How To Set Your Personal Goals – SMART Business Goals for Bloggers

Are You a Blogger who has not yet set your business goals? Are you reading everyone else’s goals for 2018 and panicking because you have no idea what your goals are? Do you believe that these Bloggers will succeed and you won’t?

STOP. It does not matter that others have their goals already written down in stone on their website. It does not mean they will achieve them and that you will not because you don’t even know what the heck they are yet.

This said I am a big believer in setting ourselves goals. What I am not a big believer in is comparing ourselves to others.

You are You and they are themselves and so it should be. If you start reading other people’s goals and start to think, “I couldn’t achieve that”, or maybe, “I don’t even know what that is.” You will start to eat away at your self esteem and then you won’t achieve anything. Worse still you will set similar goals to them and then totally fail.

Read my post on self esteem and how vital it is for bloggers to succeed.

Many people set very long term goals e.g “By the end of 2018 I will…..” I don’t know about you but I can’t set a goal that far ahead and besides it’s meaningless and probably unachievable, if you do not have any short term goals that will lead you towards that end goal.

What I want you to do right now is think about where you are in your business today.

How many blog posts do you have? How many followers do you have on each of your social media platforms? How many site visitors do you get a month? How much revenue did you make last month ? How many people do you have on your email list ? How many freebies do you have? How many paid services or goods do you have ?

These things are your starting points. Your metrics from which you can measure your success going forward. You may have others but these are mine. They are very simple and I do not want to make things more complicated than necessary. I also don’t want any lofty goal that cannot be measured.

Any Goal we make must be SMART.

Specific

1. By the end of January I will have 1000 Facebook followers. This is a specific goal.

2. By the end of January I will increase my social media followers. This is not specific at all. Catch my drift ?

Measurable

The Goal needs to be able to be measured in some way. Example one is easily measured, you have a number to attain. It could be argued that you could measure number 2 but you have nothing to actually aim at. You could get 1 new follower on twitter and then say you achieved your goal. Good luck with your road to success if that is the approach you want to take.

Achievable

Any goal needs to be achievable. There is no good saying you will earn $10,000 by the end of January from affiliate sales if you only earned $10 last month. Each goal needs to be realistic and something that you can achieve. Set the bar a little higher if you want. But not so high it will be an epic fail.

Relevant

I see so many goals being set that are totally irrelevant to the growth of their business. I’m not saying don’t set a goal to have 3 holidays next year but that is not a business metric and if you want to grow your business, set goals that will help you grow your business and increase your revenue.

Timed

If we go back to my original examples we can see that they are both timed. By the end of January I will….. it might be best to add the year to make the goal a little more concrete!

So now we know how to set SMART objectives or goals.

My advice now is to write down what your goals are for the next six months. Do them monthly and watch how it grows on paper. What does your business look like in terms of the metrics you have set now?

Now we need a reality check. We also need a plan to achieve this.

How much time do you have in a day to work on your blog or website? Can you fit in the work required to achieve that many followers, blog posts etc. What do you need to learn to achieve those goals. As an example I need to learn how to do videos effectively to achieve my goal of six “How to” videos on YouTube. I’m nearly there but there’s still some work to do!

When you have done your reality check you may need to adjust your goals. You also need to make a daily and weekly plan of what you are going to do to achieve them.

I personally make a weekly plan every Sunday which suits me. If I’m on top of my work I will write a blog post so it’s ready to go.

There is a huge satisfaction in crossing off your To Do lists and there is even more satisfaction in achieving your monthly goals.

To be a success you need to be organised and have a plan. Focus on what is important to grow your business. It doesn’t matter if you have been winging it thus far. You can start now. There’s no expiry date on the success of your business.

We started this post by talking about bloggers who have set out their goals in blog posts. It is important to be accountable. Their followers will know if they failed to achieve their goals but that’s okay as long as they are honest about why. We all fail to reach the mark sometimes.

You can make yourself accountable by writing down your goals in a blog post if you wish but I prefer to post mine within the Wealthy Affiliate community. They keep me accountable. Wealthy Affiliate is an online hosting and training platform that has taught me everything I know about the technical side of websites. I wouldn’t have one, let alone three without them.

If you want to check it out for free why don’t you do my Online Entrepreneur Certification Course. I will take you through the 10 lessons of the course over six days for free. You will have full access to myself and others to keep you focused and on track.

With Grace and Gratitude

Karen

Join My Free Online Entrepreneur Certification Course