I just got a great message from a reader indicating he’s fed up with blogging and doesn’t know what to do moving forward. He doesn’t want to quit, but he’s not getting the results he’s looking for, so he’s just kind of stuck.
His main question is “Can you take a look at my blog and tell me what to do?” I get asked this a lot.
Unfortunately it’s just not helpful for me to give you blanket, generic advice. I hate telling people that, but taking a look at your site and giving you some watered down advice is just not good business for either of us. The truth is your ideal plan of attack is completely, 100% dependent upon your goals. It’s also dependent upon where you are now and how long you want it to be before you start making serious things happen. These things HAVE to be addressed!
Since I do consulting with you guys here, I wanted to get that out and be very clear. I can’t give you goals. I also cannot provide you with drive or aspiration. That’s on you, baby 🙂 Basically it works like this: if you don’t have goals, I can’t really help you achieve them. That makes sense, right?
How to make a great goal for your blog
BUT…if you’re willing to sit down and talk it out a bit, we can most definitely fine tune your approach to web marketing and make things happen for you. One of the biggest things small business owners struggle with is knowing what to pursue with their blogs. It’s kind of hard to set a goal for your blog when you’re not really sure how blogging works to begin with, right? So I want to give you a three step process. This is my advice for any new bloggers, without a doubt.
- Get very clear on your target market – your audience is NOT everyone. Focus!
- Once you know your audience, get clear on your goals – is your main goal engagement with your readers? Affiliate income? Email list building? Client lead generation? Obviously, without a targeted goal you cannot have a targeted approach to achieving it! When you know what you want, step 3 becomes much simpler.
- Put together a simple, easy to sustain plan for making it happen – this can involve tweaks to your site, changes to your approach for creating content, changes to your marketing or all of these.
Does it make sense that steps 1 and 2 are absolutely crucial? Does it make sense that without steps 1 and 2 in place, it’s pretty much impossible to do step 3? I can help you with any or all of these three steps, but these represent the path for getting exactly what you want out of your blog.