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As the year comes to an end, its time to reflect upon our accomplishments and a time to revisit some goals, offline as well as online.

I started this blog in April of this year, and at that time I had no idea about how long I would be blogging and didn’t have a clue if anyone would read it let alone become a subscriber of the blog.

I loved making connections with people all over the globe and learning about different aspects people shared about their lives, difficulties and successes.

But then somewhere along the line, I started thinking about monetizing this blog. Since everyone in the blogosphere is talking about different ways you can make money, I confess I was swayed in that direction and started putting those banners in the sidebar. Without even realizing, I got too hung up on signing up for different affiliate programs and trying different banners, all of which weren’t making any money, zero, nil! Well, because this is not a product blog, this is about interesting observations. And Some of you even asked me to clean up the sidebars but I just never took the time to do anything about it, or to confess, I found it hard to let go of those dangling carrots!

Until just a couple of days ago, when I came across a Group Writing Project about your Blogging Goals for 2008 at Daily Blog Tips via a most generous and lovely soul Karen Zara, who I recently met via Luciano’s Lists Project

Ears to the sky by Balaji Dutt M.V

So, in order for me to think of my blogging goals for 2008, I started reviewing what I was able to accomplish since I started this blog. Read on:

  • Currently the Page Rank is at 4 - would like to take it to a 5 although I keep hearing that is difficult
  • Alexa Rank is <70,000 - would like to bring it <40,000
  • Technorati Rank broke the top 10k and even though technorati keeps fluctuating, I am sure the blog will continue to do better - my goal would be to bring it in the top 5k
  • I never thought I would have even a single subscriber and was thrilled when the first time I logged in the FeedBurner and found there were 11 subscribers, now that number sits at 180 - I would love to bring it to 500 ( and if you like reading this blog, please subscribe via RSS feed or via email and help me get to my goals sooner than the next Christmas ) :)
  • This blog was linked to by problogger in one of his speedlinking posts, by emoms and by ZenHabits and together these sites brought me a lot of traffic, great new bloggers and a good feeling of getting a bit known out there. So, for the new year, is it too unrealistic to want to be linked to by some of the other famous bloggers like copyblogger, successful-blog, Maki and such?

I’d also like to achieve something much more than the numbers

  • get into a regular posting schedule
  • clearly define the areas I want to blog about
  • get better with writing
  • get in the habit of participating more in the social networking
  • write more guest posts
  • get over my shyness - a huge hurdle in accomplishing just about everything
  • learn about affiliate marketing
  • learn php and CSS
  • start a couple of niche sites

Some of these might be too unrealistic as I work full time and cannot devote as much time to blogging as I would really like, but it sure feels good to just have some concrete goals laid out here and have a clear vision.

I will sound contradictory to my own goals above in saying that one of my goals will be to not really get hung over the numbers as it has affected my writing and posting frequency. And the only way to do that is to not check the stats that often. As a matter of fact, I plan to not display the RSS subscriber numbers to avoid getting depressed when suddenly these numbers drop.

Have you thought of what you want to accomplish with your blog next year?

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