Feb 8, 2010
Defining ‘Success’, Because Your Blog Can’t Succeed Without it… Posted by Jamie Harrop - 10 Comments
Photo by Madeira
A funny thing happened tonight. As I sat here contemplating my next move within the blogosphere, I suddenly found my light. My light to follow to lead me to success. To lead me to great things. To lead me to what I want in life.
But before that light appeared, as I sat here contemplating my next move, I realised within myself there was actually no move for me to make. At least not until I knew where I was going. I realised, very suddenly as though a light had been shone inside, that I didn’t know where I was going. I was lost on a road, with a map in front of me, but no idea where to turn. A map can only lead you where you want to be if you know where that place is.
Finding a Purpose to Your Blog
You’ve heard it all before. “Your blog needs a goal”. “You must know what you want to achieve”. “You must set yourself milestones and targets and blah blah blah blah blah…”. You’ve heard it all before. But the problem is, most people don’t listen. I didn’t listen. I’m a man. I wouldn’t be a man if I listened (Don’t go there ladies. 
). So I’m here today to make you listen. I’m going to ram it down your throats so hard it’ll bounce back up and hit your brain. I do that not to be clever, I do that because it’s the only way your blog will succeed. Because you can’t possibly ‘succeed’ if you haven’t defined your own ‘success’.
I ask people all the time what their goal for their blog is. I just asked it again on Twitter, and not one person responded to tell me they have a specific, measurable, achievable, life-changing, ultimate goal for their blog. There are always plenty of people who tell me they have goals for the next week or next month or next year. But it’s rare I come across somebody who has a final goal. A goal, that once achieved, will be ultimate and final.
Far too often when discussing goals for blogs I hear the phrase “I’m working on it.” That phrase makes me cringe. Don’t work on it. Do it! Step back from your Twitter account. Step back from your latest article or seminar in the latest ‘Cool-If-You’re-Part-Of-It’ Internet marketing course. Step back from the cyber world and in to reality for just a minute. I promise your Twitter buddies and seminars and info-products and ebooks will all still be there when you return. Just for a minute, step back in to reality, and contemplate your goal. Not your goals for 2010. Not your goals for February. But the one goal, that once achieved, allows you to slouch in your chair, breath out a long, hard, sigh of contempt, and speak the words “My blog is now a success.”
“I want to make a living from blogging…”
When I pose the question of final goals to bloggers, most of them have no answer. The thought of something ‘final’ related to their blog is scary for them. But some people do have an answer. Unfortunately, the answer is usually this…. “I want to make a living from blogging”.
(Bare with me while I walk out of the room, bang my head against a wall, scream, and then calmly walk back to my desk. Arrrrrgh!)
Goals must be measurable. I can’t stress this enough. ‘Making a living’ is not measurable. How much money a month is ‘making a living’? It’s only be defining this that you start to get a meaningful, measurable goal. And at what point in time do you want to achieve this so called ‘goal’ by? Are you prepared to work until two days before you die to achieve this goal? Apparently you are, because you haven’t set any timescale. You’ll be happy to work for 50 years to achieve this goal, then pass away peacefully as an old man, knowing in your heart you did achieve what you set out to achieve, if only two days before old age crept up behind you.
Should a Blog Ever End?
I lot of the difficulty in setting a ‘final, ultimate goal’ lies in that word ‘final’. A final, ultimate goal suggests there has to be an end to your blog. A day, a time, a place when your blog comes to a close. And in some ways, I think that is true. There does have to be a time when it comes to a close. Maybe it will be as simple as when you hit X subscribers and you decide to sell your blog. Or maybe it will be something more complicated, like when you pass away, or when you decide to hand it over to your children. Whatever the method, there will be a day when your blog isn’t your blog anymore. A frightening thought, isn’t it?!
So What’s Your Goal?
So I’d like to pose a question to you, and I want you to think long and hard about your answer. What is your ultimate goal for your blog? What do you want to achieve that will ultimately allow you to say “My blog is a success”? What is it that is going to provide you with the motivation to blog and interact with your community of readers and friends when you’re having a bad day? What’s the one thing that is going to provide a sense of focus to your blogging efforts?
Step back from the cyber world and in to reality. Your Twitter buddies and seminars and info-products and ebooks will all still be there when you return. Because remember, a blog without a purpose, without a measurable, achievable goal, is like a map in the hands of somebody with no destination. You can walk forever, but you’ll never get where you want to be unless you know where that place lies.
Do you have an ultimate goal for your blog? How do you know when you’re blog will be a success? Let us know in the comments!
This is my second post in a series discussing my cornerstones of blogging. Previous posts in this series include Kids, Girls, Zip Wires, Soldiers & Self Belief! The Story that Will Transform Your Blog…. Look out for more posts in this series later this week. I’ll slowly progress up the scale, until we hit what I believe to be a cornerstone so important, you can’t build a successful blog without it. Subscribe today if you haven’t already done so.
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Category: Blogging Tips
Tagged: Cornerstones Of Blogging, Goals, Planning
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I'm a 25 year old blogger, community and customer service specialist with 11 years experience running and managing blogs and online communities.
You got me. I don’t have specific, ultimate, goals that I want to achieve with my blog. I really need to write some down.
How will I know if my blog will be a success? I can’t really say that it is unless I put some goals down but if I can get reader feedback letting me know they value what’s being written, or that I’ve helped them along the way, then I would consider that a step in the right direction.
.-= Bryan´s last blog ..Five Reasons to Consider Cycling to Lose Weight =-.
I struggled with this on Twitter last night, and I’m still trying!
I honestly don’t have an end goal, and I can’t conjure one. I do have a very clearly defined set of five year goals, (3 years and 10 months to go) and an even more tightly defined set of goals for last year and again for this year.
