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Starting a new blog is not an easy process and it is very easy to lose your motivation. Many blogs do not make it past the 6 month barrier because the blog owner loses their motivation when they don’t receive thousands of visitors, or earn the fortunes that are boasted about on many blogs.

The fact is that starting a new blog is not very difficult at all, most people can upload a blogging platform such as WordPress and publish content on the web, but only a small percentage of these people recieve substantial traffic to their blogs, allowing them to earn a decent income.

The first 6 months of any blog are the most difficult, you may be publishing fantastic content on a daily basis but may only be receiving 20-30 visits per day. This can lead many blog owners to lose their motivation. One way to keep your motivation and help get your blog past the 6 month barrier is to set yourself blogging goals.

Setting goals gives you a focus, it provides you with a target to work towards. The biggest mistake that most blogger’s make is to focus on getting 1000s of visitors to their blog from day one. This is an unrealistic target for a brand new blog.

I believe that if you want to build a successful blog, the unique visitors and visit count are the stats you want to avoid setting goals for. Sure, everyone has an idea of the visitors they want to achieve but for the first 6 months you should not look at these in much detail, as low levels of visitors can lead to a loss of morale.

Instead you should focus on building the blog itself, some goals I would suggest for a brand new blog may be:

1. Write at least 4 posts a week
2. Increase the average comments per post
3. Increase the number of RSS subscribers
4. Write a guest post at least once a month
5. Achieve 5 quality inbound links a week

By focusing on smaller goals such as the once mentioned above you can help grow your blog. If you post at least 4 posts per week, you are providing search engines such as Google with quality content that can increase your search engine traffic. Increasing the number of RSS subscribers on your blog allows you to build a community on your blog, which helps to draw new readers in. Guest posts are a great way of making yourself known, most guest posts will include a link back to your blog, which will help with point 5. Increasing your inbound links not only helps to bring some extra traffic to your site, it also helps to increase other aspects such as your Technorati rank.

Make sure the goals you set yourself are realistic, there is no point setting yourself a goal that you are not going to reach. You should also reward yourself when you reach a goal, maybe by buying yourself something nice. By building a positive outcome to reaching goals, it helps to motivate you to reach your new goals.

As this is a post about goals, I will share with you my current goals. This blog was launched in February 2008, so the blog is currently around 4-5 months old. I am close to the 6 month barrier and still going strong. My current goals are:

1. Reach 150 RSS Subscribers
2. Write at least 5 posts a week
3. Guest post at least once a month

I am currently reaching these small goals, which are helping me to reach my current big goal of receiving 25,000 hits in a month, which by my current growth should be the end of July.

I would love to hear about your current blogging goals, as they could provide great motivation for other blogger’s.