My 2018 Blogging Goals - Mid Year Point

Back at the start of the year (which feels like an incredibly long time ago yet has passed in a bit of a blur), I set myself a number of blogging goals for 2018. I have always been the kind of person who loves to have targets – something to aim for, something to keep me motivated and something to spur me on when my motivation starts to wane. I love to look back and see how far I (hopefully) have come at the end of the year, and although at times thinks don’t go according to plan, I usually manage to achieve the majority of targets that I set myself.

We are now in the middle of the year (with the countdown to Christmas already mentally starting in my head!!) so I thought now would be as good a time as any to look at how I am getting on with my goals at the half way mark.

Table of Contents

Social Media Following

Unlike last year where I set myself some quite specific social media goals (and failed to meet them miserably), this year I like to think I have been a little bit more realistic. Facebook has become a huge challenge to grow these days (thanks to the dreaded algorithm changes, data breaches causing a bit of a blip in its popularity and the new discover feed, and so I am very pleased I didn’t try and aim for a huge amount of growth on this channel. Instead I wanted to get to 20k across my followers overall, having started the year at 14k. So am I on track? Hopefully YES. I am currently just under 18k across my channels, which gives me 6 months to try and gain the remaining two. I’d like to think that based on current stats this will be achieveable- but I wont be counting my chickens – in the blogging world – anything is possible! One individual target that I do want to add to this is that I’d love to finally get to 3k on Instagram. I have found insta so hard to grow and have worked really hard on my photography as of late. I am not doing pods or instants, and as such my engagement may never be huge (as reach is low), but I am hoping that if I stick with it I will get there!

Tots Ranking

I wanted to get into the top 100 of TOTS this year, having started the year on 146. I still dont really know whether there are any huge benefits of being there, but in my brain its a milestone that I would love to be able to meet – and stay there! I did make it briefly into the top 100 – climbing to 89 in February, but as this is an ever changing score, I am currently back down at 146 again. We will see how the year pans out!

Views

My views are not as high as they were at the beginning of last year, but it appears that the run up to Christmas does have a huge impact on my seo and google traffic, and as such I am hoping that they will go up again in the second half of the year. I am still really pleased with my overall views which are averaging between 12 and 15k views a month. For a part time blogger I am pretty pleased with that! 🙂

Domain Authority

URGH. Don’t mention the dreaded DA. Moz have shaken things up a little this year which has caused quite a lot of confusion and uprooting for everyone. I started the year on 35 and was aiming for 40, but have actually gone down to 32. With the introduction of the moz toolbar this score can now change almost daily, however there have been some unreliable changes which needed to be rolled back as well! It’s all fun and games but not sure I will ever reach the elusive 40 at this rate.

Scheduling

I now have a very basic scheduler (missinglettr) which pushes out my old posts on twitter throughout the year, and I like the way this is done in a natural and less spammy way than some schedulers. There is still a lot more I could be doing here but it’s a start!

Collaborations

The year so far has been up and down for paid work – with some months being fantastic (April and May) and others being absolutely tumbleweed (June). Another reason I am glad not to be full time blogging is that the sponsored campaigns are so hard to predict making it incredibly difficult to plan. Also even when they do come in, it seems to take forever to actually get paid!