Goals, Objectives and Blogging

Have you looked at a college course syllabus lately? They have “goals” and “objectives”. The goals are the general intentions of the course, while the objectives are the concrete things that students will learn. The objectives are specific ways to meet the goal.

So in an Intro to Philosophy course, a goal might be something abstract, like “students will gain a greater appreciation of the history of Western philosophical thought”, and an objective would be something narrower, and measurable, like “students will be able to describe the difference between rationalism and empiricism”.

There is a lot of advice online about blogging, sometimes an overwhelming amount. It tends to focus on objectives (usually referred to as “strategies”). I find that much of the advice and strategizing is irrelevant to my goals. It helps me to have my goals in mind when I consider whether to spend time reading what someone has written about a strategy.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking “I don’t have ANY goals with regard to blogging. I just do what’s fun and what I feel like.”

I think that as human beings we act for reasons, which are a kind of intention or goal. When most people say “I don’t have a blogging goal”, I interpret that as “I don’t think about goals.” But there is a difference between not thinking about goals and not having a goal.

Blogging is a human activity, and as such, it is purposeful. The only things we “do” that aren’t purposeful are things like breathing and blinking. So when someone says “I have no blogging goals”, I interpret that as “My goal is not to get bogged down by blogging and to keep it spontaneous and fun.” People who say they don’t have any goals usually do have them, and if you look closely, they also have strategies they use to meet them. For example, the person who says “I have no blogging goals” usually won’t read a post like this when it shows up in her reader. Not reading posts about blogging goals is an objective which serves to meet your goal of not thinking about your blogging and keeping it spontaneous and fun.

I think part of the issue is the word “goal” and what it connotes in our culture. We think it means conscious, striving, effortful, competitive, “work-related”, maybe monetized. But when I go on vacation, my goal is to relax and not think about anything. That’s a goal, but it’s quite the opposite of effortful and tiring and competitive.

Anyway, it occurred to me as I was reading the agenda for the Book Blogger Convention in New York in May (which looks great and which I would love to attend), that several of the panels did not interest me, because they meet objectives for goals I don’t have as a blogger. For example, the panel on marketing or the panel on the relationship between authors and blogger.

I recall having an email exchange with a fellow blogger and talking about stats. It quickly became apparent that all I cared about was subscribers and comments (number and quality) and all she cared about were number of hits and her placement in search engine rankings. It hit me that we had different goals. Mine was more focused on building community, which means repeat visitors and comments, and hers was more on visibility and reach. To meet my goal, I have to do certain things, and to meet her goal, she has to do different things. Or we might do the same things, but to meet different goals. So she might have a contest to generate interest in her blog and increase her numbers, and I might do a contest for a friend who has written a book, or to thank my readers helping me answer a particular question.

For someone more interested in community, it is more important that those people who are valuable contributors keep coming back. Not losing (good) contributors is the focus. For someone interested in, say, monetizing their blog, it is going to be important to see those numbers grow. This might mean paying more attention to what posts generate a lot of interest and hits. It won’t matter quite as much whether the same people keep coming back, but whether more and more people do. For someone who wants to be acknowledged as an expert in her blogging field, being on top of news is going to be very important. To meet that goal she’ll have the objective of doing timely links posts, and to meet that objective she’ll have to be on line a lot, to gather the news via Twitter, feeds, etc.

And these goals aren’t mutually exclusive. Building a good community is a way of growing in numbers, for example, which is a way to better monetize.

I don’t think about my blogging goals every day or every post. But I find it helpful to take a step back and ask myself about them every so often. Recently, when I changed the blog’s name, I realized that I had goals that the blog could help me meet, goals which are outside of the blog itself. Specifically, I could use this blog as a place to think out loud about issues in philosophy of fiction, a subject none of my real world colleagues work on. This will help with both teaching and research. So one issue I became more conscious of is the difference between goals for the blog, versus goals that the blog can help me achieve. (And they are not always compatible: my posts on philosophy of fiction tend not to generate a lot of discussion!) Now my thinking about “blog goals” encompasses both.

Reflecting on blog goals helps me to shuck interest in things that waste time, it helps with focus, it helps with crafting a clear blog identity, it helps minimize the stressful feeling that I should be doing “more”, and it helps with identifying the difference between blogs I merely enjoy versus blogs I want to learn from and emulate. As blogging goals change — and they do — raising my head out of a particular post and looking at the big picture helps clarify and solidify that change (at least for the moment, since goals will likely change again, and again). I recommend it!