174: An Alternate New Year’s Resolution That Will Transform Your Blogging for 2017

Welcome to episode 174 of the ProBlogger Podcast and a very Happy New Year to you. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind www.problogger.com, a blog podcast event job board, a series of eBooks, and a real-life paper book, one of those old fashioned ones, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and to make money from your blog. You can find out more about all of those things that we do at ProBlogger at www.problogger.com.

In today’s lesson, I want to talk about New Year’s resolutions and goals being the 2nd of January. I want to suggest setting a goal that I think will help to set your blogging up for a great year of blogging. In fact, I’m really excited about this episode because it’s an alternative way of thinking about New Year’s goals or New Year’s resolutions. It’s something that until today, while I was out of my walk, I’d never really considered before. I’m really excited to share it with you and to try it myself. If you’re looking at the New Year, 2017, and wondering how to make it the best year for your blog, I hope this episode will help you do just that. You can find today’s shownotes with some links to some further reading that I’ve got for you at www.problogger.com/podcast/174.

Happy New Year! This podcast should go out on the 2nd of January 2017. I’m actually recording it though on the 27th of December from a little bit few days ago and I’m currently recovering from a very hot Christmas. It’s summer here in Australia and Christmas Day for us was 36 degrees Celsius which was about 97 F for those of you who aren’t used to Celsius. We spent most of the day, on Christmas Day, swimming in a swimming pool, my mother-in-law’s swimming pool. It was a bit of a hot day, a little bit different too. I know how many of you who celebrated the day and spending your time at this time of year because I’ve been watching some of you who are snowed in on Instagram at the moment.

But now that Christmas is over and preparations at our house are turning towards New Year’s Eve. We actually will be celebrating and staying in the New Year with five other families who are coming over for the evening. We tend to get together with the same families every year. This year, there are 10 or I think about 15 kids should be pretty noisy and a lot of fun. Every year, as part of that celebration, the conversation tends to turn to New Year’s resolutions and goals for the coming year. Over the last few days, I’ve been pondering my own goals and resolutions, my own plans for 2017. Now I’m not huge on resolutions but I always do set a few goals for my personal life, my health, my relationships, as well as my business, as well as my blogging.

I’ve talked a lot about goals in the past. In fact, if you want to go back and listen to episode 77 after you finish this one, I suggest the whole process for making goals for your blog that I do think is well worth listening to. It’s episode 77: How to Set Blog Challenging Goals for The New Year. But it struck me today while I was out on my walk that many of the goals that I tend to develop for my blogs every year are a little bit, I hate to use the word, but they’re a little bit selfish.

Let me explain, often as bloggers, we set ourselves goals like, “I want to double my traffic in the year ahead.” Or “I want to publish five posts a week because I needed three this year.” Or “I want to create a new eBook, a new product for my blog. I want to start something new. I want to start a podcast.” Or “I want to start doing Facebook Live. I want to grow my list, my email list.” Or “I want to update my old blog design into a new one.” All these goals are completely worthy. They’re all good. They all tend to be about making gain in some area, achieving some sort of goal that we have or eliminating some kind of problem or bad habit that we have. All of those things are good. However, they’re all about what we want as bloggers and I wonder as I look at those goals and was thinking today about my own blogging goals, if perhaps they all have some missing element and that is our readers.

As I was walking today, I was wondering if a much better starting point for thinking about our goals for our blogs and businesses might be if we set New Year’s resolutions for our readers. What would happen if we set goals for our readers? What do we want to achieve for our readers in the year ahead? Rather than what we want to achieve for our blog.

Here’s my little challenge for you. I want to challenge you to set a goal or a resolution for your readers in 2017. What kind of pain do you want to help eliminate in your reader’s lives in the year ahead? What kind of bad habit do you want to help them to get rid off in the year ahead? What kind of mistake do you want to help them to stop making in the year ahead? What kind of obstacle do you want them to overcome in the year ahead that you want to be a part of? That’s the negative way of looking at it. What pain do you want to eliminate? What bad habit do you want to eliminate? What mistake, what obstacle? But also, you can flip it around. What gain do you want to help your readers to achieve in the year ahead? What good habit do you want to help to develop in your readers in the year ahead? What change, positive change, do you want to help bring about in their lives? What achievement do you want to help them to make? Think about your readers. Who are they? What are their pains, their obstacles, their problems, and what are the gains, the hopes, the dreams that they have? Identify one of those things that you can help your readers to work on in the year ahead.

There’s nothing wrong with setting goals for more traffic and more income and more comments and engagement with your readers but as I was walking today, it struck me that if we instead flip it around and put the focus on the change that we want to see in our readers in the year ahead, then perhaps some of those things will look after themselves.

If you can identify the thing that you want to help you readers with, this year, that will help you to work out what content to produce, what products to create for your blog, will help you to work ahead and promote your blog better and how to attract new readers.

How will your blog make a difference to your readers in the year ahead? Think about it, what is your goal for your readers in 2017? Try and get it into a sentence. If you’re struggling with that, ask your readers. I just did exactly that on my Facebook page and I’m already starting to see some of my readers tell me about the things that they want to achieve in the year ahead as it pertains to my topic. Once you’ve identified what are these that you want your year to be about in helping your readers, put it in somewhere that you’ll see everyday. Try and get it into a sentence and write it down. Put it next to your computer. Put it on the office wall in front of you so that everyday when you sit down to write content, you’ve got that change that you’re trying to bring to your readers in mind.

Maybe, it could even become a weekly post that you do that really tackles that problem or that thing that you’re trying to achieve or maybe it could be an extended series or maybe it could help you to have some discussion on your social media, or maybe you could even start a Facebook group to help you readers to achieve that particular goal. Maybe it could become part of your monetization strategy. Maybe you have to create a course or an eBook or a membership that site that’s based around that change you’re trying to bring to your readers. You may even want to announce it to your readers. You might want to say, “I’ve surveyed you. I’ve thought a lot about what I want to achieve with this blog this year and this year, I want to help you to whatever it is that you want to achieve.”

Flip the New Year’s Resolution about this year. Don’t just come up with your own goals for what you want to achieve with your blog but think about what you want your readers to achieve. What is a New Year’s resolution, a goal, for them? Once you’ve done that, I would love to hear what you’ve come up with, I’d love to hear what your goals are for your readers in the year ahead. I’m going to ponder that particular question for myself and I’ll let you know what I come up with in the weeks ahead as well.

You can find today’s shownotes and I do have a little bit of further reading for you at www.problogger.com/podcast/174. Once you’ve come up with that goal for your readers for 2017, you might want to go and listen to episode 77 which is also about setting goals for the year. Those goals I would do tend to be more about the goals for your own blog. I do encourage you to start with the question of today, what’s the goal for your readers, and then you might want to go and listen to episode 77 which I think is a good companion to today’s episode. Hope you do have a good New Year’s and exciting start to 2017 and I’ll be in touch with you in the coming weeks with the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast.