Future Goals for this Blog and Building a Platform

This past month has been quite hectic.  I haven't really discussed much of my personal life up here, but there has been a monumental change in our lives that the month of November was spent initiating.  Things have calmed down significantly, and should transition into a much more normal schedule now that we're in December.

The other thing that really took up a good chunk of my time was NaNoWriMo.  I have had this desire for a long time to become a writer of novels.  One of those bucket list things that turned into a possible dream career move.  However, as much as I would talk about it and discuss my story ideas, etc. I never just sat down to write.  I eventually got so tired of talking about writing that I finally told myself I need to actually start writing.  I got started with NaNoWriMo late as I began in the middle of the month.  Because of this, I set some realistic goals instead of pie-in-the-sky goals. 



{source}

The first goal was that I'd try to at least write something every day even if it was only a couple hundred words.  The second goal was to hit 10,000 words instead of the standard 50,000 assigned to NaNoWriMo.  On the last day of November I hit almost 11,000 words.  I'm very pleased, and the detailed outline of my first novel is almost finished.  I'm thinking about continuing the goal of 10,000 words per month because it's very doable, and will keep me focused on bringing at least the first novel to completion.

With all of the writing time and introspection time I sat down and started mapping out my goals, which includes this blog. While doing this it really began to hit me the amount of focused time I'll need to spend doing certain things, and I just need to get over my reservations of moving forward with the steps I need to take.  This blog (I'm hoping) will be a lynch pin for the future goals I want to achieve.

For the sake of keeping the rest of this post to one topic, I wanted to write out my baby steps/goals for this blog over the next month or two.  Unfortunately, I haven't really mapped out my goals further than that because I am inexperienced with blogging and am still learning about what kinds of goals are realistic for the amount of time involved, and what kinds of goals aren't so realistic.  As time goes on and I start honing my skills more, I'm confident that I will be able to map things out further.

I had debated doing a post about this just because I don't want this blog to be one that is about blogging.  There are much better blogs out there on the topic of blogging.  However, I do want blogging to be a key part of my platform, and so I wanted this post to be more of an exercise in how I'll be organizing my time management, and keeping my readers and any future readers in the loop so they can know what to expect.  Things are constantly shifting right now so this is the perfect time to play around and experiment.

Goal #1:  Start putting out regular, focused content. 

I am more or less successful at this.  However, I'm trying to stream line it to where I can have an entire month's worth of posts scheduled and ready to go with being published.  That way it gives me some breathing room with building future content.  I want to try and start small with this.  My initial goal is publishing three times a week (Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays). 

Wednesday will be a post focused on a skill set (sewing, organizing, cooking, etc.).  Saturday will be a post focused on reading (book reviews, research compilations, etc.).  Sundays will be something faith based, and a weekly link round up. 

The reason I'm beginning with only three regular posts a week is so that I can spread out my blog content over time, begin building up weeks of posts finished in advance, and will make doing more posts a week easier in the future.



{source}



Goal #2:  Start fine tuning my blog, and seeking readership.

There are three resources I will be using to fine tune my blog.  First, using Blogging Amy's program about blogging.  Second, using ProBlogger's 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.  Third, Michael Hyatt's book called Platform.

In regards to seeking readership, I have been contemplating this significantly because it means I'm going to have to brave certain social media outlets.  The more I thought about it the more I realized I need to start developing a very specific baby step plan because it would be so easy to just let the internet surfing bug take over and lose my day because of it.  Honestly, this whole process is very overwhelming and so I just need to take a step back and let the plan I've laid out do its thing.

Goal #3: Create a blog writing calendar.

One of the exercises I did was break down all of the necessary steps for making a blog post.  I then assigned a day of the week to do each step.  This shifted my thinking from jamming in writing an entire post (or several) all at once, which is extremely time consuming to focusing on one or two quality posts over the course of a week.  If they are finished before the end of the week, then I can focus on the next post on the list.  I'm trying to step away from mass-post-producing to quality-post-producing.

I decided what I wanted to do was have a week's blog posts finished the week prior.  Eventually I'd like to be able to get an entire month's worth done in advance, but that's later on down the line.  By dividing up my blogging tasks so that I only focus on a couple of tasks each day of the week, it makes getting posts done in advance a lot more doable.

Last, I'm thinking about keeping all of you in the loop with what will be on my blog calendar in the future so that you know what to expect and look forward to with what I'll be writing.

I hope this all makes sense!  I am curious if there's anything specific any of you might request regarding this?  For example, regular updates, a review of the programs I'll be using, or something along those lines?  Please let me know either in the comments or in an email.  My email address is in my 'About' page.