I've never really thought of setting goals for my blog. I mean is it really something people do?!? And if they do what kind of goals do they set? Get 1000 more facebook likes, tweet more, post more.....
Anyway so the electricity went out last Thursday evening (load shedding I presume) so I grabbed a pen and my ideas journal and furiously started scribbling down my goals. At first my list started to resemble the above goals, not bad but just not the type of genuine goals that were going to make me stay up, with match sticks keeping my eyelids open, to get an amazing blog post done. These goals felt flakey, insincere and darn right boring! I wanted goals that were refreshing, freeing and creatively inspiring. Sadly in that moment it just didn't seem to be flowing onto the page quite as much as I liked so I abandoned ship and decided rather to sink myself into a hot bath surrounded by the apple spice scent of my Foreva candle. And yup you guessed it, my lack of flow was cured!
The inspiring thoughts & goals started to swirl around freely and words like connection, community, learning, teaching, encouraging, uplifting & identity rose to the surface. From those words I strung together these 4 attainable goals that feel genuine to me....
1// Learning & Identity
'I've now come to realise that there are too many mediocre blogs out there that just re-post other people's creative content.' A great tip I learnt from Roxy of City Girl Searching was that you need to post original content on your blog, photos included. So to bring learning & identity into my blogging I will be getting the manual for my camera out of the box and snapping away more often next year. My impossible blog list would say I'll only be using my own pictures from now on but this is a realistic list so I'm going to set myself the goal of using my own pictures in 50% of my posts... so that's every second post. So doable!
2// Teaching
I am a IT geek at heart and have read, Googled and taken many courses on the ins and outs of blogging. I confess I'm not perfect and I don't know everything yet but what I do know is that there are people out there that could learn from the things I know. I've made a looooooooong list of posts and have scheduled in a blogging tutorial post for every week. I find when I do posts like these it's a fun way for me to cement my knowledge and learn even more!
3// Connection & Community
Blogging in 2014 won't only be about me, myself and my laptop. It will be about creating a blogging support group - an agreement between several bloggers to comment, share, tweet & facebook each others work. Guest blogging, offering their services and encouraging each other to blog bigger, bolder and better! If you're a blogger and interested in some support then drop me a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.
4// Guest Posting
My biggest goal for 2014 is to get my musings out there into the big world wide webs. That means guest posting, yikkkeees, what if they say no?! I'm setting myself a goal of at least one guest post a month and I've drafted a list of who and where I'd like my thoughts to featured. Plan sorted!
Tell me fellow bloggers have you set your goals for 2014 yet? and if so what are they?
No comments:
Post a Comment