Having reasonable blog goals/objectives is necessary to understand whether your website is heading in the right direction.
No matter how small or large, every established blog has specific objectives it wants to accomplish.
Goals may include sharing a vision, creating a brand, selling products/services, educating readers, or maximizing traffic.
Accordingly, clear objectives allow you to focus on the most suitable strategies and identify areas of improvement.
Finally, precise goals help you develop processes so you don’t deviate from your plan or ignore what’s vital to your success.
You’ll waste less time on non-essential activities and make fewer mistakes that cost time and money.
5 Common Blog Goals
- Make Money
- Maximize traffic
- Share a vision
- Educate readers
- Create a brand
Let’s examine these objectives to help you decide which goal(s) to pursue.
1. Monetary Objectives
Focusing on a monetary objective is essential if your primary goal is to make money from your blog/website.
There are numerous ways to generate income through your blog.
For instance, you can become an affiliate and make a commission promoting other people’s products/services.
In addition, you can sell products/services you’ve created for your audience.
Another strategy is to offer display advertising using Adsense, Mediavine, Adthrive, or Ezoic.
However, some display advertising networks require a certain number of monthly visitors to join the network.
Offering consulting/coaching services is an excellent way to earn money if you have expertise in a particular domain.
Finally, numerous authority sites offer memberships delivering exclusive information, advice, data, and content.
It helps students, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and motivated people achieve their objectives faster than free information.
It also improves their success by increasing their knowledge and opportunities and minimizing flawed decision-making.
The following list contains numerous ways to make money blogging.
Nevertheless, blogs can utilize many other income strategies to earn an excellent income.
Ways to Make Money Blogging
- Become an affiliate
- Display advertising
- Add sponsorships
- Sell products/services
- Create a membership area
- Offer consulting/coaching services
- Build a marketplace
New and experienced bloggers’ most common strategies to make money are display advertising and affiliate marketing.
These income methods allow creators to focus on creating great content and earning money passively.
They don’t need to think about creating products, offering services, or starting a membership.
It does take longer to generate income if you’re starting.
However, it can become profitable with enough effort, traffic, and the proper strategy.
2. Traffic Goals
Traffic goals focus mainly on getting as many visitors as possible.
Bloggers usually merge this goal with objectives like making money, educating students, building a brand, etc.
Sometimes, a blog will focus directly on generating traffic and decide on other objectives after achieving its goal.
If your goal is to maximize blog traffic, you’ll want to utilize SEO and keyword research tools.
These methods allow you to determine how much traffic you can generate from certain content.
It also helps you determine the competition of similar websites and their articles.
That way, you reduce your time concentrating on topics you’ll struggle to rank for in search engines.
SEO and keyword research also helps bloggers discover subtopics and niches they didn’t consider.
You can create more content on different topics and obtain even more traffic.
Strategies for Building Traffic
- Use SEO and keyword research tools
- Focus on easy-to-rank long-tail keywords
- Evaluate your competitor’s websites
- Create content consistently to rank for more topics
Of course, bloggers utilize other traffic strategies like getting traffic from Pinterest, Facebook, and other social platforms.
However, it takes time away from building the blog and creating content.
Social platforms can also change how they rank their content, causing you to lose traffic overnight.
It can be a valuable way to get visitors, but it shouldn’t be the only strategy you utilize.
3. Visionary Intent
Blogs with visionary intent have a message they want to share.
It may involve making a political change, inspiring others to take action, or encouraging people to decide with their hearts.
In this case, the intent may not be financial gain, branding, or building an education-based website.
It may simply be to get the word out and inspire change.
In that case, focus on generating buzz and getting traffic to ensure your vision is seen and heard.
Social media is an excellent way to promote your vision by utilizing powerful photography, videos, and audio.
You’ll want to share emotional stories of truth that humanize your idea.
You’ll also want to connect with people who share your vision and want to tell their friends and family.
Redirecting people to your blog is a great way to provide additional information and a home base for the community.
Establishing a Vision
- Use powerful imagery
- Utilize video and audio when possible
- Share true emotional stories
- Humanize your efforts
- Connect with existing communities
- Build a like-minded community
- Get others to share your vision
Sharing a vision is powerful when done right.
Whether you’re a brand like Nike, a human rights organization, or a philosopher, sharing a vision is essential.
4. Education-Based Purpose
A sound content strategy is necessary if your primary goal is to build an education-based blog.
Your blog’s success depends on whether you regularly produce relevant, informative, and insightful information.
Focus on writing in-depth on specific subjects and build out each category to become an expert and earn authority.
Also, find new ways to explore material and present data differently to keep readers enthusiastic and engaged.
Utilize video, infographics, charts, and other data formats to ensure visitors understand your topics well.
In addition, consider starting a membership site to provide loyal readers/students with comprehensive content.
Numerous successful education-based websites create memberships with exclusive information, data, and tools.
