How To Map Out (& Crush) Your Blogging Goals [Podcast Ep. 17]

Updated on March 24, 2024

Want to learn how to map out — and crush — your blogging goals?

Then you’re in the right place, because that is exactly what we’ll be covering step-by-step in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast.

Look, here’s the thing with blogging:

It’s easy to get so wrapped up in creating new content and getting a neverending list of tasks done that you never even look up from your business to achieve goals.

Heck, many bloggers, influencers, and online entrepreneurs get so busy they may never even set them in the first place.

Luckily, in this podcast episode you’ll learn how to:

Pinpoint your business goals (so that you can create content with purpose!)
Create a simple blogging business plan (in a way that feels fun and not daunting!)
Achieve more (while doing less!)
Exercise your visualization muscle (so you can utilize this powerful success tactic!)
Overcome limiting beliefs (that may be holding you back from being profitable!)
Map out a plan for what to do when your blog isn’t growing (say goodbye to feeling frust
And more!

Table of Contents

How To Map Out (& Crush) Your Blogging Goals – Podcast Episode Audio

Listen to the full episode using this embedded player…

…or click the links below to tune in on your preferred audio platform:

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts/iTunes

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Free Resources For Travel Bloggers

To help you really jumpstart your blogging success, I’ve added 55+ blogging resources like printables, video tutorials and workbooks into a FREE resource library for travel bloggers.

These resources are meant to help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and with less overwhelm.

For anyone listening to this episode, in particular, I think you’ll really appreciate the Crafting Your Blog’s Business Plan Workbook.

There is also a 4-minute masterclass inside that will help you pinpoint what to focus on right now to meet your goals.

Reach Your Blogging Goals Faster With These Quick Wins [Video]

Looking for some blogging strategies that can help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and easier?

Then check out the video above!

It shares 14 quick-win strategies that can help you see growth in your bogging business sooner rather than later.

Achieve Your Blogging Business Goals – Episode Transcript

For many bloggers, it can be difficult to understand how writing words on a blog post page translates to income. How do those travel post ideas actually equate to money?

Because of this, it can be tricky to set goals and create a path toward success — which is exactly what this podcast episode will help you with.

If you’re looking to set goals that help you sustainably take your blog full-time then stay tuned, as I’ll be sharing a seven-step strategy to help get you there.

Step #1: Planning a blog strategy includes taking time to dream about your blogging business.

Why did you start a blog?

What does your dream blogging business look like?

Remove distractions, close your eyes, and just let your mind wander.

Don’t think about what anyone else is doing. Don’t think about what others will think about what you want. Just let your thoughts be pure.

Personally, when I do this exercise, I like to keep a notebook and pen nearby so that I can write down any exciting thoughts that come to mind. And if you’re drawing a blank, try a blogging personality quiz for inspiration.

Just realize, though, that we are all impacted by outside influences. And unless we take the time to honestly consider our own dreams and desires, we may never even realize that we’re living someone else’s dream or that we’re trying to avoid rocking the boat in our relationships.

One example might be if you know you want to live and work abroad, but you also realize your family would consider that immature.

Moving on to…

Step #2: Pinpoint the business milestones you need to achieve to reach your blogging goals.

Along with helping you get things done, this step is great when you’re frustrated by blogging or when your blog growth feels stagnant.

Additionally, it helps you create an action plan business plan and can also help your goal feel more attainable so that it’s easier to grow your blog fast and monetize your blog from day one.

Remember:

Believing you can do something is just as important as actually taking action. You need to believe you can do something in order to actually do it.

So maybe you know you want to create an online course (or pre-sell an online course to validate your course topic idea) that helps people make money through their travel photography.

When you just look at that one goal it can feel pretty overwhelming.

What makes it easier is drawing out a path to reach that goal and breaking the path up into milestones as well as steps necessary to reach each milestone.

Looking at the course example, one milestone might be to grow your blog’s email list to 1,000 well-nurtured subscribers so you have a warmed up audience to launch to.

From there, work backward to create a plan for reaching the milestone.

