Blog goals: Review June

In early June I posted an article on goals for my blogging activity. June is over, so it’s time look back and review them.

Change of plans
June has been quite different than I anticipated. After I set my goals, I wanted to get results fast. I personally find it motivating to get results fast on some smaller goals, and then work on some larger (long term) goals. So that was the way I started this time too.

First job: host my “About”-page on my own domain. And while at it, create a “Contact” and a “RSS explained/How to subscribe” page. Easy job I thought…boy, was I wrong! I ended up deciding to start with Wordpress much sooner than I originally anticipated.

Early June I was using Typepad’s hosted blogging platform on the Plus level. Everything except my About page redirected to my domain, and since Typepad had just introduced their Pages functionality, I had all the resources available to fix this. But it turned out to be an agonizing activity. What annoyed me the most, and this has been annoying me for longer in Typepad, was the fact that the Preview function, did not really preview posts or pages in the layout of your site.

To cut a long story short…I got so frustrated, that I downloaded Wordpress and installed it, started playing with the design and imported the posts. I got so enthusiastic about it, that I decided that I would migrate first, and then do the pages.

But I also knew that this would take a lot of time, and would probably mean I would not achieve all my goals. But this didn’t matter, goals are only milestones on the way forward. It’s equally important to remain flexible, as long as you keep the long term view in mind.

Goals on posts
The work in Wordpress took a lot of my time, and my daytime job took most of my energy, so I didn’t manage to write the amount of posts I had set myself. And in retrospect I think it was a bit too ambitious in my goals anyway:

• Number of posts: 15 (goal was 25)
• Number of guest posts: 1 (goal was 5)
• Number of scheduled posts: 0 (goal was 10)

Goals on exposure
I had also set goals on exposure of my blog, on subscribers, visitors and Technorati Ranking. I thought that bringing in the visitors would bring subscribers. Technorati would require interacting with other bloggers (there are ways to artificially increase ranking, but I choose not to use them).

• Number of average daily visitors: 117 (goal was 100)
• Number of RSS subscribers end of month: 177 (goal was 500)
• Technorati Authority: 18 (goal was 100)

So I made the number of visitors, mostly through StumbleUpon. But the stickiness of the SU-visitors wasn’t very high, so I didn’t really notice big changes in RSS-subscribers. I even lost a chunk of subscribers when moving to Wordpress (although I may have solved that issue now with a redirect from the old feed-address). I learned that StumbleUpon is a great source for traffic, but subscribers are a different ballgame.

I dropped the Technorati goal when I decided to migrate to Wordpress, since I wasn’t even sure that I would manage to keep all permalinks the same.

Summary
I did not achieve the majority of my goals, yet I have a pretty good feeling about June. It feels like a renewed start on a new blogging platform. I’m going to focus more on content and exposure now. One of the side-benefits of moving to self-hosted Wordpress is that I lowered the cost of my blog by $9/month to about $6. And with the revenues of Google Adsense (almost $4) and of Feedburner (a little over $2), I have reached breakeven

In a couple of days I’ll be on holidays in the south of Spain for a two weeks, so I’m going easy on myself and set no goals for July.