It was a very long year, and like most people, you probably can’t wait for it to be over. And with the New Year approaching, now is a good time to set some blogging goals for 2021.
Setting goals is important when looking to grow your blog. It will help you focus your time and energy on the essentials. And knowing what you are achieving gives you an added incentive to keep going.
SMART about setting goals
There is a amount Information about goals and how to set them. One of the most popular methods is to base it on the acronym SMART, which stands for Clever, measurable, reachable, relevant and Time bound. And that’s what I’m referring to in this post.
But I’ll add a few more words to some of these letters to make them more specific to blogging.
S is for …
To start with, your goals should be as follows Specific as possible. Don’t set vague goals like “I want more traffic to my blog” or “I want more money from my blog” or “I want to post more”. As a lot of do you want more traffic? How much do you want more money? How often do you want to post
Instead, exercise I agree what you want to achieve:
- “I want to double the traffic this year.”
- “I want to make $ 50,000.”
- “I want to publish a new post every week.”
Not only are these goals far more specific, they also meet another criterion that starts with an ‘s’ – significant.
As I said earlier, goal setting is important if you want to grow your blog. But don’t start doing them just because of that. You should hire significant Goals that bring you closer to your long-term goals.
Do you want to make a million dollars blogging? You probably won’t be there in a year, but you can safely set yourself a goal (“I want to make $ 50,000.”) That will bring you closer to that lucrative number.
Would you like to receive a book offer? You might not get one this year, but you can safely set yourself a goal (“I want to get a new post every week”) that will bring you closer.
You should also set goals that are important to you. You might want to make $ 50,000 to buy a new car or your first home. Now that goal is much more important and you will be more motivated to achieve it.
M is for …
Next must be your goals measurable. As Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
The specific goals I mentioned in the previous section are also measurable as it is easy to find out whether or not you have achieved them. By the end of the year, you’ll know if you’ve doubled your traffic, made $ 50,000, or posted something new every week.
In addition, you can find out how well you are tracking and make some adjustments if necessary. For example, let’s say your goal is to make $ 50,000 in one year. That’s the equivalent of $ 4,166 per month or $ 137 per day. And so you can compare how much you have earned with how much at any time during the year should have made to see how well you accomplish your goal.
And when planning your goals, think of another M-word – makes sense. You are far more likely to achieve your goal if you care. I once spoke to a blogger whose goal was to raise $ 10,000 for an orphan school in Africa. It had nothing to do with the growth of her blog, but she had visited the orphanage a few years earlier, so it was a meaningful destination for her.
A is for …
Your goals should stretch you and make you work hard. But they should be too reachable based on the situation you are in.
If you can only blog in the evenings due to work and family commitments, you should probably not set yourself the goal of posting a new blog post every day. Even a weekly release could take things too far. It might be better to set a goal to get one post every two weeks initially, and then see how well you track after a few months.
Setting goals that you can’t achieve can actually harm your blog. You may be far less motivated to keep going, even if you are to do If you keep going, the quality of your content can drop, which can damage your brand.
Be sure to stretch, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. When creating your goals, consider the time and resources you have. What you want as a one-year goal may need to become one of your long-term goals instead – at least initially.
And when you’re part of a team, your goals should be too agreed. That means not only letting everyone know about the goals you want to achieve, but getting them to consider those goals so you can all work together to achieve them.
R is for …
Chances are you will accomplish a number of goals for the year. When you’ve created them all, make sure they are all still there relevant. You may find that some of them are conflicting with others or have already been addressed in other goals. And some may be just a little ahead of their time.
In 2015 one of my goals was to hold an event in the USA. We have a lot of readers in the US, so I thought it would be a worthwhile destination. But when I looked at all of the goals I wanted to achieve this year, I could see that doing an event in the US would affect some of my other goals. And so I decided to put this particular goal on hold.
Two years later, I took one more look at my list of destinations and saw how we could run this US event. In the past few years I had met some people who could help us make this a reality. So I had some time on my own schedule to work on, and the result was our Success Incubator event.
Just because a goal isn’t relevant right now doesn’t mean you should discard it entirely. You may simply need more resources, contacts, or prep work to be successful.
T is for …
After all, your goals should be Time bound. In other words, they need deadlines.
Not only does this make your goals specific and measurable, but it also helps you figure out how you will achieve your goal.
For example, if you want to post a blog post every Friday, you can work backwards to find out when to finish your research, when to finish the first draft, etc.
A tip with deadlines: try to clear them out instead of putting them all at the end of the year. That way, you won’t face a pile of deadlines when you need to relax rather than speed up.
If you split them up, you will regularly achieve goals that can have a positive effect on your motivation.
Over to you
What are your goals for 2021? And what long-term goals will help you achieve them? Let us know in the comments.
Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash