Blogging Goals for 2012

Happy New Years Everyone!

Yesterday I wrote a post about my personal goals for 2012, which included my own development and improvements I wanted to make with myself.  Today I am focused on specifically what my goals for my blog are for 2012.

I am only focused in goals that I can directly affect, I could wish for more traffic, income, earnings…etc but these are highly variable factors.  So I am focused on setting goals that may reach and improve those metrics but my goals are much more down to Earth and measurable.

Give Away More Crap!

First and foremost, I was so thrilled to be able to give away 2 Kindle Fire’s right before Christmas and kick off another Kindle Fire Giveaway this morning on DragonBlogger.com.  I do plan on giving away more gadgets, tech stuff in contests and I just enjoy connecting with readers and being able to offer rewards and make people’s month by announcing them as a winner for a really cool prize.  It is just something fun and the contests have a way of bringing out interactivity that no other articles do on my site.  My biggest contest brought nearly 500 comments on a single article.

The traffic and fans that flocked to my Facebook page were incredible and I gained more followers in 2 weeks from that contest than I did for 15 months of running my Fanpage previously.  This is going to be a win/win situation for building my fanbase and rewarding readers.  I am going to start working on networking with more sponsors and even setting aside some of my blogging profits to put toward giveaways.  My goal is to host no less than 2 giveaways per month.

Create More Video Content

Now that I have a Bloggie Camera, I am hoping to do more video recordings and host more self created video content for my tech blog.  I still want a 1080p Webcam, but the Bloggie will help with doing video reviews of physical products and showcase items on the tech blog.  Video content will help keep readers on articles longer, lower bounce rate and increase my user base on  YouTube as well.

Readers have a way of “knowing you” when you do video for your site and hearing your voice, seeing you in action builds a connection that goes way beyond just reading words.  As a blogger it is our job to build that connection with our readers, it is what separates us out from simple journalist articles and our opinions are why we have audience in the first place.

Guest Post More Often

I have been lax about guest posting in 2011, I hadn’t had the time really.  In 2012 I want to be able to put out at least 1 guest post per month and show up again on some of my favorite sites like BlogEngage, FamousBloggers, We Blog Better, Basic Blog Tips, or Blazing Minds. 

Comment On More Sites

I really want to take more time to leave comments and link back to my site, but I also want to find new sites to increase the amount of unique domain that links back as well.  I use services like CommentLuv, Drop My Link, Livefyre, and others to leave comments and engage in conversations on other great blogs.

Those are my primary goals for 2012 as a blogger, I could tell you that I reached my $1,000 in one month blogging goal in 2011 one time and it would be nice to have that be my earnings every month.  Or that I reached almost 100,000 unique visits in July 2011 and would like to break 100k visits per month every month.  But I think just by focusing on the goals I have laid out these will start falling into place.

At about 3 1/2 years old, DragonBlogger.com has made so much more progress in 2011 in building a following and growing than in the previous two years that if I have even the same growth % rate in 2012, I should be doing very well.

Besides DragonBlogger.com, I am hoping to finally complete 2 Poetry Volumes for my Poetry Blog.  1 is an audio poetry collection that I hope to sell as 100 audio tracks people can buy and listen to.  The other is a Kindle eBook and physical Poetry volume, a collection of Random Twitter Poems that they can read and experience the interactive poetry game that I cultivated 3 years ago and continue to do almost daily.

What are your blogging goal for 2012?

-Justin Germino