Blog Goals for July and August

I am coming up on one month of blogging, woohoo! I figure that it as good a time as any to set some blog goals and start tracking things like followers and expenses. I was reading the latest income report from Michelle at Making Sense of Cents and clicked on her report from four years ago.  She has come such a long way! I hope that someday I can report actually making any money from this little venture 🙂

So goal setting has never been my strong suit. I never really know what to shoot for and then trying to break it down into actionable steps is strangely hard. But here goes nothing…

Blog Goals

1. Finish two blogging courses– I have been working my way through two courses about making money with a blog. I will be writing up full posts on both of them very soon. I am hoping to finish them by the end of July.
2. Submit my first guest post on Soul Paint Co.– I have been accepted as a guest contributor to Soul Paint Co and can’t wait to get my first post up.
3. Continue to publish twice a week on this blog– I have been publishing on Monday’s and Thursdays for the last few weeks and I would like to continue on that schedule. It seems to be working for me to write two posts a week. I did get a few posts ahead last weekend and have Monday’s scheduled for the rest of July!
4. Grow visitors to 100 a day – I had one post go a little viral on StumbleUpon and had a 251 visitor day but on average I only get about 25-30 visitors. I would like to bump this up to 100 by August 31.
5. Increase my Pinterest follows to 600– I hit 300 followers earlier this week and I would love to double that by the end of August. I have joined a few new group boards in the last week and started a Tailwind account. I also got approved for Rich Pins thanks to this post from Melyssa Griffin.
6. Increase my newsletter subscribers to 100– So at the moment I have all of 18 confirmed newsletter subscribers and only four of them are related to me! I did send out my first newsletter last week, so that is a little progress in the right direction. I am using ConvertKit for my list. So far it seems to be working well although there are so many functions I am not quite sure what I am doing yet. On my site, I have been using SumoMe to create popups, a landing page, and a smart bar. So far the landing page has been gathering the most subscribers.
7. Create and Implement Business Building Challenge– I have been working on building a challenge and have invited people to join me in August as I follow it. I will be emailing out a workbook, goal sheets, and weekly tasks to help business owners set and reach goals. If you want to join me you can sign up here.
8. Create more freebies– I would love to have more to give away to subscribers and readers of my blog and I have some ideas of things to create. I am hoping that this will happen in August. My husband has some time off that month and is planning to entertain the children during the day so I can get more work done. So be on the lookout for cool free stuff!

Ok, do you think that is enough goals? I am a little overwhelmed just reading this back! I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Blog Expenses

I also thought I would share expenses with you since I don’t have any income to report yet.

In June I spent quite a bit getting set up. I spent a total of $913.44.

• Education – $511.00
• Hosting – $181.03
• Plugins and Software – $167.41
• Advertising – $54.00

This will be less in the coming months, I paid for a year of hosting, and the plugins are not monthly payments. Plus, I will not be paying for any more classes in the near future.

I will visit this list again at the end of August and report on my progress. Do you set goals for your business?