One step, for instance, might be creating a targeted opt-in freebie that would attract those interested in your course — such as a free “3 Ways To Make Money With Travel Photography” webinar.

Another might be honing your creative storytelling skills to craft were engaging emails or promoting a blog giveaway to increase engagement.

I recommend using a tool like Asana, Trello or Monday to keep track of all your workflows. Then you’ll always know exactly what to do.

And by the way, I do have a podcast episode sharing a step-by-step strategy for growing your email list.

Now let’s chat about…

Step #3: Look at how other bloggers with similar goals are crushing them.

How are they doing it?

Really study these people. Join their email list. Follow them on social media. View their content. Attend their free workshops and learn how to make money with webinars.

What exactly are they doing?

What are they showing you about how to use social media effectively?

It’s not that you want to copy everything someone else does, but instead get inspired.

Maybe you take part in a fun free challenge that someone puts on. While you wouldn’t want to then put on the exact same challenge for your audience, you can take the idea of doing a challenge, look at how they put it on, maybe even attend some challenges by other creators to source more ideas, and then spin the strategy so that it makes sense for your audience and feels right to you.

And pro tip here:

While niching down is typically a positive thing, don’t forget to look beyond your own niche — or even beyond travel altogether. As travel bloggers, I think we can sometimes get stuck in a bubble. But when we look at other niches we can get new ideas and then adapt them.

For instance, I often get inspired by following big players in the self-help and coaching spaces. Many of them are implementing powerful strategies I haven’t even seen done in the travel blogging space.

Now it’s time for…

Step #4: Choose one-to-two blogging strategies to implement and go all in.

Don’t dip your toes into, say, Pinterest marketing, YouTube, or blogging outreach. Instead, pick something and put 101% of your effort into making it work.

Learn every single thing you can about the topic and test and tweak. Then when — and only when — you have a repeatable strategy that works should you move on to a new focus.

It’s so much better to master one or two strategies than to be meh at 10 of them.

Doing this also helps increase your focus.

Instead of spreading yourself thin, you can give all of your energy and creativity to one project. Personally, I have so much more fun when I’m fully involved in just one project vs. racing to get 101 things done.

Now let’s chat about…

Step #5: Visualize your blogging success.

You want to get to a point where there is no way you can’t succeed because you can picture the outcome crystal clear with all your senses.

Personally, I like to do visualization in the morning, right before I dive into work. I keep a pen and paper near me so I can write down any good or inspiring ideas that pop into my head.

Now if you have trouble with visualization here is an exercise you can do to strengthen your visualization muscle. It will help you go beyond seeing yourself in a scene to actually experiencing the scene with all five scenes.

So with the exercise you might walk from your bedroom to your kitchen, open the refrigerator, and pick out an apple, and take a bite.

Then go somewhere quiet and visualize what you just did with all five senses. See the path to the fridge, feel the fridge door handle, taste the apple.

Once you get comfortable with this you can create longer scenes, and it’ll get easier to visualize without needing to do the acting exercise every time.

Now onto a very important step…

Step #6: Create a blog plan that includes analyzing what you’re doing in your blogging business.

Too often when we’re trying to achieve something we don’t factor in time to check if our efforts are even working.

The result?

You may spend hours every month or every week on something that doesn’t work and is a huge waste of time.

So my suggestion:

Check-in once or twice a month to see what is working and what is not. Test and tweak until you have a repeatable strategy that works.

Here are some examples from my personal life when I analyzed what I was doing and tweaked things:

Facebook Ads.

I’ve run ads before where there are a lot of impressions, and even a high click-through-rate, but people aren’t converting.

This tells me that my audience and ad are fine — people are seeing the ad and liking it — but something is stopping them from taking the action I want them to take on my landing page.

In this case, instead of changing 101 things, I’ll slowly make tweaks to my landing page to test out if different text might work better, or maybe there is some disconnect between the ad and the landing page, or maybe there is a technical issue like a really long load time for the page.

So I’ll test things out there until I get to a place where I have high-converting Facebook Ads running.

Email List.

