What are Your Goals With This Site?

I’m glad I asked.

As I’ve always heard it is a good idea to write down your goals and make them public so that you’ll be held to them. So that’s what I’m going to do.

10 or More Quality Posts Per Day

As I mentioned in my previous article, 10 Things You Can Do To Uncomplicate Your Life, you should divide a large project into mini-milestones. Therefore I’ve set a daily mini-milestone of posting 10 good articles a day. If I fall short, well, I won’t sweat it, but I may need to adjust my milestones and ultimate goals.

Improve My Writing

One of the big challenges for me is to improve my writing skills. While I’ve been told I write rather well I can be long winded at times. My challenge is to condense what I have to say into smaller bits.

Experiment With Monetization

Following in the tradition of several other bloggers I’m going to work with the monetization formula for this site extensively. The challenge here is to strike the right balance between content and ads. I think if the content is good the advertising glitz will work. Just look at Vegas.

Build Relationships With Other Bloggers and Readers

If you build it, they won’t necessarily come and they may not stick around if they do show up. So, my goal is to build relationships by responding to comments as much as possible and by using a policy of mentioning other peoples’ blogs in one of my posts when they leave a comment here. I think that having a post mention your blog is more effective than just a simple comment since the link in the post won’t be nofollowed and will count toward Technorati popularity.

My Long Term Goals Are…

For goals to be effective it’s important to attach something measurable to them. Otherwise, they’re more like wishes or dreams. Here are mine:

1. To have a minimum of 200 articles posted by November 1 and to have 500 articles by January 1, 2008.

2. To improve my writing skills. This is hard to measure directly but I’ll try to use overall article length as my measure here.

3. To effectively monetize this site. My tangible goal here is to earn $100 from this site by December 1.

4. To build good relationships with other bloggers and my readers. I need to come up with a good measure of this, probably the ratio of comments to posts, outgoing links, and incoming links. I’m open to suggestions here.

Check back and see how I’m doing. People love to see both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

If you have a blog, have you set effective goals for it? If so, leave me a comment and let me know about them.

Update: 7/19/2008

Here’s how these goals have gone so far.

1. The 200 posts in November was reached. As of this writing, I still under 500 posts, just barely though. I’ve had a few changes in direction that led to a reduction in the number of posts.

2. I think my writing has improved, at least in my ability to crank out posts.

3. This site now regularly brings in between $500-800 a month, mostly from EPN.

4. I think this has worked pretty well. I’m no A-List “make money online” blogger but I do OK.

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