This post belongs to the Strategic Blogging Series.
Vision
Having answered questions about why we blog (mission) and setting some boundaries for our behavior in doing so (Values) it’s now time to be a little more concrete in our big picture thinking. Where are you headed with your blogging? More specifically:
What is your objective for your blogging in the next three years?
Now three years might seem a long way away (and perhaps one or two years might be a better time frame to set objectives for in the ever changing field of blogging) but look beyond the near future and ask yourself questions about vision.
We’re now narrowing down the mission that we have into some more measurable and specific things to aim for in the long term. Don’t get too specific (we’ll get there) but make it concrete.
For example – your mission might be to make a living from blogging but your vision for three years time might be to be a full time blogger that need not do any other work.
Make your objective/s (don’t come up with too many) big enough to be inspiring but realistic enough to be achievable. They should probably come out of or at least relate to your mission.
Take some time to plot some longer term objectives for your blogging.
Goals
For each objective that you’ve mentioned you now should be breaking things down into smaller achievable goals. Perhaps this strategic plan is a little pedantic here and adds too many steps (hence I’ve added Vision and Goals together) but the basics of what we’re doing with goal setting is breaking down the big picture into smaller achievable parts.
In setting goals you might like to ask:
How will we know we have achieved our objective (vision)?
For each objective there will probably be multiple goals that signal it has been reached. For example if the vision is to be working full time in blogging in 3 years the goals might be to ‘quit from current job’ (once a certain earning level from blogging is reached), be earning $XXXX per month regularly by a certain time.
In a sense we’re breaking down our objectives into bite sized parts that can be ticked off one at a time as they are reached as stepping stones to a larger vision.
Read the rest of the Strategic Blogging Series.