Here’s my problem. Try as I might I can’t decide at this stage, what my goal with the blog will then become, because so many factors come into play. Where will I be living? Will I be travelling the world? Will the kids still be reliant on me? Will the properties I own have increased dramatically in value? And on, and on.
Depending on the answers to those questions the end goal for my blog could be to sell it, to hire an editor, to carry on growing it myself or even to simply close it down.
I’m not sure if I’m missing the point. Any ideas?
.-= Mike CJ´s last blog ..Giving the finger to the naysayers. Free mentoring for a year. =-.
Jamie,
Continuing our Twitter conversation where you mercilessly twisted my arm for details on measuring my blog “end goal”. Recall my goal is to use my blog to help my clients and prospective clients better understand how to bring about their “end goal” of winning new business from their multimedia marketing efforts (websites, marketing video and mobile media in this case). I aid them in understanding the psychology of buying and coach them on leveraging buyers’ triggers with their projects. The peripheral goal here is to position our firm as a trust agent in our market, a “go-to” resource.
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MEASUREMENT
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Qualitatively I measure our success through client feedback (blog comment quality, feedback during client meetings and phone conferences). Quantitatively, I measure success through feed registrations, comment volume, tweet numbers as compared to visitor levels.
I told you this wouldn’t fit into a tweet (smile). Man, you are a taskmaster! Thanks for encouraging us to think strategically about the hard and often lonely work we do.
John
.-= John Easton´s last blog ..5 Minutes to Foolproofing Linkedin =-.
Defining a goal can be frustrating; what happens when you just struggle to achieve it. Do you take a long hard look at why you are wanting to achieve that goal.
The goal gives you drive; desire to see the blog succeed – and that desire breeds frustration to struggle with all the aspects to achieve that goal.
Well – that how I feel.
.-= Phillip Gibb´s last blog ..Synaptic Light Fan Page =-.
I wrote something similar to this but for success in more of a general setting.
Part of it talked about how we view individual success compared to success of others, and how you being successful means achieving your set goals, not fulfilling what society and media view as success.
After writing that essay I knew I should set some life goals. Mind you im still 18 but after reading your post and you putting it into a new context I feel like me not defining an ultimate goal for my blog(s) and even projects ultimately cause my failure.
Never have I sat down and said my end goal aloud. I’ve always jumped into things with a set of short term goals, and once I achieved those my motivation disappeared, and in time my blog went with it.
I want to kick myself in the face but instead I’m going to go back and try to find that ultimate goal in hopes that my motivation will come with it.
The only question I have to you is, Do the goals necessarily need to be measurable? Why cant one have a subjective or qualitative goal?
After reading this I think I know why I don’t have a blog.
99% of the blogs I’ve seen aren’t worth a second visit, mainly because the people who own it can’t write good enough to keep an audience interested.
Also, what they write about doesn’t interest me.
The couple of blogs worth reading are a pleasure to read because the blogger knows how to write and the blogger writes about something that’s interesting for me. I regard those blogs as an alternative for printed media; I read them because I enjoy reading them and I learn something by doing so.
So, looking at it from the consumer side, I think a goal of a blog can (should?) be to write high quality articles that will capture an audience. Do it for some time and when the inspiration is gone or you don’t enjoy doing it anymore, just quit and start doing something else.
Some people will write all their lives; others will be through after some years or even months.
It doesn’t matter if you make a great income with your blog or if it’s a hobby.
When the moment is there just quit and move on.
The journey is the goal.
That’s the way I have been living my life; it brought me a very interesting and rewarding career.
Hey Jamie
I’m enjoying your blog. Thanks!
I find it so interesting that as I pose myself a question, so the Universe nudges me towards an answer.
Just yesterday I was ruminating about the fact that I have no purpose, passion, one big idea (call it what you will), in short, nothing that excites me!
I had the exact thought you mentioned in your post: I feel like a person who has a map but no destination.
For anyone else who finds themself in my position, Steve Pavlina offers good, practical advice on how to discover your life’s purpose, which I believe will go a long way to helping us define our blog’s goals as well.
Jamie, a quick heads up, your post had a few typos (glitches). I’m a writer/copy editor, if you’d like to do an energy exchange I’d be more than happy to check your writing before you post.
Cheers
I think a lot of people don’t have goals because it’s hard to put into words what you’re thinking. I have some general goals but nothing as specific as it should be.
1. I want to focus on Canadian topics more often.
2. I want to get better at writing with practice
3. I want to have more posts written by me that aren’t reviews and the like.
4. I want to have more than 100 visitors/day
I know you don’t want to hear “I’m working on it” but I haven’t decided completely what direction my blog should go in so making concrete goals is kind of hard right now.
.-= Callista´s last blog ..Why is an Orange Called an Orange? =-.
Jamie:
Your post is very timely for me as I recently launched a blog that focuses on personal development, marketing and entrepreneurship. From the outset I used the excuse “I will just see how things develop” because I didn’t have a specific, measurable goal. I just had an “idea”.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that not only was that a strategy for failure, but that I wasn’t going to have focus, which leads me to Gerrit’s point.
Gerrit states a harsh reality, and being that I’ve only been actively blogging at my new blog for a few weeks, it’s one that runs through my mind frequently, that is “does my blog capture anyone’s attention?” Is it worth a second visit?
I suppose only time will tell. But I do think that Gerrit nails it by highlighting the fact that “your” goal has to relate to “your” reader or it’s as good as not having a goal at all.
Good stuff people.
.-= Marlee´s last blog ..30 Days Till 30. Lesson 6: You Must Push Yourself. =-.
To get wealthy doing what I love.