Grow Your Goals, Compound Your Success

Professional bloggers often recommend setting and achieving goals for your blog. For example, you might set out to increase your readership by 5% per month or your profits by 10% per year. The best of these are difficult but attainable, challenging you to put forth extra effort without killing you in the process. If you stick to your goal in the long run and achieve it with consistency, however, your effort will pay off much more than you might expect. Consider the following examples:

Example One: You have a small blog with a modest following of 30 subscribers. Your goal is to increase your readership by 10% every month. If you achieve this goal consistently, you’ll have more than 100 subscribers in just over a year and over 500 subscribers in two-and-a-half years.

Example Two: You have a moderately successful blog that sees about 5,000 unique visitors per month. Your goal is to increase traffic by 5% every month. If you can manage this, you’ll reach 6,000 visitors per month after only four months and almost 9,000 visitors per month after a year.

Example Three: Your blog earns you an average of $40 per month in advertising revenue. Your goal is to increase your earnings by 5% every quarter. If you succeed at this, your blog will generate about $50 per month after one year, about $60 per month after two years, and more than $70 per month after three. In that time, your blog will end up earning over $500 more than if your revenue had remained the same.

Obviously, 500 subscribers is a far cry from 30, and getting 4,000 more visitors per month after only a year is huge. The secret is to keep raising the bar. For instance, to achieve the first example, you would need three new subscribers a month in the first two months, four new subscribers a month for the next three months,… all the way up to 48 new subscribers in the 30th month.

Percentile goals like this illustrate a key point: As your blog grows, so too should your goals. Nearly 50 new subscribers in one month may seem like a lot, but going from 475 to 523 makes the leap seem smaller. After all, compared to how many you’ve already got, 48 more is difficult but not out of the question.

In the end, only you can decide how to set your goals. The important thing is to define your metric of success, set a goal to improve it, and stick with that goal for the long haul. If you can accomplish it month in and month out, your blog will see the sort of growth demonstrated here.