(CC Licenced image source: bfishadow)

Kung Hei Fat Choy! Today is the beginning of the Chinese New Year and this year is the year of the Ox (hence the ox pictures).

For those worried about the world’s economy, the good news is the year of the ox is all about stability and security. Just like the powerful ox towing the fields, security and stability are the results of discipline and hard work.

Sow your seeds early and tend to them regularly and you will find success and prosperity as a result.

(Image Source: Chinese New Year Cards)

My good friend, Rick from Religious Quotes sent me a quote that I love about following through with hard work that I keep along with my goals:

“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:11

As my Chinese New Year Gift to help you sow a brilliant harvest , I’ll be posting some of the tools I use (like my blogging worksheets) over my next few blog posts (so remembering my goals, that will be about one a week). Hope you find something useful and Happy New Year!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing.

Just as in life, you often achieve things more easily when you have well defined goals - the same applies to blogging. It’s not enough to just know your purpose for blogging, but you need to also be able to turn your blog’s purpose/s into actionable goals. 

For goals to be actionable, they need to be measurable. It’s no good saying that you want your blog to be “really successful” if you don’t know what successful is. Is it traffic, is it sales, is it reputation? It’s also of no real help to say that you’ll work really hard on your blog because what does “really hard” mean? If your goals aren’t measurable, how will you know when you’ve reached them?

There are two main types of targets you can set for your blog. There are performance results that are external to you so things like traffic numbers, subscribers, amount of comments, how your customers perceive you or your company. And there are task related goals that you control because you will either be the one doing or delegating.

The first type are performance targets for your blog. You need to work out ways that you can measure your blog’s performance. The most obvious targets are numbers of people visiting your site and the number of subscribers through RSS or email. You should also be tracking linkbacks to your site - how many? who’s doing it? are they quality links? (is it from authoritative bloggers?)

If you are directly selling through your blog or your blog’s email list, you will also want to have sales targets including conversion targets (that is, the number of visitors or subscribers that make purchases). 

You may also want to look at less obvious but important indicators of how engaging your blog is like how long people stay on your blog, how many comments your posts are getting and the quality of those comments. 

The second type are task related goals. It’s a good idea to at the very least make your schedule of blogging your goal. If you’ve decided to have a daily post then make it a goal to do 30 daily posts that month (or 4 weekly posts if you’ve decided to go weekly). If you want to ensure your blog’s success, you need to also prioritise time to market your blog and connect with other bloggers in your niche (or related niches). You could for example, aim to comment on five blogs a day or a week.

Whatever, you decide on as your goals, make sure they are realistic and that you regularly review them. While your blog is new, it is best to concentrate on setting short term goals for your own actions and give your blog some time to develop before starting to aim for 20,000 subscribers and 100,000’s of unique visitors. It’s better to start off with achievable targets and once you meet them, set higher ones.  By all means, have big targets as your longer term milestones or ultimate goals - just don’t expect to reach them in the first month!

Finally, make sure that you have your goals written down and you track them. This can be on a spreadsheet on your computer or on a piece of paper stuck up next to your work area. Schedule in time to review your blog when you review your normal goals. Be prepared to question what you’re doing and change your strategy if you aren’t meeting your targets (within a realistic period of time).

Never lose sight of your audience - connect with them, deliver what they need and want, offer something unique that stands out from the crowd and you will have a very successful blog on your hands. Good luck!

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This is our final lesson for this set of Blogging Goals (don’t worry, we will be revisiting this subject in later posts - look out for something closer to the new year!).

We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). 

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.

Once you know your market (that is your niche, other sites in your niche and your audience), you should spend some time planning your blog before you go ahead and start writing it.

There’s an old saying that goes “measure twice, cut once” - a little bit of time spent on planning in the beginning can save you a lot more time in the implementation. It can also help to prevent writer’s block.

Categories

First, think about the possible subject areas or themes that your blog is going to cover. Write them down on a big piece of paper (or mind map them). Can you group them into coherent categories? 

Once you have whittled down your list to a bunch of categories, think of labels for the categories that make sense for your reader (you may want to do some keyword research)

If you think up new categories every time you write your blog posts, you are liable to end up with a big jumble of categories that make no sense to a reader or you. Remember that a lot of blogging systems allow you to add tags when you write your posts - tags are better for that sort of ad-hoc categorisation while categories are better as the bigger thematic umbrellas. 

