Successful Blogging: 6 Steps To Create Your Blog Plan For 2008

Posted on December 19, 2007
Filed Under Blogging Tips |

Planning for 2008With the New Year fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about what you want from your blog in the year ahead. A logical time boundary like a new year is a great time start something new. Your motivation is high and you are ready for a new challenge. But before you go charging ahead, you will need a plan.

So following on from my recent post Successful Blogging: 7 Ways To Measure The Success Of Your Blog, I have put together some ideas to help you get started with your blog plan for 2008. Use these steps as a basis for your plan - and let me know what other things you consider as part of your planning.

1. Where Are You Now?

Before setting goals for next year, take some time to consider what you have achieved with your blog so far.

These are the fundamentals you need to get right in order to build a solid foundation for the future.

2. What Are Your Goals?

When planning for 2008, start with your goals. As with any planning process, you will need to make your goals specific and measurable. What do I mean by specific and measurable? Take the following staement as an example:

I want to get more traffic to my blog.

As you can see, this goal, while perfectly valid lacks specificity and will be hard to measure. How much more traffic do you want, and by when? You could re-write the goal is follows:

I want my blog to average at least 1000 unique visitors per day by the end of March 2008.

This statement now specifyies exactly what you want to achieve and by when. You want 1000 visitors per day and you have given yourself 3 months to do it.

At the beginning of this article I referred to my recent post on measuring success - you may like to refer back to it when considering your goals for 2008. It might get you started with some basic ideas.

Another area you may want to consider is your upcoming posts. Thinks about the topics you want to cover and see whether you can present them in a logical order. You’re more likely to attract regular readers if you develop some topics over multiple posts.

3. Be Realistic

Make your goals achievable. There’s nothing wrong with setting aggressive targets but if your goal is too far out of reach you are more likely to lose motivation and throw away your plan.

Consider the time you have available to you. Is posting multiple articles per day going to be realistic without compromising on quality. Not many of us are lucky enough to be able to blog full time. Work and family commitments need to be balance against your passion for blogging.

4. How Will You Achieve Your Goals?

The next step is to work out what you are going to do to achieve your goals. These are your action points - the actions you need to take to reach your goals. If we continue with the example of averaging at least 1000 unique visitors by the end of March 2008, we might come up with the following actions:

  1. Research keywords with potential 100 searches per day.
  2. Optimize one post every two weeks for the keywords above with the aim of reaching the front page of Google for that search term.
  3. And so on…

Define at least one action point for every goal you have identified. Collectively these actions points will guide you in achieving the goals set out in your plan.

5. Write it down

Your plan doesn’t need to be too detailed, but you will need to write it down. This will allow you to refer back to it. Your plan gives you a point of reference. If you lose your way, you can come back to it and begin working towards those goals again.

Having a written plan also allows you to review your progress periodically. Every few months (or even every month if you are really keen) you should go back and measure your achievements against the plan. Adjust your goals according to what you have achieved so far.

6. But Be Flexible

Things change - your goals may have been too aggressive or other external factors may have held you back. For whatever reason, you may find the plan is not working for you. There is nothing wrong with revising your plan. Review your goals and determine whether they are still realistic.

If your goals are still valid, it might just be a matter of stepping back and finding a different way to achieve them. Revise your action points.

Continuing on from our example above, you might consider the following:

There’s less than 2 weeks to go until the new year, so what are you waiting for. Set your goals, write your plan and start working towards them. Do you have a plan for your blog? Let me know if you have any special methods you use for planning and goal-setting.

Technorati Tags: blog, blog planning, blogging, traffic




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Comments

11 Responses to “Successful Blogging: 6 Steps To Create Your Blog Plan For 2008”

  1. Susan on December 19th, 2007 5:35 am

    Great idea! I have spent the past month reviewing all my online endeavors, setting goals and learning about blogging.
    I truly believe to be successful at anything, you need to set goals and put the plan in motion.

  2. Brett on December 19th, 2007 6:06 am

    I couldn’t agree more.

  3. James Alenteal on December 21st, 2007 11:47 pm

    Brett,
    I like your post here because it caused me to think ahead … something I’m not often accused of.

    But what almost made go ROFL was that picture! My nomination for best blog shot of the year, tied in first place with Terry Dean’s police suspect mugshot.

    Too funny.

  4. Brett on December 22nd, 2007 4:51 am

    Thanks James. I found that picture somehow fitting…

  5. Justin Dupre on December 22nd, 2007 8:24 pm

    Excellent points that I wish I would have included in my own on the same topic.

    The picture is magnificent! Haha

    Justin Dupre
    www.moneyandblog.com

  6. Brett on December 22nd, 2007 8:45 pm

    Justin - that image seems to have struck a chord. Thanks for the feedback.

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  9. Connie on January 10th, 2008 4:54 pm

    I find this interesting and plan on developing a blog to be utilized in an elementary classroom.

  10. Brett on January 10th, 2008 5:52 pm

    Hi Connie. I would be interested to hear how you go. Please keep me updated.

    Brett

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