Setting Goals and Objectives for your Blog

I call it setting objectives, my American friends will call it setting goals – to me goals are to do with football, or should I say soccer?

Firstly, let me apologize to readers who follow this blog chronologically – this post should have been the first! Although,……does anybody read a blog chronologically?

I digress. Before you buy your domain name, before you think about which CMS to use, before you do anything, please, please, please, set some objectives and write them down! Now I know you’re going to ignore that advice, because you’re an action person, and you want to be doing things and your head is full of great ideas. So at the very least, stop where you are right now, and if you don’t have written objectives, do them, now.
Why do we need objectives, and why should we write them down? The answer lies in the subconscious side of our brains. We have all read or heard that we only use 20% of our brains, and that the subconscious part is in the other 80%. Having written goals allows us to tap into that 80%.

When you have written goals that you read every day, that information is going into the subconscious side of your brain. This part of your mind will assimilate the information and will begin to work on it – when you’re doing other things and even when you’re asleep. It will work to help you achieve your objectives. Have you ever had a “Eureka moment”? You often have them when you’ve given up on solving a problem and you have moved onto something else. This is the power of the subconscious mind – it will work for you, even when you’re not working.

So, how do you set your goals, or objectives? Start off by setting the main goals you have for your blog, based on timeframe. I’m going to use my objectives for this blog as an example for you.

Month One
Blog online with some readers – Achieved!
Blog making enough money to cover hosting costs – Achieved!

Month Three
300 visitors per day
Making 100 dollars a month from advertising
First affiliate programs on site

Month Six
1000 visitors per day
Making 500 Dollars a month from advertising
Making 100 Dollars a month from affiliate programs
20 potential advertisers targeted
In regular contact with 10 high profile bloggers

Month Nine
2000 visitors per day
Making 1000 dollars per month from advertising
Making 500 dollars per month from affiliate programs
Making 500 dollars per month from direct advertisers
In regular contact with 20 high profile bloggers

Month Twelve
3000 Visitors per day
Making a total of 3000 dollars per month from all sources
Considered by others to be a high profile blogger

As you can see, my objectives are easily measurable and very clear. And yours must be as well – you need to be able to very quickly and simply answer “Did I make it?” to each of them. You won’t always make it, and when you don’t you simply have to work your way down the list and revise them accordingly. For example, if I only hit 750 visitors per day in month six, then I’ll revise down the objectives for the following few months. Conversely, if I hit 2000, I’ll revise them upwards!

Step two is to break these objectives down into individual tasks. Now this is task management, so don’t sully your written or typed objectives with the tasks, keep them as above, in their pure and simple form because you’re going to read them every day, but more of that later. Each objective requires you to do many other tasks, and you can record them in whatever way you normally record tasks – in a note book, or via Microsoft Outlook tasks perhaps? Let me give you an example. By month three I want to have the first affiliate programs on the site, and I broke that task down as follows:

Research possible affiliate programs
Select which ones will work with my site / style
Check the selected ones are good
Sign up with selected programs
Install promotional material on the site in appropriate locations / posts
Direct mail members of site with detailed email

You need to do this with each objective, and also to set a time “done before” date, so that you can achieve each element in a timely fashion.

I mentioned earlier that you need to read your objectives every day – and you do! Don’t skip this part, because this constant reminder is what your subconscious brain needs to get working for you. You also need to re evaluate daily, and ask “How am I doing?”

Finally, I need to talk about visualization. This is the super highway to getting your subconscious brain to work for you. For some (and I’m one of them) this comes quite easily – especially so if you’re naturally a day dreamer. For others, this is very hard, but you must do it. What you need to do, in a quiet moment (perhaps in the bath, or waiting to drift off the sleep) is imagine you have already achieved your goals. Explore the feeling, the taste, imagine the conversations, picture yourself doing the things you will do if you are successful. You really, really need to do this.

You can see my goal for month 12, which will be Christmas 2009. I will have 3000 visitors each day reading my work, I will be contemplating becoming a full time blogger and will be excited at the prospect. Christmas will be looming, and instead of being worried about money, I’ll be looking forward to spending a decent amount on my wife and kids. I won’t be scurrying around avoiding people I owe money to, I’ll be able to go anywhere with my head held high. People will be regularly contacting me for advice and ideas, my site will be busy every day with comments, someone will have called me a blogging guru. My wife will be saying “Mike, remember how tough things were a year ago, I can’t believe we’ve turned things around in such a short time.”
That’s just a small part of my visualization, but I can tell you I know exactly how I’m going to feel, look and sound as and when I achieve all these objectives, and by going that far with my visualizations, I’m really getting my subconscious brain working on my behalf.

Stay with this blog, sign up to the RSS feeds and find out if I do achieve these objectives!

Have you written objectives for your site? Are you achieving them? Can you add anything to the points I have made? Please comment.