Every blog should have goals. Every blogs goals are different. They depend on your audience and what you want to get out of your blog.
Possible Goals to Achieve
- High number of user sessions
- Increase in traffic month to month
- Lots of posts
- In depth informative posts
- Lots of comments
- Breaking news
- Lots of subscribers
- Driving traffic to your other sites
- Lots of referrers
- Greater overall exposure
- Building community
- ???
- Profit!
Everyone wants all of these, but very very few blogs ever get to this point. Most successful weblogs pick a few goals to achieve, become good at those, and branch out from there. It's hard to be everything to everyone from day one. They are goals for a reason, it takes time to reach them.
When Stats and Goals Don't Mesh
What happens if one of your main goals is many comments and feedback but instead you're just getting refferals to your site instead? Or what if the only posts commented on are long in depth posts, but you wanted to make short "breaking news" style posts and get a lot of comments? Perhaps it's time to reevaluate your goals.
Hunker Down or Change Direction
If your metrics aren't matching you goals, there are several things you can do:
- Change Direction
- Go with what has been successful for you
- Listen to your audience, they will tell you what they like
- Hunker Down
- Stick with what you're doing, but tweak it
- Try new strategies to get reach your goals (see Strategies)
- Spin Off a New Blog
- Create separate blogs for different goals
- Reach two or more different audiences
- Content is tailored more to a specific audience