisingly difficult to maintain the initial pace.
Before you move on to something else, write down your starting goals. It will probably take less than five minutes, so do it now.
All good advice. One thing I like to tell new bloggers is not to force yourself to write posts. Make a commitment to write one or two a week just to get started, but if you don’t reach that goal don’t beat yourself up over it.
If you force yourself to write just to keep up with a quota your content will come off as contrived and not spontaneous or from the heart. Blogging is about letting your thoughts, ideas and personality flow through your writing. It gives people the opportunity to get to know who the real you is.
Bottom line is to write when you are inspired.
I’ve made a goal to write at least one post a day. I’m worried if I will be able to sustain this over time, but I think I am lucky because I have endless things to write about. One of the things I do is review Japanese tv shows, and there are endless ones I could do! These are so easy to write – I make a couple of notes while watching the show (always fun, unless it is a really bad show) , make some screen caps, and I have an easy post structure I just have to insert the information into. Easy content, and I usually write a couple at a time.
I think one great tip to give to readers is to time stamp their posts. Make a goal of how many to write each week, and then write them in one day, or over a couple of days. Keep writing if you have the time and have the ideas, but if life gets in the way or you simply don’t feel like it, well, you should have over a weeks worth of posts that can automatically go out there into the world without you even having to look at your site.
I’m with you, Carlie, on the time stamp feature! I use it all the time to even out the natural ups and downs of my writing inclinations.
Often I’ll write several posts at once and then set them to show up a few days apart. Not only does that help keep the content coming, but it reduces my stress because I often have one of my “to do” items checked off before the day even begins.