How to Set Your Goals and Achieve Them: 2023 Blog Guide

There are more perspectives and opinions to be shared online than ever before as more people connect with each other. There are approximately 2.5 million blogs that are launched each year. They post around 7 million blog posts per day.

It is essential that you have realistic, achievable and measurable goals in order to make your blog stand out. These are goals that can be reached and will help you take your blog further.

Why is it important to set blog goals?

Bloggers who blog part-time can easily feel overwhelmed by the work load. This pressure is why most bloggers quit their blogs within the first three months.

Setting SMART blog goals and sticking to them is key to your blogging success. A variety of reasons are crucial for your blog success:

• These help you to clearly define your unique selling point or direction for your blog
• They help reduce stress by breaking down tasks into manageable work loads
• These markers give you a set to measure your progress.
• They can help you make your idea a profitable, money-making business
• They show you how to create a blog, from the beginning to the end.
• These tools can help you overcome any barriers that you may have created, whether it be fear, stress, lack of discipline, or self-confidence.

In 5 Easy Steps, How to Set Smart Blog Goals

S.M.A.R.T. is a key acronym in blogging. It stands for Specific, Measurable Achievable Relevant, Time-Bound. You can’t go wrong if you keep these five qualities in mind when setting goals for your blog.

Specific blog goals

Ill-definition can be a hindrance to progress. Think about the coach of your favorite team sports team. He or she would tell their players to win the league. But without more details, how is that team going achieve this goal?

You are your blog’s coach when it comes to setting goals for your blog. Write down as many details as possible about each goal. Also, explain why you want it to be achieved and how you plan on achieving it. You can do this by creating mind maps for each goal. To capture all the details, you can use a visual template for goal setting.

You’ll be ready to start and help with any problems along the way if you consider all that could go into each goal. It is best to determine the nature of your goals by taking a long-term goal for your blog and breaking it down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

You should set measurable blogging goals

Let’s continue the team-coach analogy. Imagine a coach asking their team to win the league, but then forgetting to track their scores for each game. Imagine the coach asking their team to reach a goal that couldn’t easily be measured, such as “Act more confidently than other teams”. How can you ensure you are on the right track to achieving your goals if you can’t measure them?

Make sure you know how you will measure your progress towards your goals when setting your goals. These are some examples of specific blogging goals that you can achieve, along with the metrics you can use to measure them.

• Rank in Google’s 1st Search Results Page –Use Yoast SEO SEO tools to make sure your content Search Engine Optimized. A SERPs tracker can help you determine where you rank on Search Engine Results Page for different queries.
• Attract 500 Weekly Readers – Use your site-host’s built analytics tool to calculate your weekly viewer count at the moment. Then, keep track of this number as you work towards your goal of 500.
• Earn $5,000 per year –Keep track of all your earnings from blogging (ad revenues, etc.). Break this into monthly, weekly, and daily goals. If you reach these goals, you will be able to pay your annual income goal.

Pick achievable blogging goals

It is important to distinguish between “goals”, and “dreams” and be realistic about the difference. Dreams are what keep us excited and motivated. Without realistic goals, dreams can be impossible.

Again, think of the coach as a sportsman. The coach should set a goal to win the league if their team is in the bottom half of their league. This would lead to team burnout and demoralization, as well as criticism of the coach’s leadership. A coach could set a goal to move their team up four or five spots on the league table.

If you set goals for your blog, ensure they are achievable. Otherwise, you will be disappointed.

Take, for example:

• Instead of trying to monetize your blog by the end of Month 1, focus on monetization by the end of Month 6.
• Instead of trying to rank first on Google in Year 1, aim for ranking 1st by Years 2 and 3.
• Instead of setting a goal to publish a post per day, aim to publish a post every other days

Select the right goals for your blog

What would the impact of a coach setting their team the goal to become social media influencers? Would it be relevant to their overall goal (to beat their opponent and win their league) None!

This principle applies to blogging and setting goals for your blog. It is important to make sure that the goals you choose are in line with your overall blog objectives. You should consider whether each goal will have the desired impact or help you in ways that you feel are helpful.

A goal to double your Instagram followers would likely not lead to a similar doubling of your blog readership. This goal is not relevant. It would be better to aim for doubling the click-throughs of your Instagram blog-share posts, which would increase your blog’s readership.

