Why Some New Blogs Succeed, And Others Fail
Day 10 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide
By far the biggest reason that new blogs fail is that the bloggers lose interest in their creation. Many people have the ability to make a successful webpage, and to make money online. However a lot of people have a hard time sticking with their blog through the rough patches and emerging on the other side. By setting goals for your Blog you can help keep yourself focused, and not give up before you get your payday.
As with most things in life, setting goals for your blog are important. However setting the right goals are even more important. If you set unachievable goals for yourself, you are more likely to become discouraged than if you have no goals at all. So without further ado, here are some thinks you might want to set goals on, and what realistic goals are
1) Site Traffic - New blogs always struggle to get a sustained traffic going. Unless you have another established site or two and can feed the new site, traffic may be hit or miss for a little while. However you can still work to ensure that your traffic improves month to month. After your first month blogging, it is not unrealistic to assume you can grow traffic 30%/month, or more, for the next 6-8 month. 30% is a good number to aim for. If you keep that up, then a year later you will have 3 1/2 times as many visitors as you do now. Keep it up for two years and your number of visitors will have increased by an order of magnitude. Many sites can do better than this, so if you want to set your sights higher, go ahead, but 30% is an achievable number.
2) Number of Posts - In order to grow your site, you need to keep generating content. The more quality content you make the better. Setting a goal to create a certain number of posts a week can help make sure that you keep up with the necessary work. For this blog, I have a goal for myself of 5 posts / day and have been relatively successful at doing that. That rate has allowed me to post over 200 pages in a little over a month. Such a count would have taken me over almost a year at 1/day. However setting a goal of 1 post per day is a good rate for a new blog. It is a rate which will allow you to create a steady stream of content, keep your visitors happy, but not overwhelm you too much. 1 post/day is very much a happy medium.
3) Networking - You should set a goal of how many other bloggers you would consider your friends each month. Try and meet new bloggers whose sites you enjoy, and who also likes you sites. You can send traffic back and forth to each other and give each other ideas. Obviously it would be great to make friends with John Chow, but as that is unlikely to happen, try creating relationships with other new bloggers. As their site expands the links they give you will become more and more valuable. Creating 1 blogging friendship / month is a good goal. Try and read several new blogs each month and see if there are any which really catch your eye. If they do, there is a good chance you will get along with their writer as well.
4) Search Engine Rankings - Your blog will start out at a Google Page Rank of 0. Your goal should be to get a page rank of 3 after the next Google PR update. (External updates occur every 3 months or so.) You can use a tool such as PR Predict to gauge your interim progress. Making headway on PageRank is important for 2 reasons. The first is you want to climb the search results as quickly as possible. Searchers are the most valuable people to come to your page, they are the most likely to click on your ads, so you want as many of them as possible. Secondly Page Rank is one of the quick things which every one uses to judge a page. If people want to tell if a site is worthwhile or not, a quick look at Page Rank is commonly used to see what others think about it. PR 3 is the minimum to actually be taken seriously. PR 4 is a very common ranking for newish / less well known blogs. PR 5 is starting to become very well established in the blogging community. PR 6 is usually very popular blogs. Blogs tend to cluster at PR 6, very few of them tend to make it to 7 or 8 unless they have other features going for them besides the blog.
If you set those goals for yourself and track them, you will stay much more interested in your site. If you are a new blogger and are considering using any of these goals, let me know if you can meet/exceed them, and if they helped you at all.