Are you wondering how to review your blogging goals, momma? I know it’s not the end of the year yet, but I don’t wait for the end of the year to review my goals.
I review my goals every quarter, each month, and every week. Why?
Well, mostly because I’m a nerd. 😆 I’m in my happy place when I’m planning and reviewing. It’s fun for me!
But regular reviews are important. They help you to track your:
✔︎ blog growth
✔︎ income
✔︎ offers & services
✔︎ whether you are meeting your goals
In essence, regularly reviewing your blog goals can keep you on track for blog success!
If you don’t review your goals, you could get lost chasing the next shiny object…
In a deep review session a couple of years ago, I discovered that I was going about blogging all wrong. 😆
I was wasting time creating products, outlining courses, and brainstorming ways to make money. I hosted Facebook groups and Facebook challenges. And I spent A LOT of time making my site pretty.
I literally chased after every shiny little object and promise of success that came my way.
I did everything except….actually blog. 😆
And it was getting me nowhere.
After an intense review, I realized I needed to focus first on my foundation! I mean, who offers dinner on the sidewalk, while the restaurant is still being built right behind you?
No one! 😆
If your plans are failing, momma, and you don’t know why do a deep review.
I can help. I’ll walk you through my entire review process.
After all, how do you know where you want to go, unless you know where you’ve been? 😁
But before you can do a review, you have to know where you want to go!
What are realistic blog goals?
Your blog goals will depend on where you are at in the blogging process, momma.
Are you just getting started?
Then you might want to focus on:
➢ building your blog foundation
➢ building your brand
➢ building your email list
➢ increasing traffic
If you are just getting started, focusing on making money might not be very realistic.
If you’ve been blogging for a little while, though, then you might be ready to:
➢ use SEO
➢ create and execute a monetization strategy
➢ perform market research
➢ learn and use sales funnels and launch strategies
And of course, if you’re an advanced blogger, you’ll be focusing on product optimization and scaling your business.
Chances are, though, if you are a stay-at-home mom, you are just getting started with this blogging journey.
If you need to know how to start a mom blog, read this post.
Blog goals for beginners
So, what should your goals be?
Blogging is not a get-rich-quick-scheme. It’s more like the tortoise and the hair…. slow and steady wins the race!
You’ll need to build the foundation first before you can open up for business.
If you are new to the blogging scene, some realistic blog goals might include:
- Getting your blog set up
- Developing your brand
- Publishing consistent content
- Building an email list
- Growing a following
- Establishing a relationship with your readers
These are all things that you need to have in place, before creating products and services.
If you have these things in place, but you still aren’t making any progress, you might need to go back and review your process. You might need to do some tweaking here and there or make some improvements.
First, you must build the restaurant, set the atmosphere, create the menu, hire the staff, and invite people in, before you can serve that candlelit dinner!
I was trying to create and sell a planner, coaching services, and a course before my blog was even built. 🤦🏻♀️
So, I went back to the basics and focused first on the things that bring about blog growth and traffic.
I discovered a great way of figuring out which track you should be on – blog monetization or blog foundation. You can read all about it here: Before Writing Your 2022 Blogging Goals, Do This!
My blog grew after that, and my audience did too. In fact, my page views sky-rocketed!
Smart goals for a blog
Once you know which track you should be on, momma ~ building your foundation or working towards monetization ~ you can set some goals. But they need to be smart goals!
And we’re not talking intelligent, either. 🤣😂 Smart stands for:
S – specific
M – measurable
A – achievable
R – relevant
T – time sensitive
If you’ve never written smart goals before, check out this post: The Ultimate Guide to Setting Goals for Your Blog. It’ll walk you through the process of setting smart goals for your own blog.
Blogging goals examples
Many new bloggers struggle with figuring out their goals. There’s so much to do! And so many ways to do it. You might wonder where to focus your time.
So, to give you a little nudge ☺️ here are a few examples of pretty generic goals. Take one of these examples and run through the smart goal process in The Ultimate Guide to Setting Goals for Your Blog.
