This post is part of the series Start A Blog: A Step By Step Guide On Blogging
Why do you want to start a blog? What do you want to achieve?
Blogging is easy. If it’s just your hobby that is.
But if you want to monetize it, then you have to treat blogging as a business and we all know starting a business is not child’s play.
Despite what others think, blogging in reality is a long and arduous journey.
You have to be willing and ready to work hard and to persist.
And after leaving my blog unattended for almost a year, I now learned that to survive, I cannot rely on that fleeting motivation I only have at the start.
I realized this after becoming a blogger myself, a bit too late in fact.
If I were to do it again, I will change that after to before, I will first establish my goal, my purpose for doing this, because that’s what would make me go forward when I feel like giving up.
Do you know why a lot of bloggers fail?
Because they give up.
And to counter that, we will set our goals.
Now go get a piece of paper or open google docs or anything that you can jot down on and write what you want to achieve by blogging (I personally prefer to write it in a small notebook instead of putting it in google drive).
Here are some ideas…
- I’m passionate about the topic and want to share it with the world
- Earn Enough Money To Quit My Job
- Become A Millionaire
- I want to help people
- Take a stand. (Express Your POV)
- I want to meet a lot of people
- Generate Leads and Attract New Customers
- I Just Want A Personal Diary
- Blogging is my hobby
- I Want To Share What I Know
- Build A Brand
- Retire Early
- Create an Online Presence
- Gain Credibility and Authority in A Chosen Field
- I Want More People to Know About My Product
- Become My Portfolio
- Share My Experiences With The World
- And so on and so forth…
The key here is to pick a goal you really care about. The more important the goal is for you, the more likely you will work hard and not give up.
This, by the way, is the trick I use to battle procrastination and laziness.
I even set our family computer’s desktop background to the picture of a house we really want.
That way when I’m dragging my lazy body in the computer, that photo can give me a burst of motivation and enthusiasm.
For example,
My current life goal (my overall goal) is to earn enough money to buy a house and to build a profitable business so I don’t have to be stuck on an 8-5 job.
It’s also good if you can include numbers and timeframe on your goal.
for example, instead of
- “Earn enough money to buy a house” and
- “Earn income from home”
I can change it to
- “Earn $280,000 and buy a house in 5 years” – there are 10 people in my family including me and I don’t plan to apply for a bank loan so I’ll have to earn the full amount.
- “Earn at least $500 a month in March 2021” – for some people $500 monthly may not be enough but in the Philippines, $500 is already above minimum wage.
My salary for example as an accounting assistant ranges from $300-$350 plus benefits, so I estimated $500 minimum since I’ll have to pay government contributions and health insurance on my own.
My goals will now look like this..
| House ($280,000) |
| Be able to work from home (min $500 monthly) |
As you can see, after I buy a house, I’ll only need to earn min $500 a month, achievable in my opinion.
Set Objectives
Now that we know what we’re doing this for, next we will list down objectives or tasks that can help us achieve that goal.
An objective is an action or task that needs to be taken to achieve your goal.
So in my example above, my objectives can look like this…
| 1. Post every day on October 2.Gain 2,000 monthly pageviews in 2 months 3.Write 500 words a day |
I actually have a 1 year plan where I have my goal at the top and my monthly, weekly objectives, and daily tasks listed below (I won’t include it here since it’s too long).
Everything is already planned and all I need to do is to take action and accomplish my tasks everyday.
It makes my goal feel within reach and achievable.
Note: I previously thought that people are just wasting their time planning until that time when I noticed how severe my procrastination habit is and I started to read and watch productivity blogs and vlogs hoping to find a solution to this.
I’ve tried various tricks like pomodoro and day theming but it didn’t work.
The only thing that worked is this so I highly recommend this to you.
Examples
- Write 500 words everyday this month.
- Gain 1,000 pageviews this month.
- Grow email subscribers to 10% this year.
- Publish once a week for a year.
Make sure that the objectives are relevant to your goal.
You can set yearly, monthly and weekly objectives.
What I do is I set a yearly and monthly objective and then fill my daily to-do list with tasks that I need to do to achieve those objectives.
It looks like this,
or like this…
It might look daunting but it’s not. The key here is to only focus on the daily tasks once you’ve planned the whole month.
Tips on how to stick to your goals and daily to-dos
Have you ever tried planning and creating to-do lists only to completely ignore it and succumb to procrastination?
If your answer is a resounding yes then I have here tips I personally use to avoid that very toxic unproductive behavior.
Tip#1. Put a picture of what motivates you in your work area.
As I mentioned earlier motivation usually don’t last long, so we can’t depend on it.
You have to become more disciplined or learn how to inspire yourself back up after that initial motivation leaves us.
Because discipline takes time, what I do is put the picture of my goal (house) somewhere visible when I’m working.
This reminds me of why I’ve been doing this in the first place and it’s really effective for me.
I hope it’ll also work for you.
Tip#2. Quotes from pinterest/ printables
This one has the same idea as the one above but here, instead of pictures we’ll use inspiring quotes.
This is also effective but a bit dangerous for procrastinators. You’re in Pinterest after all.
One second you’re looking at quotes on pinterest, a few minutes and you might already be looking at cute, cuddly puppies.
Tip#3. Make it as easy as possible to start
Allocate place and time for your blogging work.
Make writing a habit and it will become easy for you to start.
Organizing your workspace, preparing materials, and listing tasks the night before are also helpful.
Tip#4. Gamify
Compared to browsing social media and watching movies, blogging can be boring.
Gamification may help you to add fun to that..
There are many ways you can gamify your life and become more productive.
You can do it digitally by downloading an app like Habitica or you can create your own game mechanics and rules manually.
For example,
You can assign points on each task of your to do list and use those points to reward yourself like eating ice cream in exchange for 100 points (I personally require a lot of points for unproductive and unhealthy things to help me avoid that).
You can also add punishments for missing or not doing a task, like point reductions.
Tip#5. Accountability partner / Blogging Buddy
This tip is very effective but it’s also hard finding the right match.
This is the only suggestion here that I haven’t tried yet because I can’t find someone who has the same goal as me and maybe also because I’m not trying hard enough to find a buddy because all the tips above already worked for me.
Resources
I have here a simple doc file template you can use to jot down your goals and objectives. (FREE download, no need for your email)
If you prefer a spreadsheet or excel then I also have it. (Also free, no need for email)
I tried downloading the spreadsheet on my computer and some features of google don’t work on excel so I created another one ☺️.
Conclusion
We’re finally finished setting our goals and objectives, on our next post, we will create a strategy for your blog.
