Year End Blog Assessment and Goal Setting for the New Year

With 2007 drawing to a close, I’m sure many of us are doing informal blog reviews, namely looking at the goals wet set at the start of 2007 and seeing how well we did at meeting them. The reviews will help us dream up our goals for 2008.

Certainly, the most obvious thing to track is how much money a blog has made over the past year. Personally, money isn’t my primary goal: I didn’t start blogging as a business venture. There are many reasons why people blog, and each will define a different set of criteria for success.

In addition to money, any blogger can easily track:

1. Traffic. From order of largest to least, this can range from hits, pageviews, visits, or unique visitors. You can do this by looking at your server logs, or installing Google Analytics which has plenty of ranged chart options to measure progress over a time period.
2. Subscribers. Using Feedburner it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on the number of people who are watching your RSS feed.
3. Number of comments. If you use WordPress this total is listed on the first page after logging in, under Blog Stats.

There are any number of additional data you can track for the data-obsessed: spam comments, links coming in via Technorati, Google PageRank, or number of posts.

So in the interest of sharing, here’s my blog assessment.

See Also

8 skills to develop now if you don’t want to struggle financially in your 60s

1. My traffic when from 12K unique visitors per month in January to 40K in November.
2. My number of subscribers seem to have held steady at around 250 (I didn’t increase this number).
3. I have a total of 3,803 comments.

Here’s a short list of what I have planned for 2008:

• I’ll try to double the stats above. In order to achieve this, I need to do much better at networking and participating in the blogging community, than I did in 2007.
• Pre-plan several topics for “series” posts so I’m not at a loss for things to write about on a regular basis.
• Get back on the ball with blog contests.
• A year-end survey where I ask readers to tell me what they like or dislike about the blog, and topic suggestions for 2008.

Anyhow, how do you assess the success of your blog? What do you have planned for 2008? I’d love to hear how you plan to get another year of blogging off to an exciting start.