Whether you blog for a living or you intend to do so while still keeping your day job, you might have already faced this challenge: your productivity is more like a flat line instead of an ascending arrow. You feel like you’re blogging aimlessly and that your efforts go to waste. There are methods to counterattack this blogging related malaise: setting achievable, measurable goals.

Set goals you can achieve

One thing that affects bloggers is the overwhelming amount of information they deal with, from which it appears challenging to extract those precise aspects that need to be dealt with to create blog posts that have meaning and measurable effects.

The reason why this happens more often than not is the tendency to set goals that are difficult to achieve. If you create a new blog post which you believe interesting, let’s say, on violin shoulder rest options that might interest violinists, and you expect it to gain thousands in readership, you might set the bar too high.

Each article you give away will only capture the interest of a specific category of people – in this case, violinists and those who aspire to learn how to play the violin. The small pool of potential readers should dictate your expectations, too. So, start by setting yourself a goal that you know you can achieve.

Your goals should be measurable

You may decide to write x blog posts this week or this month. That’s a quantifiable goal. But there are other indices you should bear in mind. For instance, you should consider how many shares and likes you could get for a blog post.

If you use your blog posts for lead generation, you should be able to measure how many people clicked on the links inside the article, and how many of those translated into purchasing decisions. All these indices will help you create a blogging strategy that will bring you the satisfaction you desire.

Always figure out your big ‘why’

Even if this piece of advice doesn’t appear to have a direct connection with measuring the effectiveness of your goals, it is the foundation of a good quality blog. Anytime you ask a blogger why he or she blogs, you will get a different answer that is relevant for the person concerned.

You must also decide why you are blogging. What is the moving force behind your words? What do you hope to achieve? How do you plan to make other people’s lives better with the information you offer? Once you figure out your big ‘why’, you will know what your blog should be about and what you want to achieve with it.

Understand the different types of goals

As a blogger, there are many things you need to do. You must organize your time so that you can deal with everything. That’s also something you need to have clear in your mind. The different types of goal to set up as a blogger are as follows:

–           Creativity goals – you need to establish how many words or how many blog posts you intend to write within a decided time frame. Here you can also include your intentions to approach new niches or new platforms for publishing.

–           Performance goals – you must decide on how you want things to evolve for your blog, in terms of traffic and engagement.

–           Optimization goals – these consist of using tools that will help you have a clear image of what happens with your blog, such as Google Analytics. The information you obtain this way will help you decide on strategies to increase your measurable indices.