When launching a new marketing campaign, I tell people to Start with the Basics. It’s a list of questions aimed at giving you a sense of direction with respect to where you are right now with your marketing and where you want to go. When launching a new blog, I ask people to put the same amount of thought into their goal setting. The point of which is to get specific about what your goals are, and spend less time trying to meet them and more time being effective and making progress. It’s easy spending a lot of time doing all the wrong things.

Some Examples of Bad Goals (or poorly defined goals):

• I want more leads/more business.

Of course you do; everyone does! But this isn’t very specific. Put a number on it. How much more business do you need to feel comfortable with your earnings?

• I want a well trafficked blog.

Again, this is to vague. How much traffic is good traffic? And what about conversions? Can you attribute a certain number of conversions to a certain number of traffic?

• I want more subscribers!

It’s great that you do. I want more subscribers too. But isn’t this more of an ego play than anything else? I mean, do subscribers really necessarily mean more sales? Just a thought…

• I want to rank #1 on Google!

Let’s take this a step further… It’s great that you want to rank #1 on Google (everyone does). But you want to rank #1 on Google for what term? If you author a real estate blog, get hyper-local and go after a specific term like: Long Beach Homes for Sale.

Some Examples of Good Goals (or more specifically defined goals):

• I want “X” number of home search registrations every month. I want “X” number of home search registrations in the next 6 months.
• I want “X” number of phone calls/contact form submissions every month (that I can call, verify and connect with).
• I want “X” number of newsletter subscribers by the end of the month. “X” more by the end of next month. Then, I want a 40%+ open rate (and improvements from there).
• For every 10 – 20 phone calls (contact form or IDX registrations), I want to schedule one new listing appointment.
• I want to 100 RSS subscribers in the first 2-3 months. I want 500 RSS subscribers by the end of the year. I want 1,000 – 1,500 RSS subscribers by the end of next year. (Note: Real Estate blogs don’t generally have an on-pour of RSS subscribers right away. That’s not to say they don’t get read and people wont’ subscribe to your IDX. Rather, you’re dealing with people who are in the market to buy now as opposed to someone who wants to read your content on a recurring daily/weekly/monthly basis).
• I get an average of 300 – 400 page views per day. Next month, I want to have 400 – 600 page views per day. In 6 months I want to average 800 – 1,000 page views per day. (Now, how can you discipline yourself to get there? Think in terms of content creation and promotion.

Over To You:

What are your blogging goals and objectives? How specific are they and what are you doing to get there? If they’re not very specific, maybe you can starting writing out some goals for yourself and share ’em in the comments for the rest of us 🙂