Setting Goals And Keys To Blogging Success

Lets go a couple of years into the past. Back when I had no first-hand experience with blogging, back then I was active blog reader and commenter and already knew a couple of the big names in the blogosphere. I never imagined I would be able to build a community of thousands of readers, who I interact with every day.
Back when I was still a blogging newbie, I believed that success required a lot of time and money. But in the end, things turned out to be a bit different from what I expected. I learned that doing the right things and doing them well was just enough. In this post I will reveal the steps that helped me turn my blog into an active community.
Reading and Researching
The ideas for creating my blog didn’t come from nowhere. Before I had one other blog that was a trial and error, a testing ground, somewhere to practice. But it laid the foundations for my blogging adventure.
Before creating my “serious” blog, I was researching other blogs in my niche that wrote on similar subjects. I tried to get to know their authors by actively commenting and guest posting. I paid close attention to how they were utilizing strategies, leveraging social networks and how were they connecting and engaging with their readers. I learned a lot from my observations and now knew which strategies work and which don’t, which traffic sources are valuable and which aren’t. It is a very time consuming part and I know some people are eager to just get going. But it is a very important part of the process which will almost absolutely guarantee success as you will learn all there is to know about blogging, what drives traffic and most importantly your competition.
Setting Goals
These days everyone likes to talk about goals how important they are. But personally for me, setting goals and then achieving them leaves you with a motivational feeling, which is a key to blogging. The reason I say this is that a lot of times, especially when you first start out, you might feel like giving up, it’s not easy being a newbie. But setting milestones and accomplishing them, you will get that feeling of success you crave for so much. Even when you start getting tons of followers, fans and subscribers, silly questions like, “what’s the point of all of this?” might creep into your head. By setting goals and reaching the, you measure your progress which gives you something to focus on and keeps silly questions like this out of the way.
Being Specific is the key
Creating goals to keep yourself motivated will only work if you set the right ones. The key is being very specific. For example you might set yourself a goal to increase traffic to your blog. First thing you should do is find out as much information as possible about all the various ways to increase blog traffic. Talk to leaders in your niche, discover what they did then choose a way that you think will work best for you.
One way I achieved traffic growth was by commenting on other blog posts. You should focus on a mixture of blog leaders and blogs that provide do-follow links. Engage in conversations and maybe even suggest one of your own blog posts. Then you need to focus on commenting regularly and make sure your one of the first commenters. Being the first commenter not only allows you to stand out more, you will also have more chance of getting a reply from the author. Don’t underestimate yourself, the point behind goal setting is to make progress.
Prioritizing
As you start regularly posting content and your blog starts to grow you will realize that you have more and more tasks to worry about. As your visitor numbers start to grow you will realize you need to post more often, more relevant and in depth content to have them come back, subscribe and share your material.
If you really want to grow your traffic then being constantly active on a number of different social platforms is a must. There’s a lot to think about here as writing blog posts only take around quarter of your daily time. You will also have to answer the comments people leave on your blog, comment on other blogs, be active on social sites like Facebook and Twitter, manage other blogging networks like My Blog Guest and Triberr and share your stuff on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit not to mention worrying about SEO and blog design.
This is a lot to consider as you will spend most of your day socializing, writing and managing your blog and your audience, therefore prioritizing is a must. You need to create a list of things and priorities your daily tasks based on their importance. Writing new blog posts will be at the top of your list, while checking your email all the time should be at the bottom.
When I first started I focused on Twitter. Most of my time was spent building new friendships and gathering more followers as well as sharing my and others content on a daily basis. It paid off and now I have thousands of active readers that come to my blog from Twitter, a lot of them also share my stuff with their followers. But because I was on twitter all the time, I had less time to spend on Facebook and other blog commenting.
I now learned that leveraging social networks is much better than just focusing on one specific channel. I recently found that my twitter followers we mostly business owners and were mostly interested in business and marketing content while my Facebook fans were in 18-24 age range and were more interested in Tech and Social trends.