The new year is less than two weeks away, and as many of us are working to end the year well while spending time with family during the holiday season. Through all that, it can be tough to plan for the new year, or even just to consider how you will make 2013 better than 2012.
Business blogging is another aspect that could use a few goals for 2013. If haven't yet set your business blogging goals for the new year, or haven't ever set them at all, then here's how to do that so you can start the new year off right.
Think about What You Did in 2012
Hopefully, you want to do better in 2012 than in 2013. But, you can't do better unless you know what you did in 2012, and know what it would mean to do better. For example, if in 2012 you published only once a week, a good business blogging goal would be to publish at least twice a week. However, if you don't know that you averaged one post a week, you can't set a goal of writing two posts per week. While you're at it, I would also recommend looking at the topics you wrote about, how you amplified your content, and the reasons why you got into business blogging in the first place.
Set SMART Goals
Over 93% of people don't have goals, whether that's because they are afraid of failure, or they don't have the support to achieve these goals, or they simply don't take the time to think about them. If you're reading this article, then you and your business are not in the 93%, and really want to set some business blogging goals for 2013. To set good goals, these goals need to be SMART goals. You may have heard of that acronym. If not, then here's what SMART stands for:
- Specific - Blogging more often is not a good goal. Blogging twice a week for all of 2013 is a good goal. The latter is a good goal because it's not vague. It's easy to visualize and it's even easier to put the set the other qualities in place.
- Measurable - Can you determine whether or not your goal has been achieved, or if you are on track to achieve that goal? Keeping with the twice a week example, it's definitely a measurable goal because all you need to do is count the number of blog posts and look at the date they were published.
- Attainable - Can you even publish twice a week, or make the time to do so? If this isn't reasonable, then it's not a good goal. If you are unsure about attainability, you can set an easier goal to hit first, and then move up to the harder goal. So, for this example, first try and publish twice a week every other week. Once you can do that, then try and do it every week.
- Relevant - Yes, this goal is relevant to business blogging, and would be relevant to most reasons why a business would be blogging in the first place. With relevance, goals should be related to business blogging as well as business objectives. An irrelevant goal might be to get at least one comment on each blog post. Comments don't reflect all that much, and could easily be gamed by removing the spam filter.
- Time-bound - Goals need to have a deadline, or else it's just wishful thinking. Our example goal of blogging twice a week for the whole year is time-bound because once 2014 comes around, we should already be blogging twice a week and perhaps thinking of a brand new business blogging goal.
Have you set some business blogging goals for 2013? Or perhaps have thought of one or two after reading this post? If so, please share them in the comments below.