Planning And Goals

When someone’s getting ready to start a brick-and-mortar small business, he or she are often advised to come up with a business plan before he or she even find funding or look for a location. Because of the amounts of money involved, investors want to know that the owner has thought about every aspect of their business—and most importantly, has planned out how it will make money and grow—before they are willing to back the concept. 

While you don’t need to hustle for investors when you’re starting a blog, a bit of goal-oriented planning is still the best way to make your blog a profitable venture instead of just a hobby and time-sink.

Remember that overnight successes are very rare, not just in blogging but in every area of life. The work you put in at the beginning of the process may not begin to generate returns until a year or more has passed. If you’re not ready to play the long game, you’re likely to give up too soon and never see your blog reach its full potential. 

You won’t need to invest much money in starting a blog, but you will need to commit your time consistently enough to be seen as dependable by your readers. Schedule yourself at least an hour to work on your blog every day. Commit to it as much as you would shift at your place of employment. If you don’t treat your blog like it’s important, you can’t expect the readers to feel any differently.

Setting realistic goals

Everybody would love to be making a six-figure income from home talking about one of your passions. That’s not an unrealistic goal in the long-term. The problem is that a lot of people think they’ll start a blog and within a few months make enough to retire. When they don’t achieve this pinnacle of success right away, they get discouraged and give up.

Setting realistic goals doesn’t mean you can’t dream big. It instead means breaking those big dreams down into pieces and figuring out what short-term steps you can take to achieve long-term success. 

First of all, you should determine just what your long term goals are. Where does blogging fit into your ideal future? Is it something you eventually hope to use as your primary source of income or do you see it as simply one part of a larger whole? The amount of effort you’ll have to put in to build a blog into a full-time job is very different than what will be required just to make some spending cash on the side. 

If you own a small business or product line, a blog may be more your way of communicating with your customers than it is your primary source of income—an integral part of the entire package, but not your main income stream. If you do hope to make blogging your full-time job, you should treat it like a part-time job from the outset; if it’s intended as a side project, you can take more time to let it grow.

Once you’ve thought about your long-term goals, do some research on other blogs in your niche. Start by looking at the most successful and most popular ones. How many page views and comments do most of them get? 

How often do they post? How many followers do they have on Facebook and Twitter—and how long has it taken them to get to this point? If the top blog in your niche has 3,000 followers, setting a goal of 5,000 followers in your first six months would most likely only set yourself up to fail. Set smaller milestones. If you want 1,000 subscribers, you first have to get 100 subscribers. Then you can go for 500, and so on, giving you benchmarks of achievement to hit along the way.

Scheduling your posts

There are two levels to consider here, and you should sketch out a plan for both before you start writing your content. There’s the week-by-week scheduling of when you want your posts to come out, and there’s the monthly and yearly scheduling of points or events you want to hit.

A lot of bloggers just post when the spirit strikes them. They might have four posts in three days and then a two-week gap until the next one. That’s fine if you’re a hobbyist or if the blog isn’t your primary income stream, but to make your blog profitable, it’s better to keep a regular schedule on which your readers can depend. Exactly when you post will depend on your niche. 

News-based blogs may need to be updated daily to feel current. For less time-sensitive topics, you could choose select days of the week. As always, consider your target audience. A business blog might want to have a post in their subscriber’s inboxes every weekday morning; e-mails sent over the weekend would be less likely to be viewed. 

A blog about nightlife in the city might want to put out a big post on Thursday when subscribers are making plans for the weekend. Whatever your niche, a weekly schedule lets your readers know when they should expect to hear from you and will more effectively build a strong subscriber base. 

The yearly scheduling will be more useful for managing your content and identifying the times interest in your niche will be highest. Some of these things will be universal—any blogger who sells products should make note of the Christmas shopping season on their yearly calendar—but many will be more individual to your niche. 

A gardening blog might want to time a new product release to correspond with late winter or early spring when lots of readers will be planning their gardens. A parenting blog could have special content for back to school season. By writing it all out, you can more clearly see what points in the year you want to build toward and where you might have a harder time coming up with content, allowing you to plan accordingly.

Collaboration

Collaboration with another blogger can be an easy way to keep the site running smoothly while at the same time spreading out the pressure and the workload involved in maintaining it. It lets each of you take time off when you need to, and can also help to add more perspectives to the blog’s content, expanding its appeal. Just make sure you choose your collaborating partners carefully.

It should be someone you get along with, but also someone you can count on to do their fair share of the work. Ultimately, the goal is for this to be a profitable business venture, and you should make sure from the outset that everyone involved is on the same page and committed to that cause. Even if the person is a family member or close friend, it’s a good idea to write up and sign an agreement together just to make sure the expectations are clear.

Blogging success story: Lance Nelson

When Lance Nelson decided to start his blog, he picked an extremely detailed niche. Banskoblog.com is in the Bansko ski resort in Bulgaria. Nelson turned this relatively limited niche into a full-time job that brings in over 60,000 euros per year in income, and his successful branding had a lot to do with the speed and degree of his success. 

Everything on his site, from the mountains on his logo to the weather tracker widget and menu options, clearly tells the reader just what he is about, and this precise branding paid off for him in a big way.

Being a skiing blogger means that Nelson has to think very carefully about the scheduling of his content. His readers are going to be most interested during the skiing season, and he has a ready-made audience in the winter; his challenge was how to sustain his readership in the summer months when there’s no snow for skiing. 

Nelson posts about other topics in the summer that are of interest to his readers. He travels throughout Bulgaria and shares his travels with his readers (who might themselves be looking for something to do during the summer, since they can’t ski). Even if you’re not in such a weather-dependent niche, thinking about what your ideal readers will be doing throughout the year can help you figure out the right content for the moment.