Setting goals is important if you want to grow your blog or website. It will help you focus your time and energy on what’s most important. And achieving those goals will give you some added incentive to keep going.
Setting Goals For Your Blog
There’s a lot of information out there about goals and how to set them. There are countless methods here are my favourites.
Setting smart goals for your blog
One of the most popular methods is to base them on the SMART goals Personally, I don’t follow SMART to the T, I take a more jumbled approach. Which you’ll see below
What does SMART mean?
SMART stands for: Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
How do you set SMART goals?
To start, your goals should be as specific as possible. Don’t set vague goals like, “I want more traffic for my blog” or, “I want more money from my blog”. How much more traffic do you want? How much more money do you want?
These will need to be achievable, if you’ve just decided to start a blog it wouldn’t be feasible to want to make £100,000 in just one year.
Instead, work out exactly what you want to achieve:
- “I want to double the amount of traffic I had this year.”
- “I want to make £3000.”
You now know exactly what to achieve but now you need to work out how you are going to do that.
How will you measure these goals? Will you be able to track them on Google Analytics, Search Console etc? How will you know if what you are doing is working?
For SEO, it’s easy to measure we have countless tools which allow us to track every movement. But what can you do for social or financial goals?
Many social platforms now have an inbuilt analytics system, but you’ll need to find a way to track your growth. I recommend using a spreadsheet. Same with your finances track every source of money your earn and spend for your blog. Don’t forget to factor in taxes too!
Once you understand what your goals are and how you are going to monitor them, you will need to consider how long it will take you to achieve them.
I personally like to set monthly traffic goals i.e.:
- Month 1 – 100 pageviews
- Month 2 – 500 pageviews
- Month 3 – 1000 pageviews
- Month 4 – 1500 pageviews
- Month 5 – 3000 pageviews
- Month 6 – 5000 pageviews
Growth isn’t guaranteed though, you will need to be able to consistently work on your website and your social accounts to achieve these goals. If your website is new it is very unlikely you’ll achieve your goals using just one way to grow.
You should create rich content that your users will find helpful, but you will need your content to be engaging to share on social media too. Growth doesn’t just happen and needs a lot of support.
Smart goals are great to use, but they’re not the best for everyone.
Stretch Goals
Stretch goals are my personal favourite as I am a massive try hard. These are deliberately challenging or ambitious goals and their purpose is to make you work harder.
Back in the days when I worked in a call centre, we used them to earn bonuses. So we would have our goal and then we would have another goal to do 10% better than that to earn a better reward. It really worked for me at the time. But I wasn’t very good at that job, so didn’t often get bonuses but not for a lack of trying.
These are great if you are on track to meet your SMART goals early and you want an additional challenge.
How to break down your goals into manageable tasks
One of the most important things you need to do if you plan to achieve your goals is to break down your goals into manageable tasks.
Every big goal should be made up of several smaller goals, these will help you complete the work needed to succeed.
If you want to launch a blog by a specific date, what are some of the things you need to do before then?
- Settle on a niche for your blog.
- Purchase a domain name.
- Get a hosting account.
- Build your website
- Create social channels
- Write a good amount of content to launch with
All of those steps will make you achieve your goal of creating a blog. Break down every one of your goals into a to-do list just like this.
Skills you can learn to achieve your blogging goals
It’s one thing to have goals but it’s another to know how you will achieve them. Blogging isn’t just a case of having a website and writing, there are lots of skills that go into it. Being able to do the following will help you achieve your goals.
- How to negotiate with businesses
- How to edit photos using photoshop or Adobe Lightroom
- How to edit videos
- The basics of SEO
- How to use Pinterest
- Writing/editing skills
- How to use Google Analytics
Finally, don’t get disheartened. Growth isn’t linear, life happens and you’ll not be able to always have the time and energy to put into your blog.
Having goals is fantastic but don’t let it burn you out or affect your mental health. If you find yourself falling out of love with your blog take a break or follow this guide on combating burnout with self-care.