8 Blogging Goals for 2008

A special event like a New Year or birthday is a good time to set new resolutions and goals. They help you get started and achieve your goals. So as 2008 is just around the corner, you hear a lot these days about new personnel resolutions like to quit smoking and goals like saving x amount of money next year.

Like most people I have also tried keeping these new resolutions before. But the thing is I have never stuck with them. I have tried making new resolutions and usually ended up breaking them a few months later. I have also tried setting goals but they were not set in a meaningful way in the first place. It's damn boring to think and plan them out. So my goals up to now have remained something of a vague idea or day dream.

But now Daniel over at DailyBlogTips is having a project about blogging goals for 2008. Now, I love participating in these kind of projects. They bring in lot of links and prizes. So even reluctantly, I set about defining my blogging goals for the coming year and I came up with the following 8 goals.

I think they are SMART! That’s in the sense that they are something Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely or Time bound. (LOL, incidentally this maybe the first time I have applied something I learnt in my business organization classes.) So hear they are;

1. My first blogging goal for 2008 is I’m going to make tho hosted blogs running on WordPress platform on their own domains. One will be an online magazine blog with quality and informative articles. I have figured out a subject for it, one in which I’m good and very interested in. The second hosted blog will be a personal blog in which I hope to blog about current affairs and post random thoughts and ideas. At the same time, I'll also continue this blog with a occasional posts or two.

2. My second goal is to become a better blog commenter. This is year I was a very poor commenter, mostly due to limited access I had to the net. But in 2008 I’m going to comment in at least 5 blogs each day, including 2 new ones. That's a minimum total of 35 comments a week. If I'm unable to achieve it on weekdays, I'll cover the quota in weekends.

3. Currently my blog monetization is entirely dependant on Google Adsense. I don’t want to put all my egg in one basket and from what I hear there are much better ways for bloggers to make money. So diversifying my blogging income streams is going to be my third goal.

As I said in my first goal, in 2008 I hope to focus mainly on the magazine blog. So the rest of my goals are centered around that blog.

4. I'll post a minimum of two high quality posts a week. That means the magazine blog should have at least 100 high quality and informative articles by the end of the year. In addition I hope to post another two or three post per week, which should make it a medium sized blog with around 400-500 articles by the end of the year.

5. I also hope to have 2000 unique visitors a day and 100 RSS subscribers for that blog.

6. And the magazine blog should have a Google Pagerank of 4-5, a Technorati rank of less than 20,000 and an Alexa rank with in 100,000.

7. Seven is a lucky number and it’s going to be the cream of my blogging. :-) By the end of 2008 I hope to earn an average of 300 Dollars a month from blogging. I know 300 dollars is not much and there are many bloggers who make that much in a day. But my goal has always been to make blogging a hobby for life and a part time income scream along the way. Anyway, 300 dollars a month means a 1000% increase of my current blog income and that’s a lot of money in Sri Lanka. It comes to around 32000 Rupees! I’ll be very happy to earn that much from a part time job and LOL, wont my friends and family look up. (They now think I’m wasting my time online. I think if I achieve the above 6 goals, this shouldn’t be a problem.)

8. The best thing about blogging is the social and educational aspects hidden within it. My final goal for 2008 is to continue making friends from all over the world and learning new things by blogging. Because for me the best thing about blogging is the friends I make along the way and the things I learn.

So these are my goals for 2008. Now that I've figured them, they have got me started. I'm excited about them and I really want to achieve them.