No matter if you blog for pleasure, profit or any mix of the two, at some point in your blogging journey you’ll probably end up setting some blogging goals.
How To Set Blogging Goals
Things that bloggers commonly want to focus on include:
Comments On Blog Posts
While the general sentiment among many bloggers is that commenting is going down (or over to social media), it is still nice to receive comments on blog posts from your readers. Also, it makes nice social proof of the fact that your readers are engaged. Bloggers are probably more inclined to comment than non blogger readers, usually because of the sign in required to comment. The biggest tip I can give you is to log out of your website’s dashboard and comment on your own post – is it easy? Does it look like you have to have a website to comment? Do you allow anonymous comments? These are all factors which could stop someone from commenting.
Tip: It’s fine to comment on an old blog post and delete it later. This is just for testing purposes.
If you want to increase comments on your blog posts, make sure that you include a question in every post. Make it short, easy to reply to and specific.
Tip: Instead of asking “How was your day?”, try asking “What was the best thing that happened today?” or “What made you smile today?”
Statistics
Yep, the first thing nearly any brand (or sometimes other bloggers) want to know about you. How many people visit your blog? Being a qualitative researcher by training, the sometimes single-minded focus on statistics bothers me a fair bit. I’m much happier with engagement than I am some counter flipping over. But there’s no denying that commercial aspects of blogging are largely borrowed from traditional advertising (think magazines, newspapers) which is a numbers game.
Newsletter Subscribers
Bloggers put such a huge focus on newsletter subscribers for the simple reason that, as fun as social media is, your accounts can be banned or deleted at any time, with little or no reason or recourse. If you want to have as much control as possible over how you contact your readers, then a newsletter (like your blog) is something that can’t be taken away from you. Focusing on growing newsletter subscribers is a common goal because of the ‘ownership’ factor.
Now that you’ve read some of the common types of blogging goals, it’s time to brainstorm around your blog, the business plan for your blog (if you have one) and see what goals sit well with you to focus on.
Having the goal is the first step. Actually doing work on the goal is the part that is hard to gloss over (and another topic for another time)!
What blogging goals do you have?