Your blog goals should be time-bound

Let’s close with a sports analogy. What do you think the outcome would be if a coach told their team “I want to beat your rivals…at some point.” Would they go out and beat the rival team in that game? Do you think they would feel less pressure since there is no deadline?

Because blogging is something that most people do on their spare time, deadlines are essential for bloggers. Your blog goals should be time-bound and have a deadline. Otherwise, they are easy to forget about. As other issues or ideas arise, push them further down the pile.

How to set stretch goals for your blog

These “stretch” goals are long-term, big goals that are impossible to achieve given your current work capacity. They are, in other words, our blogging goals. Reaching a stretch goal should be not only difficult but also creative and innovative thinking.

Here are some examples of blog-related goals that you might choose to set:

• To be the #1 Vietnamese cooking blogger
• To turn blogging into a full-time job, bringing in over $40,000 USD per annum
• You can be invited to join your favorite podcast as a guest blogger on your topic.

Setting stretch goals is a way to motivate and push yourself as a blogger, to set challenging goals and to provide clear direction for your SMART goals. It will take patience, dedication, and hard work to achieve stretch goals.

They aren’t necessarily impossible, but that doesn’t mean they should be unattainable. Instead, break down each stretch goal into a series SMART goals to help you push yourself year after year towards achieving your dreams.

If we take, for example, the “turn blogging into full-time 40K job”, stretch goal, it might be broken down into a series SMART goals.

1. Set up a content tracker and a posting schedule
2. Invest your time and energy into Search Engine Optimization
3. Identify your target audience and connect with them via their preferred social media platforms and forums
4. To start monetizing your blog, you can set up a contract with a marketing agency for affiliate marketing and ad hosting.
5. Guest writers can create posts that have a new audience and expand into other media such as YouTube and podcasting, if necessary.

Five Expert Techniques to Help Your Blog Reach Its Goals

It’s one thing to set blog goals, but it’s another to achieve them. Let’s take a quick look at 5 top techniques that you can use to reach your blogging goals.

1. Reduce goals into manageable tasks

You can break down each SMART goal into manageable tasks to prevent them from becoming confusing or overwhelming.

You could, for example, break down SEO-optimizing posts as follows:

1. Use keywords to find the right words and then implement them
2. Back-link relevant posts to each other
3. Your posts should be formatted uniformly in accordance with SEO best practices.
4. Incorporate useful infographics or pictures in your posts
5. Optimize the meta titles and descriptions of your posts

2. Use the “task-batching” technique

Professionals from many industries use task-batching to improve efficiency and streamline their work. Task-batching simply means that you group similar tasks together in order to make them easier to tackle, even though they may relate to different goals. Take, for example:

• Email tasks can be grouped together
• Research-heavy tasks can be combined
• Social media outreach tasks can be grouped together

3. Use the “pomodoro” technique

In the 1980s, the pomodoro method was created. It is still one of the most efficient methods for optimizing productivity and stress reduction. This technique is named after the tomato-shaped cooking timers (pomodoro in Italian), which are set at 25 minutes intervals. It’s simple.

1. Give yourself a task.
2. You can run the pomodoro clock for 25 minutes while you are at work
3. Take a 5-minute break after the timer goes off
4. Take a longer break for around 15-30 minutes after every fourth pomodoro alarm

You’ll be able to focus more on the task(s), if you allow your brain to tune out and in on a regular basis.

4. Create to-do lists

It is hard to overstate the importance of a reliable to-do list. To achieve your blogging goals, you should start by creating a to-do listing with all the tasks that you must complete each day or week.

Once you have established your task list for the block of time, it is possible to prioritize tasks according to importance while simultaneously task-batching. You’ll be able to prioritize tasks by importance, so that you don’t run out of time for the most important tasks.

5. Learn from other bloggers

Do not try to do it all alone. You’ll waste precious time and make mistakes that could have been avoided if you turned to other bloggers for help.

You can visit the blogs of successful bloggers to read their posts about setting goals and achieving them. Then, reach out via email or DM for help in areas that you are less familiar with.

Bloggers are best when they have each other’s support.

Conclusion

Every day there are millions of blog posts, yet a third of bloggers quit within three months of starting their blog. You can ensure your blog’s success by setting SMART goals and using stretch goals. We also recommend our top 5 techniques to help you reach them all.

Scoop.it Blog published the first post How to Set and Achieve your Blogging Goals: 2023 Blog Guide.

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