How to Set Yourself Blog Goals and Smash Them

Setting yourself goals and targets is a wonderful way of making sure you stay motivated and on track with your blog. It’s easy to give up when you hit a rut or have little traffic or engagement. All that hard work can feel undervalued and pointless.

However, if you start to set yourself targets to reach each week, month and year, you and your blog will flourish because you are working towards a particular goal each time you open your laptop.

Long Term / Short Term

Start off with long term goals – make a list of things you’ll have wanted to achieve on your blog in a year’s time. Ask yourself how many social followers would you wish to have by then, how many brands would you like to be working with or how professional would you like your site design to be by then? These are all measurable and completely possible with a lot of hard work and dedication!

If you think about how much you would like to achieve in a year, you will start to formulate your short-term targets more easily.

What is the goal of your blog?

Your long-term and short-term targets will very much depend on what the overarching goal of your blog is. For you it could be writing practice, a place to vent, make friends, make money and build a brand or just something fun to do in your spare time. It could even be all of these things combined.

Think about what is more important to you; readership, quality content, higher traffic, more followers, and think of fun, unique ways that you can reach them. Be it competitions to boost traffic, a social giveaway to build followers, or a brand ambassador role to help create more content

It’s important to only pick one or two main goals, this way they will be simpler to reach and you won’t feel as downhearted if you fail to attain them all.

SMART Goals – make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals is a sure-fire way of smashing them. Setting unclear, immeasurable and impossible goals will set you up to fail. Instead of ‘I want to double my blog traffic’ as a goal, make it a SMART goal: ‘I want to double my blog traffic by the end of this year’, Then set about thinking about ways to achieve this and make another target list.

If your primary goals are numerical, then start a month by month target list, such as:

• How many new blog subscribers to gain by the end of the month
• How many new social media followers you aim to gain per month
• Increase blog traffic by a specific % each month through SEO, social promotion and blog promotion

If your goal is to become an influencer and make money from your blog, then setting yourself realistic goals will help you stay on target:

• Number of brands to build relationships with per quarter
• When and why to start charging for collaborations (read our post about this)
• Invest in new camera and editing software by a certain date/number of subscribers
• Invest in affiliate training and social advertising once blog traffic reaches a certain number

These kinds of goal lists will help keep your mind and focus on track and remind you what you are aiming for.

Keeping up with your blog

The most important goals you should have on top of any list are the foundations of your work.

Keeping up with your blog content is the most important goal of all, and the backbone of all other goals. To do this make sure you:

• Write weekly
• Keep on top of your content by using an editorial calendar
• Build a bank of well edited photos and videos to use for posts
• Write at least one ‘curated content’ post a month
• Try and attend a blogging seminar or writing/blogging workshop every 6 months or so to keep on perfecting your craft and learning new ways of doing things

Whatever goals you decide to set yourself, always make sure they are achievable – don’t set yourself to fail. We are here to help if you have any questions – and of course we can help you smash your brand collaboration goals with our incredible influencer/brand matchmaking service!