Feb
11
One of the problems with blogging as a business (or doing any type of business online for that matter) is a lack of accountability. With most businesses and jobs there is always someone reviewing your work and your progress and holding you accountable for meeting your goals and objectives. Most blogs are one-person operations, and as a result there is no one there to hold you accountable.
If your goal with blogging is to make money, shouldn’t it be treated like any other business? At most businesses, as an employee you’ll probably have a review every six months or every year to evaluate your performance. If you’re willing to go through this while being an employee for someone else, why not put yourself under the same scrutiny when you are the one that has everything to gain, not an employer?
In addition to employee reviews, any viable business will have monthly and quarterly goals that are used in part to determine success and encourage consistent growth. The same should be true for us as bloggers. There are a number of different types of goals or measurements that we can use each month. Of course, whatever we use to determine our success should ultimately depend on our goals. For example, if making money is the most important goal, then it only makes sense that revenue and profit would be measured on a monthly basis.
How Can You Hold Yourself Accountable?
In order to be able to measure your achievements you need to have specific, time-sensitive goals. Some examples of possible goals:
- Number of unique visitors
- Number of pageviews
- Advertising revenue
- Affiliate program revenue
- Alexa rank
- Technorati rank
I’ve created an Excel spreadsheet that helps me to set monthly goals and track my progress. At the end of each month I can look at the results and see where I succeeded and where I came up short. That spreadsheet is available for download if you would like to use it for yourself. It includes columns for goals, actual achievements, and percentage of the goal accomplished.
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Thanks for making that download available, Steven. It’s always useful to have an example to work from.
Sharon,
I’m glad it can be helpful. You should be able to easily make some changes to suit your needs.
Thank you for the worksheet. It will really be helpful for my blog.
You’re welcome. Thanks for commenting.
Sharp idea. Carefully documenting the goals and assessing the results can sure keep the creative mind on track.
Aaron
AaronGaul.com
My friend recommend me to this blog and I’m happy he did. You brainstorm me something, thanks for the spreadsheet
It’s hard to be accountable to yourself when you are blogging for a hobby but as with a lot of things in life, if you know where you want to go, you will have a better chance of getting there.
My own personal goal is to get an average of 200 unique visitors a day to one of my sites. Such a seemingly paltry amount but oh so hard when your profession is anything but IT.
I am going to try and use the spreadsheet to keep a better track of changes I have made and the effect on traffic, so I will have a better idea, for the first time, of what might actually work (and what has a detrimental effect).
Fingers crossed!
Thanks for sharing the spreadsheet