How to Be a Goal Getter: Blogger Edition (Part 1)

Welcome to a new June Diaries series: How to Be a Goal Getter. Another way to look at this? How to set your dreams and crush them to hit your professional and entrepreneurial goals! I plan on breaking this series into a few different types that I’ll hit on over the next few months : the blogger edition, and the business woman edition. You’ll see a bunch of different topics broken up over this series, and I hope you enjoy part one of the blogger edition! Don’t forget: if you like what you see, make sure you subscribe to my email list so you get notified of the future parts! We’ll have a lot of deep dives coming. So let’s get into it!

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Create your Vision Map

WHY are you looking to start a blog? That’s the first question you are going to want to ask yourself : is this a side hustle? Something just for fun to share with your friends and network? Do you have a service you’re selling? There’s no wrong answer to this! There are all sorts of blogs out on the web.

Once you have the answer to that, it’s important to flesh out your visions and hopes for your blog. What do you think you’ll be writing about? Who is your target audience? What type of people are you hoping to reach?

Real Life Example: When I first started June Diaries, my original plan was to focus on posting about my life, a few career tips, fashion and beauty finds, sales….really, a little bit of everything. I didn’t have a specific target! Once I got going, I realized the topics I was most passionate writing about were career advice, articles empowering working women (especially moms!), and motherhood. It quickly became clear that this was the direction I needed to focus on taking June Diaries, and to focus on the niche of working moms and women empowerment. Sure – I still post about the other stuff too, they are other interests! But once I figured out what really kept me motivated, it became much easier to target my blog.

Creating your vision map will become much easier once you have a firm idea of your niche and reasons for blogging. Your Vision Map should be – obviously! – visual and flesh out some important things:

• What are your long term aims for your blog? Look at the big picture! Where do you hope to be in a year? What will your big milestones be?
• How many blog posts do you plan on posting each month? How will you flesh out and plan your content calendar?
• What other social media platforms will you use to work with your blog? Where do you want your following numbers to be at?
• How will you promote your blog?
• How do you plan on monetizing (if that’s a goal of yours)?
• What sort of look and feel are you going for? What sort of tone do you want to take in your posts? What sort of visual feel are you going for?

There’s so much more, but this should be your initial “big picture” plans. They can and probably will change as you get going – and that’s good! You will develop as you learn more about blogging and become more comfortable with content creation.

Look at Setting Quarterly Goals

Let me rephrase that: look at setting ATTAINABLE quarterly goals. I’m big on quarter goal setting: it’s long enough where you don’t feel overwhelmed to do too much in a month, but a year is too long for some of your to-do list. You’ll want to take this slow: when you launch your blog, there are SO many things you’re going to want to do that it’s going to start to look really overwhelming. Take it one step at a time! Some good beginning goals:

• Find a theme and look/feel of your blog that you really like and can see yourself using for at least a year.
• Write X number of blog posts a month, at excellent quality (there’s no right or wrong answer to this one! However many posts you think you can handle in a month without getting overwhelmed, start there.)
• Set up your email account and mailing list to start growing your audience, and have it linked in your blog posts.
• Pick one to two social media profiles to focus on and begin to learn all you can about how to use that platform to work with your blog.

Real Life Example: Do not feel like you need to do it all in there first few months! The most important thing to focus on in the beginning is writing quality blog posts and having good content. Find your voice, get comfortable with the blogging platforms, and you can focus on the bigger picture once you feel confident in that. June Diaries has been around for six months now, and my current quarter goals for this month include things like: updating my mailing list newsletter, growing my sponsors, sending sales proposals weekly, etc. I didn’t stress about these things in the beginning, and you shouldn’t either!

Notice that I didn’t put down “make X amount of money” as a first quarter goal. Your can – and should! – monetize your blog from the beginning, but don’t make this a huge stressor or goal from the beginning. Focus on content – the rest will come.

Here’s the Bottom Line

Blogging is a lot of fun, but it’s a LOT of work. In the beginning, focus on creating the BEST content you can! Find your voice, your niche, and begin to come up with a tentative marketing plan for getting to your target audience. There’s plenty of time to focus on growth, monetization, and more – we’ll dive into that in future parts!

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN PART TWO: Getting your Blog ready for monetization, and how to start making money from day one.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN FUTURE PARTS: Learning social media to help grow your blog, writing sales pitches to sponsors, writing excellent blog posts, growing your following, apps that will help with growth, and a LOT more!

Don’t miss out on this series: follow the blog by subscribing below to get alerted for future parts!

If you’re interested in brushing up on your sales skills while you wait for Part 2, check out the career section of June Diaries for great sales advice. You might find some tips to help with Sponsorship pitching!