How to turn your blogging dreams into an actionable plan

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Do you spend hours upon blogging, but still don’t see results? Do you have hopes and dreams of what you want your blog to be, but they seem virtually unattainable. Do you see bloggers all around you achieving amazing goals but somehow, it’s not working out like that for you? Don’t stop dreaming! All you need to do is turn those blogging dreams into an actionable plan…

All too often I see bloggers wading through the blogging fudge… endlessly churning out blog posts, spending hour upon hour on social media, randomly doing things because they see other bloggers do them and then getting upset because they are not seeing the results they hoped for. And it makes me so sad.

But here’s the hard truth…

…if you don’t set goals and then work backwards from those goals right back to your daily task list, you won’t ever see those results.

But the good news is, you CAN see those results, you can dream big and get there… if you do things the right way round.

And that’s the point of goal setting. Work out what you actually want out of your blog, and work back from there.

If you want to make money from your blog, great, but don’t just have that as a goal and then carry on churning out random blog posts, spending too much time chatting on Facebook and then getting sad when you don’t make a penny… turn that goal into a plan!

How?

Here’s an example…

Let’s say the goal of your blog is to make money. Enough money so you can leave your job and work on your blog full time.

FIRST, you’ve got to work out HOW you are going to make money…

There are tons of ways of making money on a blog… ads, affiliates, products, services, sponsored posts etc. etc.

Not all of them will be right for your blog or your life, but pick the ones that seem right for you.

Let’s say you decide you are going to earn money through affiliates and products.

SECOND, you’ve got to work out how to do that…

For affiliates, you’ve got to research good affiliate schemes (e.g. Amazon, ShareaSale, etc.), then you’ve got to work out how to create posts that will include those affiliate links. It could be a review of the product. Or it could be a list, like the top 20 pieces of photography equipment every food blogger should have (that’s one I still need to write!). Or it could be more subtle. A post about how to start and grow an email list, where you just casually drop in your affiliate link for ConvertKit (just like I’ve done in this post 😉 )

Then you need to write those posts, optimise them for search engines and promote them!

Or if you’ve decided that you are going to make money though selling products, then you need to start by doing some research, then create your product and then promote it. You also really need to work on growing your email list by creating an enticing opt-in offer. And use your email list and social media to create an effective sales funnel. You are also going to want to write relevant blog posts which will also help to drive sales and subscribers.

Your new ‘to do’ list

So at the end of this process your to do list will look quite different from the one you started with. Instead of things like ‘write 3 blog posts each week’, ‘promote on social media’, ‘do random thing everyone else is doing’, suddenly your to do list is much more focused… you are going to be researching affiliates and writing posts which drive affiliate sales and you are going to be setting up an email list, creating an opt-in offer and creating a product to sell, as well as writing posts related to that opt-in offer.

And if this all sounds a little daunting, don’t worry! The next stage is to break all those tasks down into little bitesize pieces and then just do as many as you can manage in one day. It might take you 3 months to achieve all that… maybe even longer. But then at the end of 3 months, you will almost certainly be earning money and achieving a goal you’ve maybe had for years!

And then you can do it all over again with different affiliates and a different product and earn even more money and little by little you will reach that goal of earning enough money to leave your job and blog full time… and then there will be no stopping you! And if you are earning pots of money, I pretty much guarantee you won’t give a stuff any more about your blog stats or the fact you only have a handful of followers on Facebook!

Taking things off your ‘to do’ list

And don’t forget, it’s as much about what you take off your to do list as what you put on. In order to those more focused, goal driven activities, you will almost certainly need to stop doing some less important activities. Look at your to do list and cross of everything that is not going to help you achieve your ultimate goal, everything that doesn’t have a purpose – that you are doing just because you thought of it or because ‘every other blogger is doing it’.

Of course, this is just an example…

…you may decide you want to monetize your blog in a very different way… or maybe earning money isn’t the goal of your blog at all. Maybe you want to spread a message that’s dear to your heart or just have a fun and fulfilling hobby or leave a legacy for your children. You can still follow the same process, start with your ultimate goal and work backwards. How are you going to achieve your goal? And what do you need to do to do that and so on until you get back to the individual steps on your to do list.

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