Originally wrote for a guest post on a blog a couple of weeks back, I’ve decided to release this on my blog instead due to the blog I was supposed to be guest posting on leaving it in review for a long period of time, meaning that this post was going to be wasted otherwise.

I’m a firm believer in setting goals and targets in business and in blogging which, is why you should be setting your goals for the new year ahead.I don’t care if you want to increase revenue or build on your brand for instance, you must set goals, as it is important for improvement of yourself and your business. Without setting goals, how can you assess where you are in the market, and if you’re doing brilliant or not?

Well in business you see aims and objectives as SMART, which can be related to blogging too. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time.

Specific - This ensures that your objectives are clear and well defined. This will help you monitor and assess actual performance against the specific objectives as well as potentially also including details of what is not included.

Measurable - It is useful to know when that work has been done and the objectives are completed.

Achievable - This ensures that everything is in place and that if the person does not reach the goals they cannot reasonably point the finger elsewhere.

Realistic - Objectives should also add useful value within the context where they are being set, being aligned with strategies and higher goals.

Time - This ensures that the objectives have a deadline so they don’t carry on for longer then required.

So how does this relate to blogging?

Well if you want to increase your RSS readership, blog branding, traffic, advertising revenue on your blog then you should follow the SMART objectives, as this will allow you to become motivated to achieve that goal by all possible means. This will give you a set model to ensure your goal is set in an appropriate way for instance, saying you want a brand new blog to get 13,000 rss readers in 2 days is virtually impossible whereas, a brand new blog setting its goal to get 50 rss readers in 1 month is more realistic and achievable in a reasonable time frame.

So what goals are you going to be setting for 2008?

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