There’s a good insight into Weblogs Inc and how they set goals for their bloggers over at the Jason Calacanis blog today. Jason says they don’t give incentives to hit the goals of 20% growth per month for blogs with less than 1 million pages a month or 10% growth if you have more than 1 million pages per month – but the goal is there.
I like the concept of setting these sorts of goals.
My own goals have become a bit fuzzy in the last few months but in my early days I set a 10% minimum growth in terms of traffic and income per month. I found this was easily achievable so bumped it up to the 20% mark so I think WIN’s goals are achievable.
Sustain growth of 10 – 20% per month over a year or so and you get to a point where the growth becomes quite exponential.
As I say – the last few months I’ve been less focused upon setting goals as life and blogging have become quite busy. I’ve decided that in the new year I’m going to try to take a few days off by myself down at the beach somewhere (summer here) to think through my blogging strategy and to refocus after what has been a pretty amazing 2005.
Do you set yourself goals for your blogging? Feel free to share what they are if you wish or what factors you build into them.
Hm, I seem to have hit a wall in this respect; my growth has dropped off. Maybe some suggestions on how to continue growing one’s blog?
The way i think about blogs is do one optimize it and go on and do the next one. Just keep doing good blogs and don’t stop in just one and keep doing them like a hobby and before you know it you have 5, 10, 15 blogs that could make you money i have more then 5 blogs like this one Bovine Colostrum but i keep doing more for fun and also like a nice hobby that at the end could make you some cash.
I’ve been doing a lot of goal-setting recently for work, home and blogging. I’ve set myself a target of 20% growth each month.
How do you ecnourage repeat visitors or users to subscribe to the feed? One of the problems I have is I have a good footfall and occassionally I get linked to by via one of the bigger blogs/sites e.g. at the moment I’m getting a lot of traffic from Digg, but people don’t stick or subscribe so I have to constantly keep working to generate new readers rather than just building my readership.
Interesting …Just went live with my site and posted up my goals as an example to others, i strongly believe you have to set goals to acheive success.
I find it difficult to make goals because I have been so surprised at the growth so far. It started slow, but I am getting a high percentage of growth each month. I tweak it little by little and i am always surprised, if somewhat skeptical. It can’t go on can it? I mean it’s a teaching blog, not a digital camera blog. Everybody hates school, don’t they?;-)
Everton try reading how to keep first time readers to your blog
I have to agree with you Darren in that having goals for your blogging is good although I am not sure how much contol I have as far as traffic goes. I have found your last series of tips for people with bloogers block is a real help as my posts were stagnating to giving my audience articles from some of the directories instead of my content exclusively.
I try to keep instead a goal of a post a day for my main blogs and then try to catch up on the weekend and also add to my smaller bloags on the weekend as well but I feel that this is probably not good enough to grow the blogs quickly and will have to double my posting frequency soon
This is tricky. I’ve experienced incredible growth in 2005, but I think it will be very difficult to continue on this pace in 2006. My revenues and traffic more than doubled this year. I see continued growth, but doubling it again would be quite a feat, bringing me to over 10K uniques/100K pages a day and $50K/yr. in revenue. At that point, it could nearly be a full-time job! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. :) A college student can dream, but I have to try to set reasonable goals. I guess one of the downsides of success is you feel the need to continue it, and if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
What I found more interesting about the graphs on Jason’s page were the very low visitor to pageview rates — not one of them appears to have an average view of more than two pages per visit — that’s pretty poor IMO — perhaps he’d be better off setting tagets about increasing the average number of pageviews per visitor, rather than just the raw numbers.
yeah it is low – although now that I think about it – most blogs that i’ve looked at the stats of dont have much of an average page views per person. Most I’ve seen are around the 2 pages per visitor mark. I wonder if this is partly about the nature of blogs – ie they have so many outbound links, they are not always well designed to push people inside the blog, the front page has numerous stories on it so they can read a number of pages worth in one page view…..not sure – it’d be interesting to see some research on this.
only $$ in my mind
Blogging for some months now. Some different, some similar blogs, some older, some quite new; these are 6 blogs at the moment. The number of blogs should not be growing to much anymore, just the number of visitors. The goal is to be at a EUR 3,000/month by July. This would be the time that I could combine blogging with my own company.
Yeah. Dare to dream!