Monthly Goals for August 2008When we started this blog in mid July we knew it wouldn’t be easy. There are so many people out there selling products and systems that will teach you how to make money blogging – and all you have to do is press a magic button and watch the cash pour in while you sleep! It couldn’t be farther from the truth.  It has never been easier to make money from home whether it’s via affiliate marketing, consulting, or creating and selling websites due to the current state of technology – combined with persistence, the ability to adapt, and HARD WORK – not because of some secret system.  Without goals to strive towards you can say goodbye to your dreams of working while sipping espresso at a cafe in Italy, or checking your email from a Mayan jungle resort.  As young adults, or adults in general, it’s crucial that we have ambition and a constant motion forward to promote personal growth and accomplishment.  Having both long and short term goals will increase your odds of staying on course, which in turn will maximize your success rate and enable you to fulfill your dreams.

Here are my monthly goals for August 2008:

  1. 1-3 Posts per day Monday through Friday – The more frequent a new site is updated with fresh content, the more often Google and the rest of the search engines will stop by and visit us which will lead to an increase in organic search engine traffic and indexing.
  2. Begin to increase online presence via social networking and social bookmarking sites.  Social networking can bring loads of targeted traffic to a blog and increase the participaction and subscribers.  I will be focusing on 6 main sites: StumbleUpon, Digg, Myspace, YouTube, Friend Feed, and Twitter.
  3. Commenting on niche related blogs is also a great way to increase your online presence and establish yourself as a trustworthy resource.  I am currently a top commentator on 3 high traffic blogs and would like to increase the number of blogs I frequent to 10.  If I can write solid, helpful comments on 10 blogs per day for the next 30 days I will definitely start to see more activity here in a very short amount of time.  I loves me some free traffic!
  4. Write at least 3-5 keyword rich articles and submit them to all the major high traffic article directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com.  By using Wordtracker to conduct my keyword research and putting those low competition, high search volume key phrases in the article headings I will not only get indexed into the search engines, but I will also have an external guage on what topics are hot based on the performance of each article.  Tip: high traffic article directories usually rank very high in the search engines, so writing some good articles could get you top spot for niche related keywords and phrases.
  5. Continue to expand and diversify my Wordpress skills.  This is my first self-hosted blog using Wordpress through my Hostgator hosting account.  I currently run between 10-15 sites – some of them only partially optimized for the occasional affiliate sale or adsense click – the others are just sitting on a domain waiting for some TLC from myself or Veronica.  I have found Wordpress to be the ultimate management system for setting up, optimizing, and maintaining a blog or niche website.  The amount of power behind it is incomparable and having the ease of 1 click set up through Fantastico on my Hostgator account makes it that much more efficient.  I will be spending a significant amount of time brushing up on HTML, CSS, and hopefully getting a custom header done.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that my goals for August are strongly focused on building content, and generating traffic. When I first started getting into SEO and keyword research I got so excited that I started building blogs, putting up 5-10 posts, and then promoting the hell out of them.  The problem with this mindset is if you only have 10 posts on your blog your traffic will come, browse, and move on.  If you’re just getting into blogging like my friend T. Edwards over at Poverty101.net make sure you have a minimum 20-30 posts before you start to heavily promote and get backlinks – because if you so happen to make the front page of StumbleUpon you better have some content to keep your visitors interested!  Nobody wants to stop by a blog with 1 good article and 5 pieces of crap.

Maybe Veronica will read this and compile a list of goals of her own, we’ll just have to wait and see.  What are some goals you guys have for this month?

Cheers,

Elijah