The Challenge (Updated for 2012)
Last year (2011) I set some goals for my blog and just at the turn of the new year (2011) someone sent me a direct message to my twitter, asking if I had met my goals.
YEP, SOMEONE HELD ME ACCOUNTABLE simply because I had taken to time to state my goals openly.
How did I do? Well terribly, due to getting sidetracked with other projects…
For those of you who do not know, I was well known online before I left to concentrate on my Corporate career, which by the age of 28 had me being hand picked and mentored by the CEO of Europe’s largest retail organisation. So perhaps I can be forgiven to neglecting my Online Marketing adventures.
I still love my offline consulting role, however after rekindling many online contacts during 2011, I want to prove to both my readers and myself that it is possible to build a successful Online Marketing career within a year.
Although this blog has been alive in parts over the last 3 years, this year (2012) will be the year I prove that it is possible to make a blog an authority within a hard – with some hard work and some clever strategies, all of which I will be sharing with you guys.
This year, just like the one previous, I am going to state my goals clearly below. However this year I have learnt from the mistakes made previously and therefore have no excuse but to succeed. (To read about the lessons I learnt about goal setting be sure to read my article on What is goal setting and why smart goals do not work by clicking here).
I have defined three key goals for 2012, which I will elaborate on during the coming weeks.
Goal 1: I will have an average of 50,000 page views a month for the final three months of the year.
Currently this blog at most has 100 views a day, however it is pretty barren. People are finding my blog through some content that I did manage to publicize last year (mainly guest posts).
In order to go from 3,000 views a month to 50k+ I need almost 15 times more traffic. So, step one is naturally to attempt to vastly increase the content on this site, but not only that. I must make sure the content links more to previous work on my site, or that the new content encourages people to read more. Maybe this will be mini-series type articles or maybe complete guides. The more I encourage people to stay on my site, the great the number of views and a great indication of how well I am serving my reader base.
I have outlined this goal in detail on this post: My challenge expanded – plan for 50,000 monthly page views.
Goal 2: I will release a new product within 2012
Ok, this is perhaps cheating as I already have a product due to launch within the next few weeks. However launching and maintaining it is still a big task, one which may take a lot of my time. A successful launch and a growing membership base up until the end of the year and beyond will be a true testament to my knowledge and skills. I am considered a business transformation master, so I will hope to work the magic on my own business to begin with.
As with goal one, I will expand on this goal in the coming days.
Goal 3: I will have a following of 5,000 members on Twitter using only organic methods.
This year I really want to attempt to diversify the mean by which I receive traffic. Last year I discover a great way of getting my article to the front page of Digg (You can see the video I made about it here) – of course the article was pretty good however it showed me that SEO is not the only way, and definitely not the biggest way that I attract my audience. Due to being into too many things at once, I never fully took advantage of this strategy and after Digg changed the way it worked, the strategy was much harder to implement.
It is obvious to me that some of what I write really hits home with certain readers. However I have never truly cared to create an audience. This year will be different. I have created a new Twitter account and aim to increase its following to over 5,000 by the end of the year.
Naturally this will take a conscious effort and entail me using Twitter regularly myself. There are also a few other strategies I will implement that will greatly aid this venture.
I will not however use this ‘follow me back’ trick – I see that as pointless and would rather attempt to gain my following in a more organic way.
I will be updating the progress and detailed approaches to these three goals over the coming days, adding monetary aims and mini aims too. If you have not joined my Twitter, now would be a great time to join, follow my progress and keep me accountable.
I look forward to your readership.
Dee Kumar
Be sure to follow my journey and be prepared to fully hold me accountable, for 2012 is the year of no excuses.
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