Or use these examples as a basis for creating your own goal, and then make it smart.
If you are working on your foundation, some blogging goals might be:
- Write and publish two blog posts a week
- Create a content plan
- Increase blog traffic by 5%
- Get my first 100 pageviews
- Create a welcome series
- Create my first freebie
- Perform market research and narrow down my niche
If you’ve been blogging for a while, and are ready to start monetizing, then some blogging goals might be:
- Make 5 affiliate sales this month
- Create my first small digital product
- Set up a sales funnel
- Launch my new course
- Perform market research to really understand my audience
- Offer a service
Okay? If you don’t have any goals, then take a moment to create some! You can always bookmark this post and come back in three months, to review your progress. 😉
How to review your blogging goals
Once you have some goals to work with, you can start your review process. Like I said above, I regularly review my goals.
I review my goals every:
- week
- month
- quarter
- six months
- year
For the purposes of this post, we are going to focus on what I do during my year-end reviews. This review process is a deep dive, momma, so get ready!
Start by taking a look at your stats
Hopefully, you’ve been diligently reviewing every month, at the end of each month. If so, then this will be quick and painless for you. But if not, then it’s time to get started!
Review your Google Analytics
I like to start with a general audience overview before breaking it down further. Take a look at your users, your number of sessions, your bounce rate, and your sessions duration for the entire year.
If you’ve never done this before, then just take note of it and document it. If you did this last year, how do your numbers compare to last year’s, last month’s, or last quarter’s? Is your traffic up? Down? Did your bounce rate decrease? How are your session durations?
How many of your users are returning users?
And then I like to take a closer look.
Out of all of my users, I like to see how many are returning users. I don’t want someone to come to my site and leave, to never come again. I want to build a loyal following.
I also like to take note of the sessions per user, number of page views, and page views per session.
How are people coming to your site?
And then I like to see how users are finding my site. I want the majority of them to come from organic search – Google. But I also want a high volume of traffic from Pinterest. I usually don’t care about Facebook or any other form of social media, because that is not my focus.
If you take a look at the referrals (in yellow) – that refers to other sites that link to your site. You want a healthy dose of those as well because it helps to build up SEO.
Nearly 100% of my social traffic comes from Pinterest. It’s helpful to take a look at your social traffic because then you know where your focus should be on social media. For the longest time, I was focused on Facebook.
But after looking at my analytics, I switched to Pinterest. Now I spend the majority of my social media hours on Pinterest. Might as well go where my audience is, right?
What are your most popular posts?
And finally, I like to take a look at what pages my readers visit the most. This helps me to:
- Know what my readers are looking for
- create my content strategy
- know what posts to focus on when creating content clusters
- know what old blog posts should be updated first
- create my monetization strategy
Review your social media profiles
After looking at your analytics, you want to take a look at each of your social media profiles. I am not going to go into detail on how to do this, because the only social media profile I actively use is Pinterest.
For all other social platforms, you will want to look at whatever analytics or insights they provide. Are your followers growing? Are you getting views? Are people engaging with your posts and clicking over to your website?
Are your social media profiles helping you to meet your blogging goals? If not, don’t waste time focusing on them.
Or, if you really want to focus on growing your traffic through social media, take a deep look at what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong with your social media profiles and adjust accordingly, so that they are helping you to meet your goals.
After reviewing your stats, take a look at your profit & loss statements for the year
If your goal is to make money from your blog, then you need to actively review how you are meeting that goal. You cannot expect to grow if you don’t pay attention to what is working for you and what isn’t.
How much money did you make during the year?
Hopefully, you’ve been keeping track of your income every month. How much did you bring in during the entire year? How much did you pay out in expenses? And what is your end-of-the-year profit?
Also, look at how you made that money. Did you provide a service? Use affiliate marketing? Maybe you had ads and sponsored posts. Or did you sell products?
Look at each monetization strategy you implemented. How much money did it bring in for you? What was your strongest money maker? Your weakest?
For help with this, read Before Writing Your Blogging Goals, Do This!
What service did you provide?
