It’s good to have goals. As a blog owner, goals can help you achieve a great deal of great things. That is as long as you’re willing to put them into practice. Goals mean nothing without the effort to back them.
Today, I’m sharing the goals I have and how I intend to achieve them.
Of course, success is often a subjective term. What I view as a successful website may differ from your opinion. Still, perhaps I can help by shedding some light on what I intend to put forward in the new year.
What Realistic Goals Do I Have for the Blog?
Ideally, I would like the blog to hit 450 visits per day. That’s about 13,500 visits per month. It’s not my ultimate goal for the site, but it’s the first major milestone I would like to hit before creating a new strategy.
At the time of this post, that would be roughly four times the traffic than I have now.
For a writing site that is constantly at odds with Google, it’s not as easy as some make it sound. This is especially true when you consider that I am doing this all by myself and without AI-generated garbage.
Unlike some YouTube blogger channels, I don’t have the money to throw at freelance writers yet. That’s what hitting the first milestone will help me afford.
So, How am I going to accomplish this in the new year?
Maintaining a Publishing Schedule
To keep the writing schedule alive throughout the year, the idea is to write blog posts a week in advance. I do this by using the Asana management app and assigning blocks of time for myself to write.
First, a solid publishing schedule is ideal for both Google and subscribers alike. People are more likely to engage with content if they know about when it will be published.
It’s kind of like how television shows used to have specific time slots. Certain programs were more ideal to show at those times for the most viewership.
Anyway, I’ve been handling a good flow lately for maintaining a three-per-week schedule. But you never know when something will derail my efforts.
Updating At Least One Post Per Week
Like the blocks of time scheduled for new content, I have one scheduled in the week for writing updates. I’ll start with old blog posts that rank higher than 15 according to Search Console. The goal is to get them into the top 10 in search.
Google and human readers love new content. No one wants to stumble across a blog post that is absolutely outdated. In fact, I’ve seen updates to posts increase traffic to them by over 8,000% in six months! And we’re talking visitors in the thousands.
Of course, that was for one of my well-established clients. I doubt I’ll increase traffic to any one of my posts by that high of a degree. But driving a few hundred more visits per week would be helpful.
Remember, I am doing this solo. At the moment, I only have enough time to update one post per week.
Reviewing More Products and Services
The plan is to review more free products writers and bloggers can use as well as spend a few bucks for products and services. It’ll take a bit of a monetary investment, but the revenue from traffic could offset the cost in the long term.
Reviews make up seven of the top 10 articles on this website in terms of traffic. That’s because reviews work exceptionally well as more than 90% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase. That was according to Power Reviews in 2023.
On all of my blogs as well as sites of my clients, reviews reign supreme in comparison to all other forms of content.
Look at the sidebar of this website right now. I bet the majority of the top 10 trends for the day are review-related. That includes pros and cons lists.
Of course, this isn’t always the case. I’m sure there are sites out there that have other types of content that perform better. But when a review is well-written, it can bring in a lot of people.
Writing More Tutorials
I would love to schedule at least two WordPress tutorials throughout the month, each on a Wednesday so I could use the #WordPressWednesday hashtag when sharing. Regardless, I plan to have at least one tutorial per week whether it’s freelancing, self-publishing, or blogging in general.
Although reviews are the top-performing style of content on this blog, tutorials are a close second. That’s because we live in a DIY world where one can learn just about anything to save themselves some money and/or time.
In the coming year, one of my goals for the blog is to write more tutorials regarding self-publishing and WordPress. A lot of these should translate well over to YouTube as well, so the content will double as a script for videos.
Overall, I love helping people solve problems, as is my nature.
Creating New Lists of Products and Services
The plan is to look for products and services my audience could use and then try them out to see if they’re any good. Then, I’ll publish at least two listicles per month. Keep in mind that I need time to test each one. I try not to mention products I’ve never seen or used.
Another effective type of content is a listicle. These are “list articles” that show a list centering around a specific topic or purpose.
