Are You Really Sure About What You Want? The Importance of Setting Blogging Goals

I usually get lots of flak when writing posts about growing traffic and making money from blogs. Some audiences usually respond with that ‘not all bloggers want that fame, that money’ thing. Actually it’s a great point. So great that I usually respond to them saying “you’re right” and just don’t bother with them anymore.

That being said it actually lead me to an idea for this post.

Whether you are a newbie blogger, an intermediate one like me (semi-newbie, lols) or an expert, it may be worth asking ourselves, what do we really want out of this? What’s our main ending goal? Actually I may need to remove the words ‘may’ and ‘be’ in the questions.

Yes it’s corny, but AdSense literally revolutionized me the ironic way

A long time ago I had a couple of friends who is as enthusiastic as I in starting blogging with high hopes of killing it financially using Google Adsense. So energetic we don’t mind paying computer shops to surf whole day just blogging and doing our crappy stuff. Months have passed by and we made less than $1 and were like ‘holy crap’.

Those two friends approached me and said, “We’re not anymore in for this thing, we just can’t imagine doing this and not getting any rewards”. I continued doing my thing, eventually started reading, learning and implementing stuffs. I realized “hey this is ton of work more than I thought it should be”. Fortunately for me, I continued pursuing. Yes it’s corny but AdSense literally revolutionized me the ironic way.

That was like the turning point for me. Most bloggers want to make money but very few can really keep up with the work load. I mean I always hear people say that they want to make money and they will work hard and unfortunately it just ends as a statement itself.

The Truth about Blogging Success

The truth about this is that most bloggers will never really succeed nor they will make money. To squeeze something in any field, you need to dive in and do sweat work. You need to go out and hit the mud, get a sore finger typing stuffs and etc. And that doesn’t even guarantee you anything! Are you ready then?

I’m usually asked by my friends on how the hell these people comment on my sites, why I receive this amount of traffic and how I do it. After telling them a thing or two they usually reply “what? You do all those things? That must be a ton of workload? Do take note that the traffic I get from my blog isn’t ever massive but still that’s traffic better than 95% of the blogs!

Why Setting Blogging Goals is Important?!

As I end this article, I’d like to re-emphasize again the point of having goals at the start and sticking to that. I’m sure a lot of other writers and bloggers have covered the wide topic of goal-setting and to be honest each and everytime I learn a lot. If you’re still unsure here are three more specific questions I’d like you to answer.

• Do I really want to make money? – Pretty obvious but it’s kinda surprising that a lot of people really don’t. We are always thrilled when talking about money but sometimes it’s really not just what we want. I talked to several other people when I attend to conference and most of them told me that they just want to have a place to stick their notes. They just want to get into the friendly blogosphere, just want to interact and get somehow famous. As you see, it’s a crucial question. Do you really need this thing to milk money for you? If yes then it leads to the next question
• Can I keep up with the workload? – Blogging is very challenging and to reap the financial rewards requires ton of work. I don’t know but due to the nature of internet marketing piped into blogging, we are psyched to think that making money from blogging is easy cheesy when in fact it’s not! I gotta tell you this, I work more than any person who has a day job to maintain my online business, the difference though is I’m enjoying and I’m getting paid for my efforts. So again it’s worth asking yourself, can I keep up with this? For how long?
• How do I make this work? – Now that you have decided for yourself about two psychological questions, it’s time to jump into more details. How do you make this work now? What are the main methods I need to use in this? How’s the step by step process of it?

The Blogging Battle

As strange as it seems but you really don’t need to focus too much on strategizing. I’m an advocate of doing things more than planning it and so many people get stucked with reading stuffs, strategizing but never really doing anything. Make sure you don’t make those same mistakes. It’s good to have strategies, tactics and whatever but that’s not even half of the battle. The real challenge always is sitting down and doing it.

So what do you guys think? The phrase ‘setting goals’ is so broad that if asked, people usually respond with unrealistic and false answers. I mean my if you ask me what’s my goal I’d usually tell you confidently that my main goal is to have an MBA degree w/c is a weird answer. So there you go, we need to evaluate ourselves and our goals now, not later, and not tomorrow.

Image credit: Chess Master

Tagged as: blogging goals, blogging success, make money, making money, setting goals, strategies

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This post is written by Melvin Dichoso who blogs at MelvinBlog Dot Com where he shares all his thoughts in the industry. He is currently running a huge contest as well with over $2000 of prizes at stake

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