After my first reflection in my last post Practice makes perfect, it is time to make 2018 goals for my blog project. I’m using my favorite retrospective format: Start, Stop, Continue to derive goals for next year. Let’s start with Continue first.
Continue
- First things first: I definitely want to continue this blog project. It is helpful for me. There are enough people who value my posts. Also I learned a lot on the journey so far and I’m sure there will be further learning ahead. I’m definitely hooked to blogging 🙂
- I continue the weekly treasures in the current format. In the meantime I have a good framework to compile the treasures, so this is easy to continue.
Stop
There are two things I want to stop. Either I’ve reached a limit/barrier or I want to focus my time a bit differently.
- I will definitely stop using WordPress.com and complete the last few actions to move to a self-hosted blog based on WordPress.org. This might not be the most important thing in 2018, but definitely the most urgent thing. I think the holiday break is the perfect opportunity to get this finally done.
- I’ll stop my current publishing frequency. While the rhythm of publishing every Monday and Friday was very helpful to make regular blogging a behavior, I wasn’t able to spend enough time on infrastructure efforts and to increase my reach. Also I want to spend a bit more time on new formats, which I’ll explain later. As I said before weekly treasures will continue in the same format and frequency. The frequency of my Compass posts will be reduced to every second Monday.
Start
Finally a couple of items I want to start in 2018, which will also include some measurable goals.
- I want to increase focus on my target audience. My target audience are people who are already company pirates, want to become company pirates or want to increase „piracy“ in their organizations or organizations they work with. Pirates don’t care about status and titles. There are enough publications, that focus on managers. I want to reach all people, who want to make an impact on their organization (e.g. individual contributors, technical leaders, people leaders, managers, CEOs, consultants, retirees, …).
- My most important goal is to improve my channels and increase my reach. Here’s what I’ll do:
- Publish selected articles directly on other platforms like Medium and LinkedIn.
- Improve my social media presence. I want to start dedicated channels on Twitter and LinkedIn. Also I plan to add channels on Instagram and YouTube.
- My goal is to have 1000 views per month by end of June and 2000 views per month by end of December. I have no idea if this is realistic, but let’s give it a try.
- I want to improve relationship with my readers by a newsletter and with at least 200 subscriptions until end of 2018.
- Connect with more people outside my network, so I want to be found in search engines. In order to make this happen, my goal is to learn and apply SEO.
- I also want to experiment with new formats:
- I’m very text heavy today, so I want to produce more visual content. Expect to see infographics and visualizations.
- Also I want to experiment with video content. My son started to run his own YouTube channel LikeMenTV, so I guess I can learn from him.
- I want to interview other company pirates or people, who can help us company pirates be more effective and find new adventures.
- I had very few books in my treasures this year, so I want to increase the number of book reviews.
- I also have a blog parade in mind, which I’ll likely kick-off in 1Q18.
- And finally I want to accomplish my goals not alone, but with the help of my „blogging out loud“ circle. The circle has been started already, so we could argue this is a Continue. But we will shift into a higher gear and eventually do something like a blogging „hackathon“.
Thank you for following me in 2017!
This was my last post in 2017. It helps me to set sails for next year. I hope it was interesting for you, to see where I’m heading. If you got feedback on any of the points or useful tips don’t hesitate to reach out to me via social media, [email]tobias@companypirate.de[/email] or personally.
I want to thank you for following me in 2017, sharing my articles and for your valuable feedback. I wish you Merry Christmas, relaxing holidays and a successful start into 2018. See you next year!