Now is no time for people who lack ambition. There might be a treasure trove of opportunity on the web, but it’s available only to those who think big and act. As such, you should have set some big goals for your blog. Now it’s time to go act on those goals, right?
Unfortunately, this is where many plans break down. People look at their goals and try to act on all of them at once. What results is a cluster of activity with little focus. By spreading ourselves among multiple goals, we make it less likely that we’ll achieve any of them. It takes plenty of balance and focus, combined with patience, for us to achieve our goals.
Focus on one at a time
While our brains are far, far more powerful than our computers, the two do share similarities. For instance, both can handle a limited number of simultaneous tasks. Run too many applications on your computer, and it will slow to a crawl. In the same way, if you try to accomplish too many tasks at the same time your brain will become overloaded. It will become impossible to make significant progress in one area.
The trick to achieving each of your goals is to focus on one at a time. If you have goals to increase your blog traffic by 50 percent, increase revenue by 25 percent in each of the next two quarters, and build 100 new backlinks, you’d go crazy pursuing them all at once. Each requires hours of work per day on all sorts of different tasks. Add into that the necessary work you need to put into the content, and it becomes a nearly impossible pursuit.
It might seem odd to create a goal and then not pursue it immediately, but that’s exactly what you’ll have to do in order to achieve any of them. Spend a week or two working exclusively on building those 100 backlinks. Then switch gears and spend a few weeks pursuing various traffic-building techniques, such as PPC. After that you can switch back to building links, or you can move onto increasing revenue. Any order works, as long as there’s a focus on a single goal.
Create a balance
Of course, you don’t want to let your goals lie completely dormant. You can change your focus from time-to-time, but you should always work towards all of your goals. The trick is to find a balance that works for you. That is, find what you can do in small ways to help work towards all of your goals, while you’re focusing on just one of them. That might sound complex, but power companies do this all the time.
Electric companies use SCADA power to manager their power networks. When one area of the grid is consuming a lot of power, while another portion is not, the smart grid can redirect that energy towards the part that needs it most. The grid then evens out when that area no longer requires the extra power. Smart grids keep cities properly powered, and the concept can keep your goals in line.
When you’re working on one goal, make it the focus, like the area consuming extra energy in the smart grid. But make sure that other areas are getting attention, too — after all, it’s not as though parts of the city get blacked out when other areas need more power. There is just a lesser emphasis on those areas. Then, when another area needs more power, the grid reacts accordingly. Treat your goals like this: focus on one, but always keep some level of attention on the others.
Remain patient
We put in work and we expect results right away. Unfortunately, that’s not how things work typically. It takes time for your actions to ferment. Remaining patient is the key to any goals — even short-term goals. Oftentimes we lose sight of that fact and expect our actions to produce immediate results. What results is frustration and, all too often, the abandonment of our goals. But that’s the opposite of what works.
This is especially true of marketing your blog. Traffic-building is a long-term process. It’s tough to build and maintain traffic with short-term actions. Increasing revenue can be even tougher, since the market for advertising and other money-making services fluctuates wildly. Patience becomes key when pursuing any of these goals. If we continue plugging away diligently, we’ll eventually start to see our goals come to fruition.
We all have big goals for our blogs and web projects. There seems to be endless potential on the web, and we all want to take part. But it’s not as simple as deciding on goals and then achieving them immediately. We need to work hard every day at our goals, focusing on one at a time while balancing all of them. It’s a difficult proposition, which is why so many websites and projects fail. But with determination, focus, balance, and patience, we can turn those failures into successes.
About the Author:
Joe Pawlikowski writes and edits several blogs across the web, including the popular BlackBerry blog BBGeeks.
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Brianne Walter
