Baby Steps posted on Flickr by See El Photo
Darren Rowse posted this terrific post on Problogger today 9 First Step Goals For New Bloggers. He posts a lovely picture of his two boys in their pajamas and draws parallels between his 12-month-old learning how to walk and the evolution of a blog. Just how babies need to learn how to stand unassisted or walk with the help of a push toy, “[n]ew bloggers would do well to spend more time thinking about their ‘first steps’ than just the big picture dreams and goals that they have.”
Admittedly, I’ve been getting a little bogged down. After getting let go a few weeks ago and hosting a family visit from Vancouver for a week, I’ve been busy, figuring out Big Life stuff, and in the process lost a bit of momentum. I have been blogging for nearly two months and find that the most challenging part of blogging is maintaining confidence in the content direction of my blog. Are the topics interesting? Will people be compelled enough to come back? After all, if no one is reading, it’s hard to stay motivated.
I’ve also be distracted by, well, my core business of getting Upside Guides‘ first property up. I am very very close to getting it live on my domain. It will be in a sorry state: content will not be updated, images will not display nicely, product data will not be plentiful, and bugs will abound. However, the important thing will be that it will be UP, happily accepting spider crawls from Google and Yahoo, as well as a place for me to show potential advertisers, partners and affiliates.
But Darren’s post has re-inspired me. It’s a reminder that things don’t happen overnight and that this blog is not a flash in a pan. Here are his goals:
- Publish 10 Posts
- Getting your first comment from someone you don’t know
- Get your first link from another blog
- Build your readership up to more than 20 readers a day
- Hit a level of 20 RSS subscribers
- Getting your blog indexed in Google
- Get your blog earning $1 a week (update: only if making money from your blog is one of your goals – it’s not for everyone
- First guest post on another blog
- Having someone (not you or your mum) tweet about your blog
I have accomplished numbers 1, 2, 6, 9. Not bad really. I think the others will just come once I have more content in the blog. I also have some pillar article ideas that will hopefully draw more interest, as well as a nugget of a guest post idea that I’ll shop around when I’ve got a little bit more content.
A couple of others I’ll add for myself:
- Publish 100 Posts. Seems that a lot of people give up. 100 seems like a good number that proves that I’m pressing on.
- Elevate the design of the Thesis template.
- Post five Straight-Talk Tuesdays articles. (I’m always looking for candidates by the way!)
Anyway, do go visit Darren’s blog Problogger if you have not done so. He’s got terrific content for blogger newbies like me.
Thanks Darren!
Related Posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Indeed it is inspiring and thanks for highlighting this. You write very well , please keep it coming !