How To Set Goals For Enormous Success

jrswab (66) in education • 7 years ago (edited)

This series focus is to help you blog better and make progress faster from my decade long experience in this medium. These principles on setting your goals can apply to any aspect of life. They are simple, action-oriented, steps to make sure you stay on top.

Let’s be realistic yet challenging. They should not focus on up-votes, comments, or an amount of income. Those things take time and are out of our direct control.

A big step in being a successful blogger is setting your goals. It's the goals that show us we are making progress. Without goals, we will get off track and lose focus on what we are trying to achieve.

This is difficult.

“Everybody has their own Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.” – Seth Godin

Even Seth Godin, the well-know blogger and author, shows us how hard it can be to achieve our life's purpose. Setting goals is one way to tackle the Mount Everest of our dreams.

Why Set Goals?

Goal orientation is very important if you wish to achieve anything. Certain tasks take only a small amount of goal setting. Such as riding every roller coaster in an amusement park. A goal to set could be to ride a specific number of coasters by a specific time of day, or a certain number of coasters each hour.

Others, like creating an awesome blog, take a good deal more in setting your goals. This because the larger tasks have more moving parts than the smaller ones. For blogging, we need to plan out every post. Think about what content and images we will use, and what keywords we are trying to rank if we want to be searchable. A goal may be the number of words you want each post to pass. What about daily content or replying to every comment?

The bigger the task the more goals you will need.

Two Types of Goals For Your Blog

Step 1: Setting Blog Lifetime Goals

Lifetime goals for your blog may include a certain number of post each month, increasing your network of other bloggers, or taking your topic on a speaking tour. There are many long term or lifetime goals you can set for your blog. Sit down and flesh this out, it will help you align your smaller goals with those bigger, lifetime goals.

Step 2: Setting Smaller Blog Goals

These goals will help you achieve your big, lifetime blog goals. Examples may include sticking to a schedule, commenting on a certain number of posts, or writing your first twenty-five blog posts in a month. These are not huge and you should adjust them once you reach the goal. Example, once you write your first twenty-five blog posts set your sights on the next twenty-five or fifty.

3 Goal Ideas For First Time Bloggers

Idea 1: Total Amount of Time to Give to Building my blog?

This is big, any legitimate blogger will be honest and tell you, the more you can give the better you will be.

Whether you are unemployed or working a full-time job there needs to be a set number of hours per week, you will devote to your blog. The majority of successful bloggers will tell you to put in at least 10 hours a week for six to twelve months.

I’d aim for around fifteen or twenty hours a week, but I know this may be hard for someone working forty hours at a ‘real’ job. So make sure you can devote at least 10 hours per week. That is only two hours a day five days a week, add two more days and you are already at fourteen hours per week.

Idea 2: How much money am I able to invest?

Blogging may take cash to get started even though it’s inexpensive and often can be free.

So making sure you have a set number you can commit to your blog is a superb idea. Somewhere between $100 and $300 should work to put aside for things like a domain name (if you want one), extra steem, and useful tools. There is never a reason to invest in your blog. However, I have found it helps to motivate a person when they have skin in the game.

Idea 3: Where do I want to be in a year?

Do you want to be doing this full-time or part-time?

It’s a big question and if you put dedication, time, and effort, this could turn blogging into a full-time job. For now, we are aiming for networking and consistent posting. But, that does not mean you won't be asking this question someday. If your goal is to blog full-time it will take a lot of part-time effort up front.

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” – C. S. Lewis

Stick to Your Path

SMART Goals:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-based

Use SMART it will help you set good goals. First, we need a specific goal, we’ll use “post three days per week”. Now we check if we can measure said goal. Yes, the total number of days is measurable.

Is the goal attainable? Yes, many people post every day of the week so we should be able to work at this goal.

Is the goal relevant? Yes, this goal is relevant, the more we post the higher the chance of reaching new readers and potential followers.

Is this goal time-based? I will say no. There is no end to this goal and no time frame to complete it within. A better option would be "post three days per week for one month". Now we have a time frame that we can use to look back and adjust our goal as needed.

“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” – Napoleon Hill

#Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or feed back please leave a comment. I'm also always open to direct messages on all the platforms out there so reach out! If you have a topic you'd like me to cover please let me know and I'll add it to the list.

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