The easiest way to make money off of your blog is to provide a service. Beginner bloggers often make the majority of their money from providing a service, so it’s good to review how effective your offer is.
Some questions to ask yourself are:
- How many clients did you have?
- How much income did you earn from each client, on average?
- On average, how many hours did it take you to provide that service to each client?
Next, review your blogging habits
This is the fun part. 😁 Because now you get into the nitty-gritty of your day-to-day blogging tasks.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- How many posts did you publish per month?
- Did you publish consistently or sporadically?
- On average, how long does it take you to write and publish a post?
- What blogging tasks do you love?
- What blogging tasks do you find draining or a waste of time? (Note: these are tasks you may want to hire out for in the future.)
- How many hours did you spend a week working on your blog?
- Are you happy with how you spent your time?
Look over your yearly and monthly reviews
Ideally, you should be reviewing your month at the end of the month. If you’ve been doing this, take a look at your monthly reviews.
Does anything jump out at you?
How about last year’s end-of-the-year review? I love looking those over at the end of the following year, to see how this year’s review compares to last year’s.
When you look at your monthly and yearly reviews, you can get some great insight into patterns you’ve created – things that hurt you a year ago and are still harming you now.
You can also see patterns of success and things that have served you well.
Review your goals for the year
Take a look at this last year’s goals. Did you meet them? All of them, some of them or none of them?
Did your goals change over the course of the year? If so, why? Did it turn out to be a good thing, or did it hurt your progress?
How do your goals compare to last year’s goals? Did they build off of last year’s goals? Or did you pivot in your business and change direction entirely?
List out your wins for the year
Whether you met your goals or not, you still had success along the way! Take a moment to list out everything that happened this last year that was great!! Use these questions to help:
- List at least three great things that happened this last year. List more if you can!
- What did you have to do to accomplish these things?
- What did you learn from these successes?
- What patterns do you see?
- How did these patterns help your business?
List out your losses for the year as well
Even if you had an amazing year and you met all of your goals, nothing is ever perfect! There’s always room for improvement.
Use the following prompts to find the areas you can improve on in the upcoming year:
- List at least three disappointing things that happened this year.
- What lessons did you learn from these experiences?
- What patterns do you see?
- How did these patterns hurt your business?
And finally, ask yourself these questions:
1. What three things are you the proudest of, this year?
2. What were your three biggest challenges?
3. What are three lessons you learned?
4. What are three things you can improve on for next year?
5. What are three changes you need to implement, to make those improvements?
If you were to start the year all over, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the beginning of this year?
How are you different between this year and last year?
Who and/or what are you incredibly grateful for this year?
What did you focus on this year? How did that work for you?
What will you focus on next year?
At the end of the day…
Reviewing your goals like this is a long process, momma. I usually only dive in this deep once a year.
You are going to want to set aside at least a full day to get it done. You can tackle it all in one day, or you can do a little each morning, throughout the week.
But working through these questions will give you a great understanding of what worked well and what did not this past year. Patterns of behavior will begin to emerge, as you ask yourself these questions.
Do this every year, and you may see that you learn well from your mistakes, correct them and move on. Or you may notice that you keep repeating the same mistakes, month after month, year after year.
And the best part of reviewing your year is that it gives you a chance to see all that went right for you. When we are caught up in the day-to-day struggles of blogging and managing a family, we often overlook our small wins and successes along the way.
We even lose sight of what we are grateful for.
Blogging is hard work! It can often take years before you see the fruits of your labor. Reviewing your year will help you to cultivate a blogger’s mindset – the kind of thinking that will keep you going, even when times look bleak.
And it will help you to celebrate the joy along the way!
So, take a day and complete this exercise. Grab a blog planner to help you review your goals! If you don’t know which one to try, then read this post: The 5 Best Blogging Planners and What You Can Do With Them.
Then pop back on here and let me know how it went for you!
What went well for you this year? What do you want to change next year? And what patterns in your own behavior surprised you?
At the end of the day, momma, a review is no good if we don’t learn from it and make some changes. 😉
Leave a comment and let me know!