It helps people who financially support the blog obtain valuable learnings to improve their personal and professional lives.
Building an Education-Based Blog
- Create lots of valuable content
- Answer as many questions as possible
- Discuss specific topics/niches thoroughly
- Find new ways to analyze vital subjects
- Develop a course-like structure
- Utilize written, video, audio, and interactive content
- Build a membership section for dedicated learners
- Make finding a specific topic easy
Education is about making sure students understand topics thoroughly and use the knowledge effectively in their lives.
As a result, the success of your education-based blog depends on how well you teach topics to your readers/students.
It also depends on how easy/difficult it is for visitors to find and absorb relevant content.
All in all, you must ensure your content strategy aligns with the objectives of your education-based blog.
5. Branding Focus
Brands like Nike, Figs Wear, and Apple use blogs, advertising, and social media to share stories and convey emotions to their audience.
It allows them to control the narrative and establish themselves as authorities in their niche.
It also creates good PR for news outlets, social accounts, and press releases that want to discuss the brand.
A brand usually represents a demographic, whether athletes, women, healthy living, technology, fashion, or enthusiasts.
Therefore, it’s essential to understand your demographic and cater to them emotionally, intellectually, and socially.
A brand isn’t just a name. It’s a lifestyle and set of beliefs and ideas.
You’ll become more successful by connecting with others who know, love, and trust your brand.
Moreover, you’ll have raving fans who shout your brand to their friends, family, and the world.
Strategies for Building a Brand
- Know your demographic
- Use images, video, text, and audio to share powerful stories
- Show enthusiasts why your brand is essential to their needs
- Connect with people emotionally, intellectually, and socially
- Use blogs, social media, news, and networking to connect with others
- Make people feel good about buying and support your brand
- Make your brand part of a lifestyle
Many brands establish themselves to sell products, services, or other solutions.
However, you can also establish a brand to create a movement, inspire a demographic, or change peoples’ minds.
Whatever you decide, remember people come first if you want to create a successful brand.
Goal Setting Examples
Let’s assume your blog goal is to attract lots of qualified readers to your blog based on your niche.
You’ll never reach your goal if you spend all of your time tweaking your design and adding fancy buttons.
Instead, focus on creating exciting and engaging content readers want to share and find in Google searches.
Focusing on monetizable content can significantly improve your outcome if your goal is to earn an income.
In that case, non-monetizable topics won’t help you achieve your financial goals quickly.
You’ll also waste a lot of time creating irrelevant content.
It is necessary to ensure your goals and strategy align if you want to succeed.
Not having goals hurts motivation and causes you to spend time on things that won’t yield a return on your investment.
SMART Goals
Initially, your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
It gives you the best chances of success.
Smart goals identify your objectives and minimize time spent on non-effective tasks.
Set one to three achievable goals and focus on them until you feel comfortable with them.
Your comfort level will likely rely on knowing you’ve made sufficient progress towards accomplishing your goals.
Once you’ve nailed down the process and seen success, you can double down on your efforts or start supporting new goals.
Whichever strategy you use, ensure it brings you closer to your ultimate objective.
Typical objectives include financial freedom, sharing stories, educating people, starting a fashion trend, etc.
We all have the same 24 hours a day, and there is only so much you can do in that time.
As a result, you must choose meaningful goals you can accomplish and most are likely to achieve.
It’s not only essential for the success of your blog but also for your life and lifestyle.
As your blog grows, you can change them, add new objectives, or eliminate goals that no longer serve you.
Establishing Specific Blog Objectives
Having a solid strategy and routine is essential for accomplishing your blog objectives.
Most successful bogs choose routines that help them grow over time and stay consistent with their strategy.
For instance, a successful blog may post relevant, informative, and highly searched content daily.
It allows the blog to build authority, expertise, and trust.
It also helps them gain traffic through search engines like Google and Bing.
Over time the content acts like compounding interest by improving the blog authority and generating search traffic.
Becoming an authority also increases the blog’s chances of getting shared across social media and websites.
Another goal for some blogs/websites may be to maximize earnings.
In this case, setting goals to create monetizable content/products and ensure that pages are converting well is paramount.
Conversion strategies may include using conversion software, updating page copy, improving images, offering upsells, and identifying what causes visitors to abandon a purchase.
Once you’ve determined your objectives, you can develop a strategy designed to achieve your goals.
Nevertheless, ensuring your goals are realistic is essential, so you don’t waste time on non-effective strategies.
Potential Blog Objectives:
- Create 10 – 20 articles per month (5 – 10 in-depth articles)
- Grow readership/visitors by 10% per month
- Reach x number of social media followers by x date (ex. 10,000 Facebook fans by the end of the year)
- Increase reader retention by x (25% of readers visit your blog 4x per month)
- Earn x number of dollars per month (make $4,000 per month)
- Improve conversion rate by x (improve the percentage of visitors who buy a product/service or sign up for your newsletter)