See that.  It’s a summit.  You have to climb up to get there.

I have a confession to make.  I try to sound positive on this blog, and on top of everything, but I gotta admit, sometimes I get down.  Does that happen to you too, fellow bloggers?

I had a relatively new blog up until a few days ago.  It was about 3 months old.  It was progressing nicely.  Nothing spectacular, but I was making progress.  I had gone from an Alexa ranking of around 4 million to one in the 700 thousands in about 3 weeks.  I was feeling pretty positive about it too.  I was messing around with code and trying to make it look better when I messed something up.  I messed up bad, too.  After compounding the problem another time or two, I committed a massive screw up in the file manager, and the blog disappeared.

Three months of work gone.  Bummer!  What did I do?  I didn’t whine about it.  I liked the blog, but it lacked focus, and since I had dreams of monetization, it really wasn’t a great candidate.  So I decided to start a new one (actually I plan on starting several, but this one is first).  When I began the first one I hadn’t really thought it out well.  I just knew I wanted a place to express myself.  And I wanted to express my self on a variety of subjects.  Rather than figure out which subjects I really cared about, I just thought I could write about many subjects on the one blog.  I have come to think that was not the best decision.  It’s better to have a niche. I read that shortly after I started the other blog, but I thought I could find away around it.  Note to self:  When Yaro Starak speaks…listen dammit!!! The guy knows his stuff.  There’s a reason the pro bloggers are the pro bloggers.  But back to the story.

I am working hard to get this blog up and running, but I’ve got that 17,244,602 Alexa number up there on the Alexa toolbar staring at me.  I think it’s mocking me and I hate it for that.  But after I get through feeling sorry for myself, I’m going to do something about that damned number.  Feel free to tell me that the number isn’t precise and that it doesn’t matter very much, but I won’t believe you.  It matters to me.  It’s a sort of confirmation that what I’m doing is making some small difference.  I decided to write this post about getting overwhelmed with a new blog, because it’s my guess that I’m not the only one out there that feels that way every now and again.

So what am I gonna do about it?  Well, there’s two components to blog success.  Content, and Promotion.  I’ve written about that before, and believe me, I’ll be writing about it again.  In one of my first posts I talked about the need to set what I called tactical goals.  These are the goals that you set to achieve your strategy of building a successful blog.  I said then that I would give actual numerical goals in a near future post.  Guess what.  The near future has arrived.

These then, are the goals I want to achieve on a daily basis to grow this blog:

1. At least 1 new post every day, and sometimes more
2. Comment on at least 20 blogs every day
3. write and/or submit 3 guest posts every day for the next week

The first two are quite doable.  The third is really going to make me buckle down and seriously get to work.  Guest posting is probably the fastest way to get noticed.  And if you are going to be noticed then it had better be for great content.  For a guest post, I believe you should be submitting your best stuff.  After all, you’re trying to be invited into the house, and you don’t want to track in that dog dropping you just stepped in, do you?   Of course not.  Be a courteous guest.  Sure they’re getting free content, but you asked them to do you the honor of popularizing your writing.  Be grateful.

So.  There you have my new tactical goals for the next week.  Goals can always be reviewed and changed if necessary.  After a week, I’ll review and see how I did.  If I must I can adjust downward, but I think the goals should be a stretch.  By the same token, I may be able to change them upward.  We shall see.  And I will, of course keep you informed.

As always, comments are encouraged.