How to Set Goals for Your Blog in 2023

We admit that we’ve fallen into the trap of setting “goals” without having a realistic way to accomplish them. We decided to create this post to help our fellow bloggers set realistic and actionable goals for their blog in 2023.

In the past month, our blog views have significantly improved and we’re hoping that 2023 is a great year for us. So instead of just sharing our blogging goals with our readers, we wanted to create a guide for creating your own goals for the new year and sticking with them.

How do you decide on your goals for the new year? Let us know in the comments.

1. Write Down Your Goals

The easiest way to hold yourself accountable with your blogging goals is to write them down. Create a document just for your blogging goals and write them down. Start out by writing something along the lines of get 1,000 monthly page views.

Underneath it, write down ways to accomplish this. Does that mean improving your SEO strategy or focusing on getting more blog views from social media? Think strategically about how to accomplish these goals and you’re more likely to stick with them when cultivating a plan. Then return to this document often to keep track of the progress made.

2. Organize Your Goals Based on the Timeframe

Now that you have your blogging goals and you created a plan of action, it’s time to categorize them. Separate them into short-term, medium-term and long-term. Your short-term goals can all be accomplished this year. While medium-term goals and long-term goals will take between one to five years and over five years respectively.

Why should you start planning goals that will take a while to accomplish right now? Because blogging is about the long gaming, especially if you plan on monetizing the blog in the future. Focus on long-term growth strategies and if you would like to develop your blog into a business.

For short-term goals, be realistic, but also push yourself to do better. We’re taking our short-term goals seriously because we know there’s a lot of room for improvement this year for our blog. One goal we have is to complete blogging courses in order to improve our content, get more followers and rank posts on Google.

3. Start Reflecting

Most bloggers have a good idea about what they want to accomplish with their blog. But now it’s time to reflect on last year’s stats. Did your blog achieve everything that you wanted it to? How were the amount of pageviews? Where did most of your traffic come from? These are the areas to reflect upon.

By understanding everything you did last year, you can improve your strategies. Because if you keep doing the exact same things as you did last year, you should expect the same results. We recommend reading as much as you can about your specific goals and to develop strategies that are more advanced than the previous year.

4. Consider Your Return on Investment (ROI)

The 80/20 principle states that about 80% of results come from roughly 20% of effort. This is sad and probably true, especially when it comes to blogging. The fact is that when creating goals, they should be more targeted. For example, when starting your blog, you don’t need to be on every social media website. You won’t get traffic from everywhere and it takes away the amount of time you could be spending on a more reliable source of traffic.

In fact, bloggers we’ve talked to say that getting traffic from Instagram and Facebook tends to be a waste of time. So really think about the effort you’re putting into you’re blog and if what you’re doing is giving you a return on your investment. If not, it’s time to improve your time management skills. We recommend getting a planner in order to reflect on this.

5. Block Out Your Time

ROI brings us to our next subject: time blocking. Like we mentioned above, keeping track of your schedule is a must for any blogger. Block out your days for essentials tasks, such a post writing, post promotion, content planning, etc. People are more likely to stick to a schedule when it’s written down in front of them.

Be mindful when time blocking. Think critically about if this so the best use of your time and are there ways to become even more efficient. The answer is usually yes, no matter how organized you are. We recommended keeping it color coded based on the focus area.

6. Set Your Goals for Your Blog Views

We already mentioned that bloggers should write down their goals. but we’re going to take it one step further. Start by having goals for your blog views organized by the month. Why monthly? Because unless you’re a big-name blogger, the goal is to improve every single month.

Monthly goals need to be edited more than yearly goals. The reason is because factors change throughout the year. If you’re starting today, we recommend thinking critically about the next three months. How many views would you like to see by then? What is realistic for blog? What could I be doing better? Answer all of the questions and turn it into a strategy.

7. Set Additional Blog Goals

Lastly, think about if there’s anything else that you would like to accomplish with your blog. This could be related to how often you post on the blog, what type of content you’re writing, how you engage with fellow bloggers, etc. Write down everything that you would like to do and then go back to step one on this guide and create a plan of action.

Our final piece of advice is to rush through this process. Really take the time to consider your blogging goals and how much effort you plan on giving your blog. You don’t want to get into a situation where you work so hard that you burnout and end up taking a long hiatus. Consistency matters in the blogging world and search engines take into account websites that always add new content.