Blogging With Objectives

I promised John Wagner that I would put up my goals for blogging here at Communications Overtones. Friday seemed a good day for such housecleaning. But along with my goals, I will also outline my objectives and how I plan to measure my success. Hopefully, if you haven’t set up your own objectives yet, these can be helpful to some of you.

My original goal in starting Communications Overtones was to learn all about blogging, its tools and its culture. I suppose as I feel I meet this goal I will broaden it, but for now I am still in training wheels.

• Objective 1: Set up a working blogging site by November 2005: My blog launched Thursday November 3, 2005. Results: Accomplished
• Objective 2: Network. “Develop a relationship with at least five other active bloggers by June 2006.” Results: I have had a great reception in the blogosphere, thanks all Technorati says I have 18 links from 11 sites, thanks such blggers as Scott at Media Orchard, Shel Holtz, John Wagner, Phil Gomes, and Mike Bawden.
• Objective 3: Comment on at least five blogs per week. You can check my results on this objective here since I have started tagging all my comments at del.icio.us this week. (tip: this also helps you “follow” the conversation and comment more than once)
• Objective 4: Learn how to work with the technological tools out there to make the most of the blogging experience: trackbacks, Technorati, cool tools like Shel’s swiki where you can search for PR-related blognews
• Objective 5: Earn a loyal following for the blog by earning one referral link per week by writing great content. Results: My stats at Google Analytics are growing very well I think, but I have no other sites to benchmark against:

November 2005: 107 visits, 51% new, 49% returning, 67 referrals
December 2005: 347 visits, 63% new, 37% returning, 284 referrals
January 1-6: 98 visits, 56% new, 44% returning, 78 referrals

Also, the average amount of time that a reader spends on a blog post is about 3 minutes. I think that is pretty high considering the surfing mentality of blog readers.

I do think it is important to have goals and measureable objectives in whatever you set out to do. It keeps you from getting off track and going on wild goose chases. I am glad to be here with you all in the PR blog community. Thanks for welcoming me in!