Blogging goals help you create content with a purpose, so your blog isn’t just a smattering of aimless articles in a sea of content.
As a result, a goal is required to provide direction and intent that guides your blogging activities and attracts an audience.
Making decisions without a plan leaves your success to chance. Make a plan, and you’ll have a set of steps to take to get you and your blog where you want to go.
Planning Effective Blog Goals
- Establish Specific Blog Objectives.
- Set Measurable Objectives.
- Set Achievable Blogging Objectives.
- Establish Relevant Goals for Your Blog.
- Time-Bound Objectives Will Keep You On Track
You’re in luck because there are five major options when it comes to strategic goals that give your blog its overarching direction:
1. Establish your brand: Since blogging is a great way to establish thought leadership, this is probably the most popular blog goal. It can be used by both large and small established brands
Incorporate your branding into your blog to achieve this, and develop a strong voice. To assist your readers, provide information relevant to your niche. Recognize that establishing a thought leadership platform does not imply that you must only write opinion pieces. To assist your readers, you can provide a variety of useful information. This blog is an example of a blog with this goal.
2. Attract new customers or generate leads: People prefer to do business with people they know and like. This blog goal encourages prospects to buy from you by providing them with relevant content that answers their main concerns. Answer questions from prospects and customers using the FAQs approach to content.
Creating an editorial calendar for this type of blog is as simple as making a list of the most frequently asked questions and then responding to them.
Comparing your products to those of your competitors is also a good idea. If done correctly, this strategy can help you shorten your sales cycle and cut down on customer service calls.
3. Provide after-sale assistance: People who have already purchased your product will benefit from this type of blog. The information encourages them to use your products more and buy from you again.
The subtext is to increase the lifetime value of your customers. Prospects may be swayed by this type of content.
4. Take a position: This is the Hyde Park corner or soapbox approach. Your goal here is to express yourself and make an impression. This can, of course, be related to your brand, but it can also stand alone.
This goal also works well if you want to establish your own social media home base.
5. Increase direct revenue: While many would-be bloggers believe they can start a blog and make money overnight, the reality is that blogging requires a lot of effort, not only in writing posts but also in preparing them for publication and promoting them.
Understand that only a small percentage of your readers will purchase from you. You’re getting a lot of sales if you reach 2% of your readers. Top bloggers make it appear simple, but they have invested a significant amount of time in growing their followings.
Many bloggers make money from their blog in a more indirect way, through connections and other types of business.
How to Determine Whether Your Blog’s Objectives Are Achievable
How can you tell if you’ll be able to meet your blogging objectives? This is an excellent question, and the answer will differ for each blogger.
When setting SMART achievable goals, the first step is to make a list of where you are now. Ask yourself a series of questions based on the list of blog goals we discussed earlier in this article:
- How many people do you get per month?
- How much money do you make on a yearly basis?
- How many email newsletter subscribers are you able to count?
- How many social media followers do you have today?
- How many backlinks does your blog currently have?
- How frequently do you publish new content?
- How many pages/posts do you think need to be updated in terms of SEO?
Another thing to think about is how far you’ve progressed since you first started blogging. Examine the months, days, or years of data you’ve collected about your blog.
What are the current trends that you’ve noticed? Is your website’s traffic, profit, or email subscriptions steadily increasing? Have you ever experienced times when there was more traffic than there is now?
If that’s the case, what happened when you were wealthier? Did you start posting more frequently? Is it possible to promote yourself even more?
It’s time to have a serious conversation with yourself about what’s working and what’s not for your blog. It’s also a good time to consider how much time you want to devote to your blog.
If you can devote a couple of hours per month to your blog and don’t expect to see a significant improvement in its performance. Actually, if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, your blog will likely never grow. Keep your expectations in check.
