Many bloggers that I meet start out with a goal of having a successful blog, but have little idea what that actually means.

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They want “opportunities to open up,” they desire “influence,” they want “lots of readers,” they want to be seen as “authorities”…

None of this is bad—but it’s also quite vague and I wonder if it could be a contributing factor to wishy-washy results.

Good things do sometimes just happen to people, but more often than not, the people who achieve most with their blogs have in mind some goals that they’re looking to achieve.

My story of defining success

When I started blogging in 2002, I didn’t have any idea that blogging would last beyond a few weeks (I had a history of not sticking at things) and as a result, I had few goals. However, over the coming couple of years I began to see the potential of blogging to be more than just a hobby, and to even become a way of earning an income.

The problem was that my dreams remained very vague. While I hoped one day my income would grow, I never got specific with what I was aiming for and as a result, I never really gave it the effort that I should have.

It was only when I sat down with V (my wife) one day and we set a specific goal that things began to really take off. The goal was to be working full-time as a blogger within six months (note that I’d already been blogging for some time—the full story is here).

For the first time, I had a definition of what success was for me. I wanted to be a full-time blogger. I also had a timeframe in mind—six months to achieve my goal.

• Suddenly I started to take my blog more seriously, treating it as a business and doing the things I always knew I needed to do (but had always put off).
• Suddenly I had a concrete target to aim for—and motivation like I’d not had before.
• Suddenly I had consequences to face if I didn’t meet my target (I decided I’d have to go get a “real job” if I didn’t succeed).
• Suddenly I had something with which to filter the opportunities that came my way. when invited to do something, I was able to ask, “Will this take me closer to my goal, or is it a distraction?”

Defining what success meant for me drove me to action and sped up my blog’s growth. A few months later I needed to come up with a new definition of “success,” as I’d already achieved the full-time goal.

Define success… and then…

Recently I came across an old Moleskine notebook from the period after I’d defined success for the first time (2004). In it, I’d dedicated a number of pages to goal-setting and planning how I’d act on those goals.

1. 5-year plan: The way I did it at the time was to set a five-year plan. I had a full page of notes of things that I had wanted to achieve by 2009.

   In it, I had some pretty lofty goals. i wanted to have written a book, I wanted to have started another photography blog, I wanted to be doing public speaking regularly, and more. Much of what I wrote back then I’ve actually achieved (some of it was way off track), but at the time I couldn’t have been further away from much of what I was dreaming of.

2. 1-year plan: With that five-year plan or dream in place, I then created a 1-year plan. At the top of that page I’d written “what do I need to do this year to take me closer to my goals for 2009?”

   That page then contained my goals for 2005. They were smaller goals, and each of them was a stepping stone to the big dream.

3. 1-month plan: The next pages broke down my 2005 plan into monthly action items—things I’d need to do to achieve my one-year plan.

   The key was to start with the goal (a definition of success) and then break it down into achievable steps.

This may all sound highly organized, but these plans were all hand-written and took up a total of five pages in a small notebook. I’d probably put it together in a few hours, yet these decisions gave me a powerful plan to move towards my definition of success.

What is your definition of success?

Your definition of success is likely to be a little different from mine. We all blog with different motivations and goals, and that’s totally fine. The key is to have something to aim for.

So what does success look like for you?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Define Successful Blogging for You

Of course when I return home, everyone always asks, “What was the best thing” or “What did you learn this year?”

Here’s what I learned

The thing that I always learn when I go to Blog World (or almost any other conference, for that matter) is simple: DO IT!

This year I decided to take a different approach to taking notes at BWE. Whereas in the past I’ve tried to capture much more of the words and ideas of presenters, this year I decided only to write things down when I heard something I needed to implement.

So instead of page after page of notes to wade through, I ended up with a rather concise list of action items—things I knew would not only be nice ideas but which would help lift my blogs up a notch.

As I sat in LAX waiting to board my flight back to Melbourne, I gazed over the list of action items and realized that much of what I’d written were things that I already knew I should do, but were things that I’d either put off, been distracted from doing or had not yet done well.

Here’s the thing: blogging isn’t rocket science

While when you just start out, there’s certainly a learning curve and it can take a while to get your head around some of the more technical aspects of blogging, a lot of what it takes to build a blog is pretty much common sense (note: common sense doesn’t equate to it being easy … it’s also a lot of work).

However the problem with “common sense” is that things that are common sense are often the things we take for granted—they’re things that we get comfortable with, and don’t always actually do.

Not only that, but the common sense things are often overlooked in the pursuit of “secrets” or “advanced tips and techniques.”

I spoke with one blogger at BWE who told me that they were dissatisfied with the event because it was all too basic. They commented that they “knew it all” already and wanted speakers to reveal their “real secrets.”

When I unpacked this with him a little and we looked over his blog together, it became apparent that while he may have known a lot of what he’d heard at BWE already, he’d not done much of it. For example, he told me he was sick of people talking about setting up an email newsletter. However, when pressed, he admitted that doing it was still on his to-do list.

He knew he should do it, but he was so busy looking for the next new secret technique that he’d failed to implement one that was tested and proven.

What have you been putting off?

Of course, most of us have been overlooking or putting off something.

For me, there was a list of 20 or so things. For example, I sat in one session with Amy Porterfield who talked about Facebook, and I realized that while I’m using Facebook much more effectively than in the past, there are still five or six things that I need to do to take my Facebook strategies to the next level.

I also realized that I need to rework some key pages on my blogs, rethink some aspects of my blogs’ designs, and so on.

What about you? Most ProBlogger readers didn’t get to BWE this year, but that doesn’t stop you implementing what I learned. Take ten minutes to consider the action items do you have that perhaps you’ve been putting off, but which you really need to take action on.

If you’d like to share them in comments below to help make you a little more accountable to them, please do!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Most Important Take-Home Advice from BlogWorld Expo LA [#BWELA]

Oe great way to save yourself a lot of time when it comes to these frequently asked questions is to have pre-prepared answers that you can email back to those asking the questions. Up until now I’d been using a little program called ‘TextExpander’ (a Mac application) to speed up the process of getting these answers into emails – but in the last 24 hours Gmail came to the party with a new featured called ‘Canned Responses‘.

Canned Responses is a feature you can turn on in Google Labs and allows you to type up responses and to save them as templates. I know a lot of other email programs have this capability already – but as a Gmail convert it’s exciting news to me and I know will save me a lot of time.

I’ve already got a few Canned Responses drafted including:

• A couple for most commonly asked questions – pointing people to articles I’ve written on these common topics.
• One as a response to a problem that some of my forum users have with logging in.
• Another as a response to people wanting consulting.

What would you use Canned Responses (or draft templates in your email client) for?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Gmail Adds ‘Canned Responses’ and Saves Us all Time with FAQs