Establishing Goals For Your Blog
Any productivity fan will tell you that most people plan using only short term goals. The you start a new project - like a blog - you never really think about what's beyond the end of a year. Even that can be a generous goal post. Bloggers need to plan long term.
/READ MORE// What is the key to writing a successful post?
Think about what you where you want to be in five years time. Will your blog still be active, or will you only blog for a few days, weeks, or months? Realizing your own levels of commitment and free time to spend can help establish a pretty clear vision about what need to do and what you can put into a project like a blog. This vision will help you pick the right platform to blog on.
Making decisions about the future of your blog can be hard, so here are some questions I ask myself about where you want to take your blog:
What level of commitment are you willing to put towards your blog?
Take a moment to understand your own level of commitment. If you are already wondering why you thought this would be a good idea to begin with, them maybe a full time blog isn't for you. On yhr other hand, if you are already thinking about ways you can use your blog to better your business, or how much fun it will be to have a place family can read things, this might be a lot of fun as a long term goal.
There's no shame in not being commitment to a full time blog. It's just a good way to prepare for the next steps.
You can view commitment to a blog in a couple different ways: some may work your you, some may not. One of my favourite methods to determine a starting point for your blog is in how many posts your willing and able to write, per day or per week. Most popular blogs tend to post more than one post per day, but by then they are already making a good bit of money or the bloggers have an established blog to back them up, or perhaps the blogger has a job which allows them the time and money to put into a pet project such as this.
A posting of once a week usually works out for most personal blogs in the beginning.
Do you like writing?
Being able to write, to really write, is a skill. To be able to write and make your reader interested and fun is a different beast entirely. Blogging isn't something you just pick up overnight; its something that you learn and grow from as you do. Case in point: I/We started this blog about blogging when we started learning ourselves. It has grown, but it was a side-project to Ions, a tech blog that has also grown and benefitted tremendously from it's mistakes and from a lot of the stuff we talk about here. Make a mistake, learn about it, write about it, it makes your next post better and the cycle continues.
If you have no interest in writing, or arn't sure you are particularly good at it, it might not be worth investing a lot of time and money until you have a better answer.
Knowing how to type - let's assume this is a given - is an important skill that you need to do well for obvious reasons. This is a small thing that can kill a new blog in it's first steps, because if blogging isn't fun, you won't do it. If you don't like to type, consider a podcast, or a vodcast.
We'll talk about those later, but as far as content goes, writing is still king, and podcast and vodcasts are important parts of every blog. These should be a packaged deal.
What will you blog about?
If you think of your blog as a personal retreat to write in, a hosted service is the place to start. If you've already decided that your blog will serve a business or monetary purpose, don't go with a cheap solution: get a nonghosted setup on your own server.
Design is also hugely important. A company or consulting firm would need a polished, profession brand online, and that means incorporating it with the existing brand and logo. Usually, nonHosted solutions will give you more freedom and flexibility with your design but you will need to have or hire the skills necessary to implement custom design changes. We'll need to talk about that a lot later.
Do you see your blog being a career?
A career, a way to land new clients, or a way to connect with people.
Websites are great for making connections, and presumably, you want to start a blog partly because you want to reach out to people. If the group of people you want to reach out to is a professional one, or a group where you might need to earn some respect, your blog can be a great way to communicate an unspoken message about who you are, and what you stand for.
Don't take this to mean to need to go corporate.
Many bloggers have built careers for themselves unintentionally, thanks to the quality of their blog. Bloggers have used their blogs as jumping off points for book deals or writing gigs, flaunting their talents and become tv stars, or even as stand alone sources of revenue. Think about your audience and how to appeal to them, even when considering your blogging platform. If you want to build an empire, start with a strong foundation.
How comfortable are you with having yourself and your information out there?
I'll say it again: the Internet is a public place. Whatever you reveal about yourself on your blog is available to everyone, not just people you want to reach. In part thanks to caching - a method of saving copies of websites and internet files for search engines and archives - you may find out that your bad teenage poetry will hang around you your entire adult life. Sometimes, bloggers can find themselves is centre of unwanted attention, and might need to blog more anonymously then they originally wanted to.
If privacy and anonymity is a priority for you, a hosted blog will give you some more privacy issues than one you install on your own web server.
Asking yourself these questions can help give you some guidance into what you want out of your blog, where it will take you, and what you expect from it long term. This will inform your next steps, everything from hosted vs non-hosted to the design, to where you blog.
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