Writing new articles and posting updates around the articles you wrote on social media are all critical parts of blogging. However, if your blog lacks a direction, none of these efforts will amount to any results.

Business blogging requires a serious approach. This means you need to follow all the steps below to get extraordinary results with the blog.

1. Set Specific Business Blog Goals

What do you want with your blogging efforts? What metrics do you want to improve?

Here are some blogging goals to inspire you for your blog:

• Traffic
• Improving social media presence
• Improving the size of the email list
• Your blog’s role in SEO strategy
• The number of backlinks you want to generate.

Be specific with the goals you want with your blog. What are the monthly or weekly traffic goals? Do you want 1000 people a day visiting your site?

Be specific- How many sales do you want to generate this year with the blog and the next year?

• Getting to 25,000 visitors a month
• Generating 10,000 email subscribers
• Improving SEO rankings for buyer keywords

2. Choose Measurable Goals

It’s important for you to choose measurable goals.

When you’re posting new content you must have a measurable goal around sales or software subscription goals stemming from the blog.

Let’s say you want to acquire 100 leads every month after blogging for six months.

That’s just one example. You can also have traffic goals. Let’s say you get 200 visitors in the month of January and two months later you want over 500 visitors a month.

• 500 visitors in March
• 1000 visitors in April
• 1500 visitors in May

The best thing to do is move slowly towards easier traffic goals until you’re consistently hitting a steady number.

It’s easy to build momentum thereafter. You need to first clear the mark of getting a few dozen visitors every day.

You will face difficulty scaling from 5000 visitors to 10000 visitors a month. Once you consistently hit that mark, scaling is easy.

3. Start by Educating your Customers

There are a number of ways you can use the blog to improve customer engagement and build loyalty.

Start by educating your customers. Get insights from them on how to improve your products.

It doesn’t matter how cool or boring your products are. There’s a possibility that your customers are facing difficulty using your product or service. Don’t start stressing yet though.

If you can create a list of how-to posts that show the details on how other customers are using these products or services. There’s a way for you to make interesting content in any industry.

Using Google Analytics you can easily determine how many people are reading these posts. You can also use metrics like comments on posts, social shares to see the engagement on your blog.

Here are more things to track:

• Are there repeated sales? 
• Are they choosing other products or services?
• Are customers changing their behavior on how they are using products or services?
• Is there customer retention?

4. Gain Insights from Customers

An online poll can help you uncover deeper insights around existing customers which can then support products and services you’re offering.

What should you measure?

You want to take into account customer responses. But the strongest benefit of collecting these answers is you understand how customers feel about using your product or engaging with your business.

5. Increase Awareness about your Company

Speaking at conferences or hosting virtual meetups is another possibility you may want to explore.

As a fellow blogger, you can collaborate with others and be featured on their sites. 

Whatever your goals are, you can write posts that:

• Showcase your expertise
• Use the research at hand to start talking about others who are relevant and get their feedback
• Provide analysis of relevant news in your niche
• Use them to reach out to journalists
• Interview someone. Use examples to get more interviews

What should you measure?

Keep a record of other achievements with your blog. Were you able to secure a speaking gig at a conference? Were you developing new relationships that helped you achieve your business goals?

6. Think of the Time and Resources Spent on the Blog

List out priorities. Find out what you can do best and dedicate resources to that instead of spreading out resources thinly.

For example, driving awareness around your business so that you get opportunities for speaking at different conferences throughout the year might be one of the most important goals on top of your mind.

If that’s your goal, make it the sole point of focus. Think of what you’re going to speak about. Think of the blog posts that will help your gig and do that one thing well.

Don’t be distracted by writing all sorts of other posts. Focus on one thing and do that really well.

7. Put Your Goals in Writing and Review them Regularly

When you want to decide to achieve something and want to measure if or not you’re close to that goal here’s what to think about:

• Did you get to what you set out to do? What stopped you? Is something else of higher priority?
• What works? What does not? What do you want to do differently?

Review the progress of your work and actually create the review. Make small or big changes and track everything that you’re doing.

8. Too Many Goals is a Bad Thing

Don’t take on too many goals at once. It’s great if you can try and get to one blogging goal at a time rather than listing out and working towards ten goals at the same time. You will have a better shot at succeeding with that single goal. 

Writing your goals down 

Keep your goals at the forefront. Write them down in a notebook or place the note on a noticeboard. You can use the post-it note on the screen as well. This will help you be reminded of these goals and help you commit to them.

Work out what you’re not going to prioritize

Set up clear boundaries so that you are not going to worry about these goals. Focus on building traffic. With that as a goal, you don’t need to pay attention to the number of comments on blog posts or the number of backlinks you’re getting. Focus on one goal.

Doing this will help you keep a single-minded focus on your main goal and you don’t have to work at all things at once.

Create specific goal “triggers”

Instead of telling yourself to write every week that can be a little vague, why not set the goal of writing every Thursday in the morning. You have a schedule to stick to, a routine and times for working on those blog posts.

We cannot carry out multiple streams of thought all at once. That’s why putting down your goals in writing is key.

This helps you organize and also remain motivated.

There’s very little that’s more satisfying than going through the list of successfully completed tasks and that points out that these goals are achievable.

You can use a spreadsheet to keep things organized or go old-school with a pen and paper.

You can also make these goals externally accountable. Discuss the goals with friends or colleagues at least once a week. You can make it an organizational goal. Do this every month.

This perspective from someone outside can be really helpful.

You can also use apps that automatically send you nudges so that you know which tasks remain. There are apps that let you add a certain amount of money for those goals. If you don’t get to those goals your money gets donated to charity.

What you shouldn’t do?

Tracking too many Metrics

There are hundreds of metrics you may want to improve. There are hundreds of ways to get traffic and if you try and do them all at once the end result is that you’re going to overwhelm yourself and find none of those goals as achievable.

Not focused on Singular Goals

The second rule is not to set up unfocused goals. It’s easy to start a new blog and then start worrying over whether to publish something new on the blog, whether to start a forum for the blog or write guest posts.

Be smart and focus on one thing.

You’re Unrealistic with Goals

The third problem is setting unrealistic goals. Telling yourself that you’re going to 100,000 views in the first month is one example of an unrealistic goal. You may only get 100 views in the first month while more established blogs will naturally accrue thousands of views.

You’re now ready to focus and get on with the work.

Apply the framework to your blog. This isn’t a list of instructions that you must follow no matter what. Customize these goals according to your situation.

The goal is to focus and doesn’t take you away from the main goal. Blogging has bever been easy. But it has never been extremely complicated either. You need a clear vision and you need to remove several layers of complexity by setting clear goals that will help you spend less and less time worrying about the blog’s direction and you get more time creating new great content.

Get the Right Tools to Measure Your Blogging Goals

Blogging tools can help you keep track of your goals

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics helps you keep track of key metrics around your blog like which content is being viewed, traffic, and new and returning visitors. With Google Analytics you can easily verify how many people read these blog posts. You can also use the number of comments on the posts or the number of social media shares happening to be a metric of the success of your articles.
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs is another great tool. You get data on competitors. You get their analysis and site optimization tips. The free backlink checker helps you understand the new links your site is beginning to acquire.