Compared with your 2010 travel blogging goals, this year your focus seems to be balancing work, travel, and play. Many of you were able to accomplish your goals to varying degrees and often in unforeseen ways.
A Look Back At Your 2010 Accomplishments
- Andrea (Inspiring Travellers): Because we’re travelers/expats who have been stuck in one place for too long, this year was about creating the blog and getting some solid posts under our belts ahead of our next round of long-term travel. It’s difficult to fix bugs and work out kinks while you’re traveling full-time – we thought best to work those out ahead of time. I think we probably exceeded our expectations this year.
- Heather Cowper (My Blogging Journey): I did hope that I would have achieved more in monetizing my blog and although I’ve made some good steps in that direction, I still have some way to go before my blog can provide any meaningful financial return for all the hours I put in.
- Nora (The Professional Hobo): My goal for 2010 was to reduce my working hours without reducing my income accordingly. It worked! I now work between 14-28 hours per week on average, and my income has actually gone up!
Achieving My Personal Goals In Unexpected Ways
Taking a look back on what I set out to accomplish I learned that less can be more and though a bit late, came through on a special goal I had set my sights on.
- Continue my blogging schedule (a good failure) – Although I had thought about maintaining my foXnoMad schedule of 5 posts a week, when I asked, most of you wanted less. This change significantly boosted my subscriber numbers and the new schedule gave me more time to edit and expand upon my ideas. As for my other sites, including this one, the once per week for Travel Blog Advice and the Tech Guide For Travel, and once a month for How To Travel With Pets has been mostly consistent. Despite this, I’m still looking to rearrange the schedule so I have some weeks with a reduced writing load.
Write another eBook – I wanted to create another eBook, but this time one that was alive and more than the sum of its pages. The Ultimate Tech Guide For Travelers not only comes with 6 months of free personal tech support from yours truly, but a year of free updates that will make it worth much more than the price. Comment on this post before January 5th, 2011 and I’ll give you 35% off the price to see for yourself.
- More meet ups – I’ve met more of my readers and fellow bloggers in person this year than I ever thought I could. From FOGG Odyssey in Quito, Turkey’s For Life in Fethiye, to Wandering Earl in northern Iraq, it’s been a pleasure to get to meet these and so many other wonderful people.
- The usual suspects – As I mentioned last year, I’m very superstitious about announcing my specific metric goals but happy to say all of them were met much earlier in the year than I expected, forcing me to set much higher goals over the summer.
Goals Forward And Back
As important as setting goals is, looking back and evaluating the ones you’ve set previously is equally as valuable. It not only helps you gauge where to set your sights on for the future, but can give you a sense of accomplishment in a medium where it can be hard to find.
[photos by: BaazarBizarreSF (New Year’s resolution coaster), CarbonNYC (man looking through binoculars)]
Hi Anil, thanks for featuring our response. Good luck with your goals for this year – we really enjoy your blogs! Cheers
My pleasure Andrea and thank you for the support 🙂 Wishing you all the best with your site in 2011 and if there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to ask.
Good to see that you had such a successful year. We reached our goals in 2010 and feeling okay about things. This year we have higher goals though. Last year we didn’t really know what to expect, so achieving our goals was easy because we went far beyond anything we thought we could do. This year we have higher expectations so we are feeling a little overwhelmed. I like Nora’s reply, work less and make more. That would be our number one goal, but I am not sure if we are capable of that yet.
It can be overwhelming, I completely understand. Blogging for a living is a lot like managing a table that needs many more than 4 legs to stand. Not that I am by any means great at balancing things, but I’ve found not doing something for a bit and seeing what happens to be an effective way to gauge how much effort to devote in a particular area.
I’ve been very pleased with the growth of my blog in 2010. I started treating it like a business (not just a hobby), and more recently have begun looking into different ways of monetizing both the blog and the experience. Lots of irons in the fire, so to speak, but life is good and can only get better 🙂
Great to hear the positive outlook early in the year Chris and think you’re on the right track 🙂
I didn’t set any goals for 2010 because I was new to blogging and was just figuring it all out but I wish I had. I am struggling a bit on setting goals for 2011. Sure I have all the numerical ones (RSS, Twitter, FB, etc) but it’s the larger ones I seem to be stuggling with. Any suggestions?
Hi Ayngelina, do you mean in terms of direction or financial?
That’s a part of how I set my larger goals, by asking what I can contribute or build over the year. One good question to ask is, “what do you want to get out of your blog?”
Hi Anil!
Congratulations! I didn’t do much last year (probably because I didn’t have goals?!) but for 2011 I certainly have goals for sure, both in terms of value of posts and time commitment. Thanks for staying! 🙂
Hi Priyank,
I can’t wait to see what 2011 brings and I’m guessing Mexico is going to be a good boost to achieving your goals 🙂
Well done on achieving your goals! 🙂
I too am superstitious about being open with my goals, metrics and plans so all I can say is that 2010 put a few smiles on my face. I am also mindful that treating this venture too much like a business turns it into ‘work’ and can end up taking the pleasure out of it. Finding a balance is key to continued enjoyed of this medium 🙂
Thank you Corinne! I’m glad to hear I’m not the only superstitious one and very happy to hear 2010 was a goal-accomplishing year for you 🙂
I agree that finding a balance (and sustaining it) is very important for both the writer and the writing itself!
Hmmm…I did accomplish some of the goals I set for 2010, but certainly not all, particularly the monetizing aspect. However late in the year I had an idea for my first ebook which I plan to launch this week and hopefully that will be the beginning of my bigger income plan. I also have other plans in mind which I hope to achieve, but am not really sure on what to expect.
Good luck with the launch Federico, feel free to post the link here when it goes live.