One strategy I’ve monitored before is my opt-in freebies — those free pieces of valuable content I give to people when they sign up for my email list.

I’ve tested, for example, different kinds of opt-ins. I’ve also tested different promotion strategies.

And a trick here:

What I like to do is duplicate my original opt-in landing page, and create different versions of the URL. You can see an example of my landing page featuring resources for travel bloggers here as well as another version here. See how the URL is different?

This way I can check the traffic for those specific pages to get more insight into how a page is doing for a certain placement.

Just make sure to set the canonical URL on these duplicate pages to the original landing page URL so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content. You can do this using the free YOAST plugin. If this doesn’t make sense just Google “canonical URL” to get more information on that.

By the way, speaking of freebies, I recommend learning how to create a free resource library, as this is a truly powerful opt-in for growing your email list.

Affiliates.

With my affiliate marketing strategy — which I map out in a blog content strategy template — I have tested different kinds of affiliate partners to see what resonates with my audience, as well as different ways to promote my affiliate links.

My email list is segmented, so I’ve been able to dive deeper to understand which segments of my list benefit from which affiliates.

And again, I wouldn’t be able to do this if I was trying to learn 101 things at once.

Finally, let’s discuss…

Step #7: Build onto your blogging strategy or add another one into the mix.

For instance, let’s say you’re doing well growing your email list by placing opt-ins in your unique blog ideas and social media videos.

You might then take it to the next level by hosting a webinar — which, by the way, this video can help with:

Or, maybe you’re starting to make sales in your automated nurture sequence that people get when they join your list.

You might then get more clever, for instance, by hosting a five-day email challenge that includes a daily Facebook live check-in, and then ending that with a pitch for your relevant product.

For instance, a “5-Day Travel Hacking Challenge” that ends with a pitch for your travel hacking e-course.

If you need help mapping this out, here is a list of digital products that you can sell as a blogger as well as a marketing plan for your product launch if you’d like to really increase sales.

Before we end this episode, I want to share some general tips for all this.

Tip #1: Spend time pinpointing where you want to go in your blogging business and get crystal clear.

This will make it so much easier to map out a path.

You know, it’s not about if you can do it — you can. It’s about how you’re going to do it and when.

So if you know that you want to make $1,000 profit on your first course launch, what do you now need to do to make that happen?

Maybe that means first you’ll grow your email list to a certain number of people. Maybe it means you’ll also plan a webinar and create a Facebook Ads strategy to help promote the launch.

See how much clearer things get with this method versus simply saying that you want to make money blogging?

Tip #2: Spend time on mindset — including getting to know your limiting beliefs.

If you do not believe that you can create a profitable blogging business, you won’t do it. You need to fully believe in yourself and your abilities.

It’s about having a growth mindset and getting to a place where you can say “You know what, I don’t know how to grow an email list. But I’m excited to learn and I know if I put my mind to it I can do it!” Because you can.

That’s really the blogger mindset you want to adopt.

I also find it helpful to create a space — for me, I use a Google Drive folder — where you keep proof of your abilities. For example, I love taking screenshots of testimonials and emails from students that I’ve helped.

But if there is a limiting belief that you find in yourself, you need to do the work to dismantle it, and a great way to get started is to essentially become a faux-lawyer and create a case to yourself.

Tip #3: Be a realistic planner.

If you’re the type of person who gives yourself 101 tasks to complete in a day, you’re going to forever feel like you didn’t accomplish anything or like you’re unproductive.

Be realistic about timeframes when creating a blogging schedule. Give yourself enough time to account for hiccups that pop up with a project or your website going down or — like for me, my Facebook account was hacked for a week where I did nothing but scramble to try to fix the issue; it totally set me back.

Another tip:

I like to also leave Fridays open as an overflow day for anything I don’t finish during the week, which is extremely helpful for this.

Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode.

I hope you feel inspired and empowered to go map out and crush your blogging goals.

Don’t forget to grab free access to my Travel Blogger Resource Library. The tools inside will really help you grow much faster and easier.

Also, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you get notified when future episodes publish.

Happy blogging!

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