Happy December!

Winter officially starts today, which means site owners are officially divided into two camps. If you’re the prepared kind of blogger, you probably already have all your goals and post ideas mapped out for the season. If you’re more like me, you’ve been meaning to do it for ages and you’re just getting round to it now.

But that’s ok! Here’s a look at my goals and how to set your own winter blogging aims if you haven’t already.

What’s the difference between winter blogging goals and any other blogging goals?

Dividing blogging goals into seasons works well because:

• It gives you more time to play with than a month, but not such a long period that you lose focus (although monthly goals and yearly goals are useful too!)
• Blogging patterns tend to change depending on the season. For example, in winter I’m much more likely to be holed up in front of a screen compared to summer. In winter I’m restricted to photographing only at weekends because of the light, so I need to plan for that too.
• You can plan what’s coming up. So if you have a fashion blog, you know what your plan will be for the next couple of months in terms of trends and types of clothes. If you know you’re going on holiday, you can plan to document your trip.
• You can fill any gaps in the nearish future. E.g. February is typically a pretty dead time for stuff going on for me, and it’s the miserable side of winter, so I know I need to be on top of post ideas but I can also use the time to get ahead and plan for spring.

This post simply acts as a prompt for setting your blogging goals this winter.

Creating goals

Be specific – The golden rule to achieving anything is to be specific. Sure, you could set a goal that’s ‘Make my blog better’, but what does that really mean? Set specific tasks, like ‘Fix all 404s’ or ‘Replace image headers’, and then set those under the broader heading ‘Make my blog better’ instead.

Make sure your goals are realistic – For example, blogging every day is a dream for most people, and if you’re scratching around for something to talk about or your blog posts are getting shorter and shorter, your visitors are going to be unimpressed. If you want a quantity goal, plan all your post ideas for the next couple of months now rather than winging it. I wrote a post recently with some blog post ideas if blogging more frequently is your goal.

Be conscious of your weakness(es) – This way you know where you’re most likely to fall down and can stop it happening or reduce the impact. For example, I tend to list far too many goals and then get stressed out about them. Maybe you do that, or don’t push yourself enough, or leave everything to the last minute…whatever it is, be aware of it so you can improve it.

I’m not a fan of anything remotely corporate, but if you’re serious about your goals you may want to look at Developing SMART goals. I think there’s too much detail there for me personally, but if you have trouble staying motivated or really love to plan stuff, they’re a good idea.

Consider the timeframe – I’m doing my winter goals project from December 1st to February 28th. That’s quite a big chunk of time, but when you take into consideration the holidays and travel time, it’s not actually all that long. So while I could create a huge tasklist of improvements and additions, I need to only focus on a shortlist of core things, and also have a rough idea of how long they’ll take. I could put ‘Redesign blog’ on my list, but then I’d have no time to do anything else.

Goal stages

When I started thinking about my blogging goals, I realised that I was going through a simple three stage process:

1. Reviewing – Not sure what your goals should be? Go through your website thoroughly and look at what you don’t like, what you’ve been meaning to fix, and what could be better. This includes backend stuff too; maybe you need to replace a plugin or make your typing pane bigger or introduce custom templates to make your life easier. Take a look at your analytics too and see which posts performed the best and which days were a bit quieter.
2. Planning clean up – Identify specific clean-up tasks and translate them into goals. Again, this is both front-end and back-end stuff.
3. Organising new stuff – This includes plans for blog content, new pages, new images/design, anything you’ve wanted to add but haven’t got round to, backend additions, and general stuff you’re adding (as opposed to fixing).

Depending on what your goals are, you make also want to break them down. So for example, I may have a main goal to increase traffic to my blog, and underneath that I have a list of mini tasks to achieve that: sharing posts on Facebook groups, commenting on other blogs, developing relationships with other blog owners and so on. This helps you see the big picture and the little picture at the same time and stops everything getting overwhelming.

Recording goals

There are so many ways to do this and I think it’s a matter of personal preference. You could write a blog post listing your aims, write them in a doc or on paper, develop an online to do list, add tasks to your calendar etc.

My whole life is in Todoist, from household chores to domain expirations, so I have a project set up for my blog and I’ve added a load of tasks. Online to do lists and calendars also have the added advantage that even if you forget to look, they will remind you anyway. However, I also have a brand new Goals book ready to go for next year, so I’ll be using a combination of the two to keep me on track.

My winter blogging goals

Here’s a rough outline of my main goals. Each one has a series of tasks underneath, but if I went into all the details of tasks and number this post would be about a million words long…so here’s the TL;DR version :)

Clean up

• Improve navigation – I’m happy with the simplicity of the navigation, but I think the links are worn and dated and need a lot of tidying up and renaming.
• Sort categories – My blog is so old, and I haven’t reviewed the categories since about 2006. This definitely needs fixing because they really aren’t relevant or clearly named. Diary-style posts need to be separated out from how tos, opinion pieces, etc.
• Fix sidebar – There’s a lot of broken stuff in there (don’t look!), plus some stuff that could look a lot better, like my Instagram and Flickr photos.

New stuff

• Continue to increase traffic – I’m planning to maintain/increase the number of posts I’m publishing, and then work on promoting outside that too. The traffic I’m getting these days is laughable compared to the glory days, but it’s something to work on rather than beating myself up about it. This is a bit vague goals-/numbers-wise, but honestly I could write a whole series of posts about it so I’ll stop here for now. I’m aiming to double traffic over 2016 as a whole.
• Return all comments – At the moment it’s a little more ad hoc than I’d like, so I need to be more disciplined and get into a proper routine for returning comments.
• Reply to comments – Normally I don’t reply to comments on my blog as I prefer to visit the commenter’s site and leave one there, but I’m going to try and reply to comments on my blog too, so I don’t look like I’m ignoring everyone!
• Create a Facebook page – I’m not 100% sure on this goal just yet, because I don’t want people to rely on seeing one of my posts on Facebook when the chances are it probably won’t even get shown to them, and I’m not using Facebook at the moment anyway. On the other hand I do like posting mini-updates and photos about what I’m doing and where I am, and at the moment it’s only friends who see those. So this one is a maybe.
• Feature for most popular/interesting posts – I’m not sure what form this is going to take yet; maybe sidebar posts, maybe a ‘New here?’ page, maybe a ‘Best of’ list.
• Write a review of 2015 – So much good stuff has happened this year that I want to go back and revisit it all.
• Write a travel blog entry – I’m going to Vegas this month, so I’m planning to take lots of photos and do a write up.

Join me!

If you’re planning winter goals for your blog, leave a comment below with your priorities or a link to your own goals post :) I’ll be reviewing my goals and how many I managed to hit in the spring!