Another way of seeing categories is as a navigation tool, they help your readers navigate your blog. This may not seem such a big deal when you’ve only got twenty or thirty posts on your website, but once you’ve been blogging for some months and even years, it does become essential if you don’t want your older content to be lost.

Blog Schedule

When you know what areas you want your blog to cover, one neat way of organising your site is to create a schedule of when you will blog certain types of posts. If you had a money tips blog, you could make Monday the day you talk about financial goals, Tuesday is technology savings tips, Wednesday is food saving tips, Thursday is education and school savings tips, Friday is auto savings tips, Saturday is entertainment savings tips and Sunday is reader’s tips. 

If you post less frequently, you may want to create a schedule over a month - say you had a food blog, the first Saturday of the month is lunches, the second Saturday is main meals, the third is side dishes, the last is desserts.

Blog schedules are what you want to make of them. You don’t need to schedule all your posts. You could write daily posts but schedule one day to have a particular theme - so with a craft blog, you could make Saturday “Show and Tell” day where other bloggers send pictures of things they have crafted. Or you could make Friday “Around the Grounds” day where you have links to interesting stories related to your blog that you’ve read online. Maybe once a week or month, you can do a special interview with someone in your niche.

Also don’t feel that you have to stick to one schedule forever. You can run things for a specific length of time, for a season, for just one month (for example if there was some special event running over that month) - it’s up to you, it’s your blog.

It’s helpful to communicate these to your readers so they know what to expect but you don’t have to, You can keep these to yourself as an informal template to help ward off being stuck for what to write or you can make these days on your schedule into publicity events (for example if you did “Show and Tell” once a week or month).

Blog Calendar

Blog schedules can be part of your blog calendar, but a calendar is a lot more and should be an essential part of your blog’s planning.

You can use a paper calendar (with enough space to write at least a line for each day); a paper diary type planner; a notebook; a word processing document; a mind mapping program; or what we use, a spreadsheet with the date in one column and the topic of our blog posts in another column. Electronic versions are the most flexible because you don’t have to rewrite your schedule if you want to make changes, but it’s really up to what works best for you.

Brainstorm ideas for your blog over for the next 6 months to a year. Remember to note in any special promotions you or your company might have - if you have a product launched, you will want to make sure you spend enough time on your blog promoting it as well as any other marketing you may do. Look also to other special events like Mother’s Day and holidays and make sure these are marked on your calendar - consider building posts or promotions around these themes (if appropriate to your niche). 

Think about things that you want to cover in your blog, can you do series of information pieces? Are there themes you want to explore? These are all things for your blog calendar.

For the longer term part of your calendar, you can keep it quite broad and just highlight the areas or themes you might want to focus on or the special promotions you’ll be doing. But in the shorter term, you can break this down to more detailed topics that you will covering on specific dates. Unless your blog is very reactive like a news site or a news commentary site or a personal experiences journal, it will help you tremendously to make sure that you always plan at least a couple of weeks’ content at least to topic detail in advance.

Reviewing your Blog’s Plan

You don’t have to feel bound by whatever you have in a blog calendar (unless of course your marketing is dependent on it!) and in fact, you should review your blog’s plan on a regular basis and change it as you feel necessary.

Your blog’s plan should be a living document and one that is constantly revised and updated. It needs to keep up with your developing relationship with and understanding of your audience. It also needs to match your own changes - you may aim to blog every day but find that change it to three times a week or once a week - if so you need to rethink your blog content to ensure that it provides the maximum value for your readers.  Your blog is better off with one really well thought out bit of quality content each week than hastily created haphazardly posted short bits of content.

Just remember if you plan your blog and review and revise that plan regularly, you’re giving yourself a great advantage as you’ve already put yourself in the top percentage of bloggers by those actions alone.

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Next time, we’ll be looking at how to set goals for your blog.

We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series - only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.

Though this lesson on knowing your audience comes after knowing your niche and your competition, knowing your blog audience is the most important of the three. However, it’s difficult to know your blog audience without first knowing your niche and your competition so that’s why they were introduced first.

Knowing the audience you are targeting with your blog is absolutely essential to having a successful blog because it is your audience that determines your blog’s success. It may sound completely obvious but just as many small businesses skip the market research step, many bloggers ignore this too.

