Image by Estevam Romera
Many people who don’t think much of New Year’s Resolutions, but I love them. What better time to sit back, reflect on the year behind you and get excited about the year ahead?
Whether you’re a new blogger or a seasoned one, the new year is a great time to look back on blogging in 2010– how did you feel about it? How do you feel about the community? What about your role in it? What areas did you think you fell short on? Where did you exceed your goals and expectations? (Tell us, I want to know!)
When thinking about my blogging resolutions for the upcoming year, I try to break them down like this:
- Focus on Quantitative Goals, not Qualitative Goals. Set yourself distinct goals like, I will leave 500 comments this month, I will finish the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook, and I will host a bitchin’ event celebrating my blog. It can be as simple as “I will increase my blog posting by 1 post per week.” Tangible short-term goals are easier to work your way through, leaving you with improvements on your site and a great feeling of accomplishment.
- Maybe focus a little bit on Qualitative Goals. Maybe you want to improve your writing or your blog design– how do you quantify that? While there are markers that can help you determine if you are, ultimately you’re going to feel whether or not you’ve done it.
- Make your resolutions time specific. Set yourself smaller, short term goals. Leave 200 blog comments in a month. Email 5 readers a week. Find 50 new blogs that you really love by March.
- Get back to the heart of blogging & why you blog. Maybe it’s self-inspirational, because you have to shop your closet. Maybe you love hunting for a great bargain. Maybe you love high fashion– no matter what reason you got in to blogging, take some time to reconnect to it.
- Look to the stars, but keep your feet on the ground. It’s great to have ambition in your writing, but don’t forget to be realistic. Maybe you set yourself a goal of increasing your subscriber base from 30– to 30,000. That may not happen in 2 months. It could happen in 2 years though. Give yourself a smaller, more realistic goal– from 30 to 300 to reach first.
- Don’t compare your success and failures against other bloggers– they’re YOUR resolutions, not theirs. It’s really easy as a blogger to compare your successes and failures against another blogger. But they aren’t you. When setting resolutions and goals for the new year, don’t account other bloggers in there…. just think about what you want to accomplish. Whatever it may be and for whatever reasons. Don’t feel like you have to have advertisers because another blog does. Don’t feel like you have lowball your site because a bigger blog slashed their ad rates.
It’s all great and fine to talk about great ways to set yourself up to succeed in your resolutions, but what about your own resolutions? What are they? For great suggestions, check out The Style Sample’s 13 Tips for Keeping Your Blogging Resolutions.
Over at Dramatis Personae, my goals are to:
- Step back from EVERYTHING else– and focus on creating great content. 3.5 years in to blogging, it’s easy to lose site of why I blog. So I want to step back from advertising, step back from stats, step back from outreach, and focus on my site and what brings people to it: the content.
- Let go of dispassionate resources. I know a lot of the pro-blogger sites recommend using things like forums to increase your readership… but those can quickly become a drain on time. I’d rather focus on doing 2 or 3 things well, then stretching myself too thin.
- Reconnect with what makes blogging so great– the community, my passion for fashion & style, my love of self-improvement, media, and art.
What are your goals for this upcoming year? Do you believe setting goals & resolutions for the New Year would be beneficial for your site’s growth?
I’ve already started to work on my goals. So glad you mentioned not looking at other bloggers. That’s been my problem in the past.
Great Post!