I've mentioned in recent posts that I have a number of New Year's resolutions for blogging, including reaching certain traffic levels, as well as reaching ad and article revenue goals. One of these goals is to hit the $100/m mark in Google AdSense ad revenue sometime this year, preferably by summer. Another is to get 1000 unique visitors daily across all my sites/ blogs before the end of the year. I've come across other bloggers setting these goals and mentioning them, but never really explaining how they planned to do so. Here's my attempt to explain, with a bit of preamble about goal-setting.

I've lately been inspired by Steve Pavlina's very well-written website about personal development and goal-setting. While I was a teaching assistant in college, I coached several friends, colleagues and students set and achieve goals. Some took a few months to achieve goals, others took several years.

I've been in a career and financial rut for four years, having had to change careers several times because of the economy and lack of jobs. It's been a struggle, demoralizing and frustrating. Blogging has helped me have goals and motivation again. But until I sat down and read Steve's inspirational writing, I'd forgotten about the proper approaches to goal setting.

Now I don't plan to get too philosophical here, but I do want you to keep some things in mind when you set your own goals:

1. When you first set your blogging goals, they may seem unachievable. This is normal. Go ahead and set some goals anyway. But don't force yourself into a time frame if you're uncomfortable with it.
2. Make your goals realistic. Break them down into easier intermediate milestones.
3. As you achieve smaller milestone goals along the way, you will gain confidence and the bigger goals will seem more and more achievable. In fact, your mind will tune itself to recognize opportunities when the appear. I've lived in this frame of mind before, and it's a very heady feeling. But humans live in cyclic fashion, and things change. When they do, you must start your goal-defining and setting again.
4. Unless you already have a popular website or blog, or are a celebrity in a certain medium (TV, print, movies, radio), your initial traffic will be mostly from Search Engine referrals. That's normal. To get
   subscribers, you have to earn them. You have to be able to offer something in your writing that appeals to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure your target market finds you. This takes time and effort. The question is how much effort do you want to put in? (Darren Rowse has said (link below) that early on, when he was only blogging 2 days per week, he sometimes posted entries to his multiple blogs as much as 50 times in a 12-hour period.)
   
5. Keep in mind that humans live in creative cycles. We'll have peak creative periods, as well as valleys. Your goals may suffer some months more than others. (I've been writing for a long time, so I know my cycles well. For me, January is a high period, Feburary a low, then things pick up until mid-November and slow down until early the next January.)

The rest of this article focuses on points #2 and #4. For example, in yesterday's post about reaching another AdSense revenue milestone, I mentioned that I passed the US$40/m mark for January. Since my goal is to reach $100/m, say for the end of June, I have 5 months to move from $40/m to $100/m. The only way I'm going to reach this goal, in my mind, is to break it down. (My end-of-year goal is larger, but I tend to psyche myself out if I burden myself with too many goals.)

Since the revenue increase that I need to achieve during these 5 months is 100-40 = $60, that means I have to increase by 60/5 = $12/m, each month. On a regular basis, between 5-15 of my blogs make any money at all. (I'll go ahead and state it outright: none of my blogs make a lot of money yet. As I've mentioned previously, it's because I have not posted regularly to any of them in particular. If I were to pick just 5 blogs to focus on, I'd probably make a lot more, a lot sooner. But  I have a publishing agenda that I need to follow, for consulting reasons, and in hopes of picking up contracts.)

So if I can increase my AdSense earnings by an average of between $0.80-$3.00 per blog per month, for 5 months straight, I'll reach my goal of $100/m. This translates to a steady, continual increase of about $0.03-0.10 per blog per day for 5 months.

When put in this form, the goal seems achievable. If you can increase targeted traffic to niche blogs, you might just be able to earn this from pay-per-impression ads. I've noticed, for example, that my very technical blogs regularly show this kind of potential revenue. I don't have the traffic yet, but when I do, the goal of, say, a $0.10/day increase per blog for 5 blogs for five months won't be that difficult.

How do I get the traffic? I could buy it, but it probably wouldn't be targeted. I could advertise, but I don't have the budget. That leaves writing and posting more entries in a shorter period of time.

Let's do some easy math. These are made up numbers, and are very conservative. Let's say that you can rely on every focused entry you post initially bringing you at least 2 search engine referrals per week. Let's further assume each visitor only views one page. So in this case, one page view equals one unique visitor.

It takes time, but when your archive of blog posts reaches a critical mass (different for each search engine), each article may bring you 2-4 search engine referrals per day rather than just per week. That means that for every 100 posts you have, you will likely get 200-400 visits per day or more (after reaching critical mass). If you post 3 entries per day, 5 days per week, that's 150 posts per month. In a year, that's 1800 posts, and thus potentially worth 3600-7200 pageviews per day.

The problem is that these numbers depend on a lot of factors, some of which are:

• The popularity of the topics you write about. For example, some of the topics I write about just don't generate that much traffic yet. In my opinion, people don't know that they will be interested. But once I reach my target market with certain blogs, and put together several e-books for sale, these topics will pay off. I'm investing my effort for a return in 2-3 years, and for several years afterwards.
  
• The quantity of posts you have per topic. Let's face it. If you want targeted traffic, you need lots of focused, topical content. Revenue-wise, you cannot expect advertisers to want to fund your site if you cannot provided them with the market they are targeting for their products. It really isn't that different than for print magazines.
  
• How spread out these posts are over your blogs. That is, if you write 1800 posts per year for a single blog, they will very likely be more valuable in terms of daily traffic than if those 1800 are split up over numerous blogs. (Hence one of the reasons my blogs have not yet reached a critical mass.)
• Your daily posting frequency. Okay, you have to give yourself time off from blogging each week. But if it takes you 2 years to write those 1800 blog posts rather than 1 year, it'll take you that much longer to reach a critical mass.
  

Of course, you could help things on their way by article marketing. That is, writing and publishing articles on "free article" sites. Christoper Knight, owner of EzineArticles.com, has written a number of articles on the subject. While there are no guarantees of traffic, a site like his has a very high Google PageRank (8 for the main URL), and this will rub off onto my sites (the ones linked to from my articles.)

My 8 articles at the time of this writing, submitted between late December 2005 and late last week, all have a Google PR of 6. None of my blogs or sites - all of which have been around for 3-8 months, have more than PR 5. Some still have a PR 0, even after 3 months and many dozens of posts. They've generated a total of around 460 pageviews so far, an average of 57 pageviews per article in approximately 40 days.

If this rate continues for at least one year, that's over 4,000 pageviews for just those 8. Christopher says that about 3.3% of his visitors click on an author's resource box, which contains 1-3 live links to the author's sites. That's only 140 or so extra visitors to my site, on average, over 12 months. But if I continue writing and submitting at least 5 articles per week, week in and week out, that'll start producing steady traffic to my sites, by slow degrees. (Keep in mind that you can polish up your older blog posts and submit those, provide they are focused and are of high quality.)

Add to that any traffic that arrives from ezines or websites that have republished your article(s), and you could be enjoying a fair bit of traffic. Ramp up your daily submissions, and being able to reach your traffic goals will become a lot easier. Something to seriously consider.

Links: Steve Pavlina - Personal Development for Smart People; Darren Rowse - Becoming a ProBlogger - A Story in Many Parts; Christopher Knight - How To Earn $10,000 USD or More From Article Marketing.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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