“First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” - Aristotle

Before you can even start thinking about building a business you first have to set your goals, doesn’t matter if it’s online or off-line, the same principles apply. It’s much easier to establish yourself when you’re actually seeking to reach a certain level, then just go with the flow and hope for the best. Goal setting techniques are used by top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.

What you have to do is write down a list of things you wish to accomplish in the near future, this could be a certain subscriber level, a particular traffic count or a amount of money earned from your blog. Whatever interests or you consider as a relevant goal for your business write it down as realistically as possible (don’t go at making 2000$ a day from your blog in it’s first week, keep it as achievable as possible) and set yourself a time frame, between which you’d wish to achieve your objectives.

For example, this blog’s been live for 2 weeks now, so I think it’s safe I make a few short term goals:

Technorati: rank 100.000 or better
Subscribers: 100+
Alexa rank: >300.000 (I really hate Alexa and find it very irrelevant, but i’ll it nevertheless)
Traffic: 500+ uniques a day

I want to accomplish these goals by next month, so I’ll work harder and more effieciently knowing what exactly I have to do. On October 24, I’ll return with some stats and hopefully I should come victorious :D.

How can I seek and accomplish my goals:

• Visualize the big picture. Firstly break your objectives into big, large scale goals you’d wish to achieve and then break it piece by pieace, until you can reach a step by step growth. Think of it as a reverse action, you first think of the end result and the work down to your origins.
• Make lists. Once you’ve decided on what it is you’d want to achieve it’s time to actually execute. For a more productive growth of you blog, make daily, weekly and even monthly to-do lists. Weather it’s building a regular posting schedule or making a commenting habit write it down and work on it.
• Be Precise. This is where you stats freak actually come in handy; at the end of each day write down your basic statistics (traffic,subscribers, money earned) and at the end of the month or trimester you can build graphs. That way you can see if your blog has grown, how much, when and why.
• Write goals down. And put them somewhere at view point so you don’t forget what it is you actually have to do. I sometimes get so cluttered in my work, I forget where I’ve started from. A good placed sticker with my key points helps me go though.
• Perseverance is the key. Once you’ve established a schedule, stick with it. Don’t stray away from your objectives and respect your pattern. Don’t be too constant though, as you can risk becoming to predictable to your readers.

What’s your goals?

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The Setting goals for your blog and accomplishing them by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.