The 2009 Blog Improvement Project and Week 1 Project (Setting Goals)

I have been feeling dissatisfied with my blog of late. I still feel this need to have a blog, but have felt that my blog is not living up to my aspirations in various ways. Yesterday which surfing the ‘net, I came across a button on this book blog while reading a book review. (If you must know, I am slowly making my way through One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell and I do have this sad addiction to searching for reviews and even spoilers of books I am currently reading, especially books I am finding tedious, in the hopes I will discover motivation to actually finish the book.) Okay, back to my original topic, the 2009 Blog Improvement Project, which was the button I noticed. I quickly clicked on the button and arrived at Sophisticated Dorkiness, an interesting blog by Kim. I began to read about her project and I was hooked. I had found a community of people who were focused on improving their blogs. Accountability and structure! I decided whether or not I could be accepted into this project, I needed to jump on board the improvement project.

The 2009 Blog Improvement Project is a year-long challenge that will consist of twice-monthly activities to improve your blog. Every first and third Monday of the month an activity will be posted at Sophisticated Dorkiness that will be related in some way to making your blog better. Now, I am already behind my counterparts. I have missed the first 2 months of the project. However, being the anal compulsive person that I am, I plan to work on catching up with the rest of the group project by project, ideally finding a way to catch up long before the end of the year.

From Kim for the Week 1 Project - Setting Goals. What do you want to accomplish with your blog in 2009? Set some goals for your blog. Think about where you would like to be a year from now, and try to set clear and specific objectives that you’ll be able to measure in some way once we get to the end of 2009. Even before you set goals, it’s important to reflect back on what you’ve actually accomplished. Problogger suggests 69 questions (of various topics) that you could use to consider the things that are going well with your blog and the things that might need improvement. Using some of these questions could help you decide what blog areas you should set goals in.

Already, after spending some time on this first task, I am thinking quit, run away!! This task hits on some difficult issues for me. I tried to answer Problogger's 69 questions (whom I love, by the way, due to his fabulous advice on blogging and twitter) and came up with a whole lot of nothing. My blog seems to exist in isolation. I suspect only a few of my close friends actually read it. I am never quite sure what my focus is and because of that my posting is erratic and disjointed. So rather than run away, let’s set some realistic goals for the next year:

(1) Find a focus or center for my blog. I think my original purpose was to have a creative outlet, to find my own inner creativity and pleasure again, after having kids and losing my focus. I love so many things; I don’t think my blog can be narrowly focused. However, I need to find someway to keep a focus so I, and others, can have some consistent content here.

(2) Find some structure for posting that fits my needs but also leads to more consistent posting. Again, finding a way to post a certain number of posts in a week with some schedule seems a good idea and I am toying with the idea of having some sort of weekly schedule, i.e., Wednesday book reviews or happiness project musings on a particular day of the week? To quantify, perhaps set some weekly structure in posting by end of month and post at least 3 times per week?

(3) Content, content, content. By this, I would like to have some plan for my content that is consistent with my eventual focus. I would like to have some content that is planned, but still leave room for rambled musings. I do think I am usually too good at planning, and not so good at spontaneity. The blog is part of my life goal of being more spontaneous and living “in the moment.”

(4) Find a way to network and find a sense of community. Since I can’t control who comes to my blog, I would like to make more of an effort to visit other blogs on a regular basis and comment more frequently. Okay, I stole this one from many of the other BIP participants! But it seems like a great idea. Perhaps to measure progress, my goal would be to leave a comment 5 times in a week?

(5) Learn more about blog design and applications. I don’t need the most technical or beautiful blog, but I would like to understand more how to make my blog more user-friendly for me and also for those visiting. I would also like to learn more about tracking who is visiting my blog.

Okay, I could come up with many more goals, but I think those are enough for now. If I do achieve progress on these goals I can always come with more. If anyone is out there, please leave me any comments with your observations or suggestions. I would appreciate it!!