I decided to embrace a new challenge – a 30 day blogging 201 exercise via Daily Prompts. My assignment for today is to identify three goals for this blog.
- Because writing down goals forces you to think carefully about what success means to you — “success” is different for everyone.
- Because having goals helps you focus your blogging energy. If the thing you’re doing isn’t helping you achieve your goals, ditch it.
- Because achieving a goal is a great feeling that motivates you to set and meet new goals, creating a continuous cycle of awesome.
Well, I can’t argue with this – focusing my blogging energy would be very useful about now. The daily prompts are getting tiresome for me and I’m flagging. I’m also trying to move away from blogging about topics that make my stomach churn and find new areas of interest to explore.
- Create an editorial calendar by April 30. (OK, I borrowed that one, but it is a good goal.)
- Identify why we don’t get comments. (Is that a goal? I can’t say I’ll get X amount of comments when right now we get almost none, right?)
- Recruit a new contributing blogger by September 1, 2014.
The question of why I blog is not something I can easily answer. It is certainly part activist and part personal exercise. But I’m not particularly motivated by having X unique visitors each month or Y number of social media shares – it is sort of “neat” when that happens, but not really motivational because I know it is somewhat arbitrary and capricious.
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Getting back to the topic at hand. An editorial calendar is certainly a very useful tool and I’ve slacked off in that regard. So being a bit more organized and planning ahead is definitely going to help me conserve my energy. Comments? Well, I know that means people are engaging us and that’s good. Is it just the layout of the blog? Is it because I use Disqus instead of the native blog commenting tool? Is it too hard to find the comment button? Something to explore. And it would be nice to have a fresh voice. But a fresh voice who contributes on a regular basis. That might be unrealistic. Perhaps a series of guest blog posts is more realistic. I guess we’ll see.
One thing I’ve tried to do with my blog is give back and right now I’m asking readers to contribute to a crowdfunding appeal for “Cathy’s Closet.” This project will distribute personal hygiene products to the LGBTQ community in Pittsburgh. Will you consider a modest donation?
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