How to reach your blogging goals

You won’t reach your blogging goals by blindly putting one foot in front of the next.

Sure, that will get you somewhere, but who knows where? 

You’ll just keep yourself busy without any real sense of direction. 

In order to reach your blogging goals, you have to first know what your goals are.

Then, you have to have a good sense of how you intend to reach them.

In this article, I’ll show you some very simple strategies that can help you to actually achieve your blogging goals.

Set the right goals 

When you sit down to write down your goals (and you must write them down), there are a few things to consider.

Telling yourself that you want to be “a successful blogger,” or that you want to “make a lot of money blogging,” are not goals.

They’re dreams.

Just because you call something a goal, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to achieve it.

So make your goals things that you can actually achieve.

Be realistic.

Instead of setting a goal to “make money blogging,” for instance, you might choose to “sign up for 3 affiliate programs to promote.”

You probably wouldn’t even know where to begin to “make money blogging,” whereas you can easily figure out how to “sign up for 3 affiliate programs to promote” on your blog.

And that’s a good way to actually start making some money with your blog.

Even more important, it’s a goal you can readily achieve.

Be realistic, otherwise you’re just wishing, not goal setting.

Become a successful achiever

Perhaps the most important reason to make your goal something easily achieved like “sign up for 3 affiliate programs to promote,” is this.

Every time you achieve something, it creates a pattern that your subconscious mind will be able to follow.

Signing up for the 3 affiliate programs may be a good stepping stone to making money on your blog.

But more importantly, you can revel in your success.

It may be a small success, but it’s a success.

And when you get in the habit of completing small goals successfully, you start regarding yourself as a success.

Habits are hard to break once they’ve become deeply rooted.

The easiest way to get into the habit of succeeding is to keep doing it, over and over again.

Become a habitual achiever

Make your goals meaningful, but easily attained.

It’s not so critical when you start doing this to make your goals big or complicated.

Keep them small and simple.

That way, more than achieving a particular goal, you’ll get yourself in the habit of succeeding.

And all successful bloggers get in that habit.

They don’t see themselves as failures, or even strugglers.

But they do see themselves as achievers, mostly because they’ve been achieving over and over again over a considerable period of time.

Break big goals into little tasks

This goes hand in hand with creating the “achiever” mentality.

To reach your blogging goals, you should break down your big goals into a string of little tasks.

There are two main reasons for this.

Small tasks are easy to accomplish

First of all, you can get in the habit of success and achievement by repeating the process of accomplishing goals repeatedly.

That may not be so easy to do if you’re trying to achieve big goals, though.

Example

Let’s say your goal is to “get 3 blog posts ranked on the first page of Google search this year.”

That may or may not happen.

No matter how good a job you do, you don’t have any real control over how Google will rank your blog posts.

Meanwhile, you will have invested an entire year trying to accomplish something with a very high chance of failing.

Eventual failure would be rather devastating to your self-esteem, wouldn’t it?

And even if you succeeded, that would only be one success in 12 months.

How to create tasks

Instead of trying to reach big goals, what if you broke down your goals into multiple smaller tasks that are more manageable and achievable?

So, instead of investing yourself in getting 3 blog posts rank to rank high, you might put your efforts into accomplishing a string of little tasks.

Maybe they would be things like…

• write a blog post this week
• Link your blog post to 2 authority blogs
• Email or Direct Message both of those 2 authority bloggers to let them know you’ve mentioned them in your blog post
• Publish a Youtube video summarizing some key points contained in your blog post
• Post one key point in your article on 3 different social media sites, inviting comments

Now, I just listed 5 small tasks that you can absolutely accomplish.

And you would be succeeding over and over again, building up an achiever mindset that will stay with you long after this particular goal has come and gone.

To make it happen, all you really need to do is roll up your sleeves and get the work done.

Make your goals attainable

By following a strategy like the one I just illustrated, your success doesn’t depend on Google or anybody else.

And you can experience 5 successes in a week.

You have achieved 5 times more in a week than you could have hoped to with one big goal that you committed an entire 12 months to.

Yes, you will be building the habit of achieving.

But in addition, if you do this consistently over the next 12 months, you will actually increase your chance to rank some blog posts high in Google.

The alternative is to just keep writing blog posts aimlessly and without meaningful follow up actions.

Create meaningful tasks

The key to achieving your goals is to break them down into tasks that are not only simple and easily attained, but that are also meaningful.

Look at the short task list I created in the above example.

Each task is meaningful in terms of reaching your main goal.

So, for instance, consider the task I labeled “Link your blog post to 2 authority blogs.”

That’s a meaningful task.

It helps you reach out to other bloggers.

And not just bloggers, but authority bloggers.

That will help you start building an authority network.

As you develop an authority network, you will be inviting stronger backlinks to your blog posts.

That will help your blog post get ranked higher, since Google ranks partially on the basis of authority backlinks.

So each time you complete this task, you are helping reach your goal of getting your blog post to rank high in the Google search results.

And that’s the second reason to implement this simple strategy.

How to reach your blogging goals

Now, I’d like to hear from you.

Let me know in the comments below about your blogging goals.

What strategies do you think might best help you achieve them?

I  just gave you one quick example of how little tasks can lead to accomplishing big goals.

As you continue completing meaningful tasks over and over again, you multiply your ability to reach your goals.

Take action to become a habitual achiever.

And take multiple little actions repetitively over a determined amount of time.

Those are the strategies that will help you reach your blogging goals.

–Donna

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• Bio
• Blogging Magic

Donna Merrill

Donna is a well known blogger and creator of "Blogging Magic" - an intensive guide to blogging. "Blogging Magic" is for beginners who are trying to figure out how to bring their blogs to life with tons of visits, comments and social media interaction. It's even for advanced bloggers looking to reach new levels of authority and engagement with their audience.