Goals are supposed to be “operational” level – they set real targets and real deadlines that lead to real budgets and real plans. If you don’t know how many people you want to help, you don’t know how many staff to hire, how big a hospital to build, etc, etc, etc. Goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

The ‘non-quantitative’ or ‘why goal’ comes before that, at a higher level. It’s your strategy, and it comes from your purpose. If your purpose in life is to support your family financially – very commendable – then your strategy may be to raise, manage, and provide money by blogging. Your goals would then be for how much money, and how much blogging…

Personally, I have a hard time defining my ‘purpose’, so my strategy and goals tend to be patchy and sometimes appear incompatible. Start/build my business(es)? Or spend more time with my family? Save more? Or give more generously?

I suspect most people’s lives are full of these contradictions. Maybe the fun is in balancing them.

These are operational goals that rarely inspire or direct action because fail to answer “why?” It would be the same for financial goals – a statement like “I want a million dollars” has far less focus and motivation then “I want to be able to take care of my family’s education and medical needs without hesitation or financial stress. This will take a million dollars.” The money is a means to a end, not the other way around.

I would advise people focus on what they want to achieve philosophically first then use goals like these to drive quarterly growth. For your blog, perhaps you want a certain type of community to form and flourish. Or perhaps you want to provide clarity and access to regional or organizational data. Both of these would require a certain number of people, certain types of posts and a certain amount of revenue.

First, get a ‘why’ goal, then set ‘how’ goals.

Thanks for the info.

Since I’m helping a friend generate and promote his blog, we’re sitting down and working through what our goals are.

Not sure how much of a stretch it is, but our goal is $4.00 / day within 6 months.

@TOMAS – goals for Search-This in 2008:
- 3,000 uniques/day by year end
- 5,000 subscribers by year end
- finish my e-book by March
- Be in Google’s top 5 for “internet marketing”
- and number 1, get more people to comment

@Court – no point in setting the bar low.

@John – right, these articles will be geared toward the professional.

Give your blog a chance to succeed, plan things out and know where you are going.

This of course assumes that your definition of success in this instance is defined from a business perspective, that success is measured by the increase of quantifiable variables like visitors, revenue, quantity of output etc.

While it’s probably true that a lot of blogs do have business goals as their main priority, I’m sure there’s probably also a lot whose goals may be different like giving someone something to pass the time, practising their writing skills, using it as an online diary etc.

Quantifiable goals probably aren’t as important for blogs that are more personal in nature.