In my case, I want to show lists of viable products or services writers can use. For instance, I have a list of the best beginner writing apps and a list of plot generators you can use right now.
I would love to add more lists of things writers and bloggers can use to help them shave off time looking for products or services. Besides, listicles are great for internal linking when you write full reviews afterward of each product in the list.
Affiliate Blog to Book Experiments
Bloggers should never focus on ad revenue alone for income. Ad-sharing networks pay little in comparison to properly managed affiliate marketing platforms. I haven’t done a lot of affiliate marketing in the past, so I am ramping it up a bit in the new year. But I’m only using products and services I have faith in. I don’t peddle garbage.
The Blog to Book Content Strategy works relatively well, as long as you’re writing a book people want to read. In the coming year, I want to utilize the strategy with more affiliate content.
Essentially, it’ll be an eBook that centers around a specific product or service but is written in a way that is more incidental rather than salesy.
It may or may not work, which is why I’m calling it an experiment. But if it does work well and I manage to make a few more bucks from it, you can bet that I’ll let everyone know how I did it.
Mind Mapping with Mindomo
There are a lot of ways you can plan out goals for your blog. One of the methods I use is brainstorming using the Mindomo app. It has a lot of great features, customizations, and allows up to three mind maps in the free version.
I’ve been using Mindomo for many years both personally and professionally. It’s helped me design a variety of content strategies for clients as well as restructure my own blogs.
Mind mapping helps you by exploring options to achieve specific goals.
I first started mind mapping back in college when a professor taught us how to do it when designing logos and graphics for clients. Nowadays, I take the process much further with more detailed elements of what I need to achieve goals for the blog.
For example, one of the ways I’ll hit 450 visits per day is by publishing 3 posts per week. Then, I break that down to researching 15 posts per month for writing content. Then, I go further and break down the types of content I want to explore, and so on.
The more you break down one of the segments, the more details you have for your goals. The more details you have, the easier it is to come up with a strategy that works to achieve those objectives.
Now, you don’t have to use Mindomo as there are a lot of mind mapping apps out there. Or, you can simply grab a pen and a notebook and make it on your own. I only point out Mindomo because it’s one of the tools I’ve been using for the past six years and thought it might be useful.
Google Analytics and Search Console
When setting up goals for your blog, never underestimate the value of Google Analytics and Search Console. These two are perhaps the most utilized data points on the Internet for gathering site-wide information.
The problem, though, is that Google Analytics will often record bot scraping on your site. This is when bots will scour your website for information or downright copy entire posts.
Nowadays, you’ll see a lot of spikes in Analytics from AI tools like chatGPT.
There are ways you can block AI from crawling your website, such as adding entries into your robots.txt file. However, bots can still access your site through links provided by others.
This means that if someone else links to your content, the AI can follow it to scan your text, bypassing the robots.txt file altogether.
In any case, Analytics still has valuable tools that can help you fine-tune your content. For example, you can determine what social sites send traffic back to your blog, how much each post makes in AdSense, how much time people spend on your pages, and more.
Despite it having a few flaws here and there, Analytics is still decent for helping you set up blog goals.
Search Console is Google’s view of how your website performs online. This includes pages that are indexed in the search engine, what position posts appear using certain keyphrases, and impressions of your content.
Of both tools, I’d say that Search Console is probably the most prominent, especially if you’re trying to perform well in Google.
In my case, I’m going to look for phrases and pages that score worse than the 15th position in Google. The hope is to get them closer to the top 10 to generate more traffic.
Blog Goals Are Great, But…
It takes effort to keep a blog afloat, let alone improve. And when you’re doing everything by yourself while trying to manage all of the other projects on your list, it becomes one hell of a challenge.
Still, creating realistic goals for your blog can help you achieve a lot. But don’t forget that goals are meaningless without a commitment to put in the work.
It’s OK to reach for the stars. Just make sure your feet are firmly planted on the ground lest you fall.
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