Time to set some goals

Well Two Double Ooh Nine is here and what better time than now to review Two Thousand and Great (2008), and maybe set some goals for this year.

On New Years Eve 2007 I wrote a quick blog setting out some goals for the 2008, so how’d they turn out…pretty good actually. Pretty well everything I was hoping to achieve was achieved.

• More Traffic – Yup, currently averaging around 220 unique hits per day, and had a number of articles ‘Stumbled’ which brought in around 2,000 uniques
• More Subscribers – Yup, my count according to Feedburner is around 95-105 a day
• More Advertising Revenue – Nope, I removed all advertising from my blog in the latter part of the third quarter as I didn’t think it was worth keeping on here as the ads being served were often spammy and detracted from the look of the site
• More Links – Yup, I’m seeing a lot more incoming links each day, most of them are for my recipes, though there are a few other articles that get picked up as well.
• Higher Page Rank – Yup, I started the year with a PR0, and ended the year with a PR3.
• More Content – Yup, prior to 2008 I was averaging a post every 3-4 days. In 2008 I averaged a little over a post a day on this blog, as well as averaging over 2 a day on I’m With The Band.

As you can see, 2008 was a pretty decent year for my blog. I pretty well met all of my goals, and probably could’ve met all of them if I kept the advertising on the site. So what’s next?

I guess I should probably set some goals for 2009, though to be honest I think they will be more or less the same as 2008, ie. more traffic, more subscribers, more links, more content.

Here we go;

• More Traffic – I’d love to see the numbers double in my daily unique hits, some where around 500 a day would be great.
• More Subscribers – Again, let’s go for a reasonably modest increase up to 200 daily subscribers.
• More Content – Two blog posts a day is achievable, and at least 1 new recipe a week.
• Guest Bloggers – This would actually be new to me, I’d like to get at least 1 guest blogger a month to write for me here.
• ‘Static’ Blog Design – It seems silly, but I’d love to limit the re-design of this blog to 3-4 times at most through out the year instead of the 7-8 I had this year.
• Write an eBook – I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, but I’d like to actually write an eBook and give it away for free on my blog.

And last but not least;

• Maintain my own blogging voice – I don’t want to fall into the trap of being a ‘me too’ blogger where I re-post in my own words the same gimmicky, spammy, ‘get rich from blogging’ bollocks that so many people out there write. I’ve done it already, f#$k going there again as it’s worthless, junky, crap that only wastes my time and my readers time.

There you have it, my blogging goals for 2009. I might do a follow up post in the next day or two with my personal goals for 2009 seeing as I already put so much of my life online for the world to see.

Anyway, hope you had a good New Years wherever you were, and however you celebrated. And here’s hoping 2009 will be an awesome year for us all!

Take it easy, Mat.