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With this being a new year and all, I’ve decided to lay out some personal goals for my life in general and blogging goals for My Personal Finance Journey during 2013. I have also added a reminder on my Outlook calendar to track our progress pertaining to these goals each month (or as often as I have time for anyway!).
As I experienced in 2012, by tracking these goals each month, it provides us with more accountability and visibility to what we are doing and where we want to go with this community/blog and in my life.
As is the case with many things in life (including my 2013 financial goals which I laid out a couple days ago), a good portion of my blogging goals are long-term commitments requiring attention in each passing year. As such, you might see many similar goals that I was trying to or did achieve in 2012 listed for 2013. I am perfectly fine with having some of the same goals year-to-year, provided that I believe in the causes they represent (which I ponder each year, and all of the ones listed below definitely do meet that criteria!). Nevertheless, I’ve tried to call attention to completely new blogging/personal goals for 2013 by highlighting them in bold red text for easier reading.
So, here goes! The blogging goals for 2013 are as follows:
- Read and interact with (comment) 25 partner blogs per week.
- Continue active participation as a proud Yakezie Personal Finance Blog Network member.
- Publish 3-5 blog posts per week.
- Obtain 600 unique visitors per day average by end of 2013.
- Host all personal finance blog carnivals (Festival of Frugality, Best of Money, Tax Carnival, Carnival of Personal Finance, Totally Money, Carnival of Retirement, Carnival of Financial Planning, Carnival of Passive Investing, etc).
- Continue organizing Carnival of Passive Investing in 2013. Offer hosting of the 12 editions for 2013 to guest hosts. If you’re interested in hosting, shoot me an email! You can view the schedule by clicking here. Also for the Carnival in 2013, my goals are to a) continue getting passive investing authors involved and b) start reaching out to financial journalists (maybe from Kiplinger’s or Money Magazine, etc) and/or financial reporters on TV.
- Continue to spread word about benefits of passive investing over active investing. Get involved in BogleHeads forums as well.
- Write 1 guest post for another blog per month to expand reach of my ideas.
- Create an eBook on one of the following topics – a) Ways to be Frugal, b) Investing Strategy, c) Steps to Buying a Home, d) Getting out of Debt, or e) Financial Prioritization / Account Hierarchy. Once create book, market it afterwards.
- Possibly transfer blog to WordPress hosting. First, migrate Carnival of Passive Investing for practice before do My Personal Finance Journey.
- Create and publish monthly newsletter – “Intelligent Financiers Newsletter.”
- Attend blogging, marketing, finance, or real estate classes at local community college or nearby conference locations. Particularly, I would like to take a class or two to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and also how to publish a book in hard-copy.
- Submit blog posts to blog carnivals every two weeks to expose my blog to new audiences and build links.
- Successfully execute Tour de Personal Finance in July this year. For 2013, plan further ahead of time to gather more entries (max = 64) and get some sponsors involved. If get sponsors, donate 50% of the earnings of the event to a charity chosen by the yellow jersey winner of the event and also offer prizes for top place entries and jersey winners.
- Do Easy Like Sunday Morning Roundup and Recap 1X per month minimum.
- Continue social media presence on Twitter and Facebook. I would also like to try to incorporate some use of Pinterest as well.
- Feature one Cheapskate Jake Frugal Ramblin’ per month.
- Run 10% Blog Income Give Back Project each month. Continue teaming up with local charities to build relationships. Focus on visiting the charity personally after each give back concludes. Try to get other sites interested in doing something similar and also begin to look for sponsors for 1-2 of the giveaways.
- Start and grow personal finance group speaking service. Generate ideas for speaking topics. Offer to local community first and build from there. Create page promoting service on My Personal Finance Journey.
- Continue to try to find other ways to help people with their finances away from the blogosphere. One thing I’ve applied to do is become a volunteer credit counselor with Credit Education.org. However, I have not heard back from them, even after submitting my application multiple times. Another option I could pursue is offering general advice on finances from a life coach perspective – lifestyle, frugality/money saving tips, life values and dreams, etc. You have to be very careful in making it clear to not offer advice on specific financial instruments since you must have the correct certifications for that (which I do not have). This might be hard for me to resist delving in to the specifics, but it could be fun! I would definitely need to learn more about the legal aspects first though.
- Start building smaller sites – one about blogging tips, finance from a scientific perspective, running, and my family’s genealogy as time allows (this is a lower priority goal).
- Network with other bloggers, with a particular focus on physically meeting them to build relationships. The bloggers I have met in person so far are really interesting people!
- Incorporate affiliate resources in to posts where relevant.
- Negotiate advertising deals for other sites.
In addition, my personal goals for 2013 that I set are as follows:
- Get to bed at midnight or earlier.
- Take 1 day off per week (Saturday or Sunday) completely from doing work on my blog or from my graduate research job to keep my mind feeling more “fresh.”
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Become better at following the Getting Things Done email/work flow management system to focus my time and energy on high value projects first and avoid distractions.
- Hike or bike ride 1 time per week with a group.
- Do a bike race if my Achilles starts to feel better.
- Hike more with the Charlottesville Hiking Group.
- Read one personal finance book per month.
- Go backpacking one time per month in warmer months.
- Take a trip out of town 1 time per month. Visit sister’s new home in Raleigh. Visit one of the beaches in Virginia.
- Learn how to build a group speaking business.
How about you all? What blogging/personal/professional goals have you set for yourself in 2013? Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/aresauburnphotos/1121058121/sizes/l/in/photostream/
