Archive for June, 2006

Aiming for the stars.

Now there’s a lofty goal. Aim high. If your aim is too low, you might just surprise yourself and hit the target, so aim high. I set high goals with my writing and my blogging, as well as many other aspects of my life.

Are Your Goals Measurable?

An important reminder about setting goals: they must be measurable. If I say “My goal is to be a better writer” that is not really a goal. How can it be measured? It is a worthy ambition indeed but not really a goal. If instead I said, “My goal is to write a post on my blog every day for a year,” I’m setting a measurable goal. At the end of the year I can test that goal and say, “Whoops. Only 23 posts – bit short on that goal!”

Take a Long Term View

Setting goals for today, this week and this month are important in many aspects of life. For the serious writer and blogger they are crucial. Without clearly defined short term goals I tend to mess around with this and that and don’t really achieve much. Staying focussed is all important. It gets things done.

Too often though, I get too focussed on the immediate, and don’t keep a big picture view in mind. I read somewhere many years ago that most people, when setting goals, vastly overestimate what they can achieve in a month, or a year, but vastly underestimate what they can achieve over five years. Writing and blogging are long term projects. You can’t write a best selling novel in a week (well most of us can’t). You can’t have successful blog in just a month. Take a long term view. Be in it for the long haul.

Group Writing Project

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has us at it again. This week’s project is on developing goals for a blog. Two weeks ago many contributed to his challenge to write about The Habits of Highly Effective Blogging. I’ve had some interesting and worthwhile feedback from my contribution here on my birding site and also on some follow-up articles on this blog. I’ve been thinking seriously about my long term goals with my blogs (I currently have three – see the others here and here).

Where am I heading with these blogs?

What do I hope to achieve?

What stars am I aiming for?

My Stars – or the blogging goals I’d like to achieve by the end of 2008.

1. Posts: To have written 1000 posts in each of my three blogs by the end of 2008.
2. Income: To have a certain level of income (not for publication) per month by the end of 2008.
3. Plan: To draw up a plan of what I want to blog about over the next three years.
4. Comments: To respond to all genuine comments from my readers.
5. Links: To make at least one link every week, more if possible.
6. Read: To read at least three blogs of other bloggers every day.
7. Community: To develop a community of loyal readers of my blogs by engaging them in conversations through comments, links and emails.
8. Accountability: To be accountable to myself (through regular posts, links comments etc) and to my readers (through traffic and comments).
9. Content: To write posts that will be of interest to my readers leading to increased traffic to and comments on my sites.
10. Enjoyment: To maintain a sense of enjoyment through all of my writing.

Wait a minute, I hear you saying. You’ve broken your own rule about goals being measurable. Some of these goals will be hard to measure, so they will need to be refined, reworked and modified as I go along. I need some thinking time to work through the issues.