It is again that time of the year when everyone starts to set their goals and targets for the upcoming year 2023. Every year we make several such goals but never really follow through on them. The biggest reasons why our goal making process fails is that we aim for too high and ultimately it becomes unreachable and at some point in time we our self realizes that our targets are impossible and we abandon our quest.
We need to be calculative to determine what we can truly achieve. For this to happen, we have to understand where we are currently and determine the path that we should take in the next one year to reach our end of the year targets. Feel free to break down the targets on monthly or quarterly basis so that it becomes further easier to track and achieve.
Today, we are going to discuss 7 tips to make the best blogging and marketing goals for 2023.
1. Don’t chase everything – It is easy to forget the actual targets once you start exploring your business and your niche. You will find gold mines everywhere and whatever you expand into will start to seem promising. Don’t lose your way in the process and stick to the exact goals that you have setup at the starting of the year. Doing too many things and not completing anything in particular is always bad for business.
Think about it deeply. If your target is to create one strong niche blog then don’t start twenty and build nothing.
2. Set a target to learn something new – It is a new year and with the starting of a new year, you should always plan to learn something new. Make sure this talent is strictly on niche so that it helps you in the long run. As a blogger, your immediate courses might be from learning languages like PHP, html and design and development studies.
3. Analyze what had worked and set goals to scale those – If you are very new to your business then there isn’t too many things that you can scale. However, if you are in this business for sometime then it is easy to analyze what has worked so far. Check what type of content is working for you, the type of landing pages that are converting, the newsletters that are selling and so on and so forth. List them up and start scaling them. Do more of what is working for you currently.
4. Set Social Media Targets – Making social media targets is always a tough call. So much changes in a year that it is hard to keep up. There are people who have made targets for Google+ from reaching 100k followers, to a Million and more, only to know that their work is going to go down the drain as GooglePlus was coming to a close.
With social media, your targets need to be dynamic. Every month you need to analyze where you are currently and then change your goals to make sure you keep up your momentum. Some things on social media do not change and that is micro blogging content. This content can be shared across all of your social profiles, so even if some social site does decide to close down, your content will still be flourishing on other similar sites.
5. Set up your Budgets – For some reasons, most people forget to allocate the required amount of budget for setting up these goals. If you don’t break down the budget into some of the major categories, like Pay Per Click Ads, SEO, Email marketing, Staff and Vas, Site and hosting etc. then there are several items that you won’t be able to plan for. If you are planning for PPC in your goals and you don’t have a budget for it, then it is best not to include it in the goal.
6. Identify Marketing Channels – Research and identify your marketing channels and setup specific goals for every marketing channel you might have. This way your goals will be more specific and you will know what you want to achieve.
Email Marketing: If you don’t have an auto-responder series then you can include that in your goals. Furthermore you can set some numerical targets for your email list and grow it with time.
Search Engine Optimization: Set some ranking targets, that way you will keep track of certain keywords that needs to rank better. Setup an excel sheet with those keywords and see how month after month, they improve on their current rankings.
Referral and Affiliate Setup: If you don’t already have an affiliate setup then you can put this in your goals. However, if you already have this setup done, then it is time to set some targets were you can aim to get this many affiliates at the end of every month.
Giveaways and Contests: Contests are excellent for goal settings as you can track various aspects of contests and see how they help with your overall marketing targets.
Organic Marketing: Comments, Forum posts, Guest Posts etc. are all part of organic marketing. As a blogger you can always take targets to make a set number of comments and forum posts and see how you reach your targets on a weekly basis.
7. Build an emotional Connect – This year, put this into your goal making. Take a target to do the following things:
- Get into your Customers Shoes: Think and act like a customer. Do an actual check-out and see if your customers are able to buy your stuff smoothly or not. When you see some issues, talk to your customers and try to get some feedback on how you can improve the whole process.
- Get yourself a Personality: This year, set a target to build a personality and make sure that your blog posts and other content is showing your newfound personality.
- Develop a Story: Put this in your yearly goal to take out some time and start developing a story. Work on your story and fine tune it and deploy this story, part by part, over the year – via. several blog posts and other type of content.
- Make sure to share personal pics: Now that we are talking about developing a brand story and connecting with your customers, it is important to share pictures and videos of your own personal life so that your customers feel like they are part of it.
Let this year be different, make goals that actually help you in achieving your targets and in the process improve your overall business.