When your blog is still new, you will not have established your audience as yet but that doesn’t mean you know nothing about them. In the previous Blogging Goals Lesson, we looked at your competition online (sometimes known as your potential allies). We reminded you to not only look to see what is offered but who it is offered to - read the comments on blogs, look through forum posts - get to understand the audience because these are the same people you will be targeting.

Imagine your target audience - who are they? What do they look like?

Think of the following:

• How old are they?
• Are they male or female?
• What is their family situation?
• What’s their job/business and income level?
• What’s their education level?
• Where do they live and work?
• What are their wants and ambitions?
• What are their needs?
• What are their problems?
• What are their interests and hobbies?

And perhaps most importantly, what would they get out of your blog? What would make them go back to it on a regular basis?

It may be that your niche targets a wider section of the population but often you can find unique features about your audience. In the previous lesson we brought up a company that makes business planning software. Their target market will be people of all ages, men and women, from all walks of life - but the one similar feature they will all have is wanting to build a successful business.

Knowing your blog’s audience is not a one off step. It’s going to be something you will want to regularly review. Once your blog is up and running, you’ll want to look at your traffic and your comments on your blog and see what content is popular, see what gets publicity, see what gets new visitors, see what gets comments. It’s a good idea to touch base with your audience through a call for comments or an online survey to see who they are and what they want to see in your blog.

Also remember to tie what you know about your audience to what your goals are for your blog. If the purpose of your blog is to increase product sales but your audience isn’t buying then you need to look at where the problem is coming from - is it that you are not appealing to your audience with your product or is it that you not attracting your target audience. The right information helps you make the right strategic choices.

Remember what we said before, it’s your blog’s audience that will determine your blog’s success - get to know them and build yourself a better blog.

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Next time, we’ll be looking at how to plan your blog.

We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series - only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.

Once you know the niche market that you are targeting with your blog, you will want to do some research on the existing market.

If you already have a business, you should know your competitors well enough. However, things are a little different online. Often your apparent competition can also be your allies.

The first thing to do is look for other blogs, websites and forums in your niche using a search engine. Once you’ve found some sites, see which sites they are linking to. Try to pinpoint which are the most authoritative sites online and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses - how could you do a better job? What is missing that would be useful to the audience? Are there are areas that are being ignored? 

The next thing to do is evaluate whether these sites are true competition or potential allies. Your particular niche has some bearing on this as some niches are more exclusive than others. 

For example, if you are a plumber, your clients only really need one plumber so other plumbers would be your direct competition. However if as a plumber, you had a home improvement tips blog if a home decorator had another home improvement blog you shouldn’t see this as competition necessarily. The truth is people read multiple blogs in the same area. It’s just like how people will buy multiple books in an area they are interested in. While there is a limit to people’s time and attention, it is flexible and often people do keep up with a handful of blogs or more. And because plumbers are complementary to home decorators, cross traffic between the two blogs can help to build both the plumber and the home decorator’s businesses.

It’s even worth considering seeing your direct competition as your potential allies. This works particularly well when you are selling a product that someone might buy endless variations of that product - eg clothes, stationery, recipes, patterns, books. In fact, information is definitely a product that people can have infinite amounts of and still wish to have more. So as a cook, if you promoted another cook’s blog and even another cook’s book that is unlikely to have any effect on your own readership or cookbook sales. 

In fact, you’ll find that there can be a lot of traffic advantages to networking with other bloggers in your niche, it is certainly one way that you can quickly build an audience. Have a look at your niche and see how open people are to cross promoting.

Often markets are large enough to support multiple suppliers and connecting with others in your niche can also help you understand your niche better and give you personal support and help. Generally bloggers are nice people and you may find yourself developing wonderful friendships.

It’s a good idea to create a spreadsheet to record your market research - list the blog or site address, contact details and your thoughts about it including the potential for making an ally.

When you are doing this market research, not only look to see what is offered but who it is offered to - read the comments on blogs, look through forum posts - get to understand the audience because these are the same people you will be targeting.

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Next time, we’ll be looking at understanding your blog’s audience.

We try to keep any Sunday posts dedicated to the other stuff that supports our business lives but that which often gets ignored - Goal Setting, Productivity, Motivation, Review, Health (we’ve categorised these under “Constant Progress”) and Higher Purpose (giving back to the community and feeding your soul). This will continue during the How to Blog series - only we will be focusing on how this is related blogging.

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.