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Recently, some of the blogs I read regularly have begun listing blogging goals for 2009. For example, see this post on Daily Blog Tips. For some blogs, the listing of blogging goals seems to have become an annual event. In fact, several bloggers, after listing their goals for the upcoming year, have looked back to review last year’s list of blogging goals to see how many of last year’s goals were achieved.

Setting goals for your blog, like goal setting in general, is a good idea, sometimes gratifying and sometimes eye-opening, but always useful. Goals inspire you to work harder. Also, by setting goals, you are able to measure progress from year to year, and to formulate and initiate plans to improve performance. Therefore, I like the idea. I will set goals for this year and plan to revisit the goals at the end of 2009 to see how many of them I achieved.

Most of the goals identified by other bloggers involve generating traffic and money, expressed variously as increasing posting frequency, getting more readers, getting more subscribers to RSS feeds, generating higher page views, achieving a higher GooglePageRank, or a highter Technorati, Alexa, or Complete ranking and earning more monthly revenue from ads. Not discussed as much as the above goals but equally important, I think, are goals focusing on improving the quality of the blog posts produced.

That said, here are my 2009 goals for the “Law Office of Vanarelli & Li, LLC Blog”:

  • Post regularly throughout the year. For the first 7 months I was blogging, which was the time it took me to reach my 100th blog post, I averaged 1 post every 1.7 days, or 1 post every other day. I would like to post at least once every day in 2009.
  • Produce creative, original, and insightful blog posts, consistently of high quality, that are useful and interesting for readers.
  • Consistently produce blog posts in which I report and comment on the most recent cases and legal developments in the various legal practice areas covered by the blog.
  • Build my community through greater participation. I hope to interact with more bloggers and readers by increasing my reading, commenting, linking, arguing, praising and helping.
  • Increase the number of comments.
  • Increase use of images on the blog to at least 5 pictures in my posts each month. I managed to import 1 image in my 100th blog post in 2008.
  • Invite guest bloggers to write for my blog. I had 1 guest blogger in 2008 who posted on 2 occasions.
  • Increase the average number of unique visitors to my website and blog to at least 500 each day and the average number of pages viewed by each unique visitor. At present, the blog averages 325 unique visitors each day, and each visitor views about 4 pages on average.
  • Increase GooglePageRank from “3”, the page rank which the website and blog have achieved to date, to “5”.
  • Write a series of blog posts focusing on a particular topic. I wrote a series of blog posts in 2009 on “preparing for mediation.” I hope to continue that series in 2009 and add others.
  • Increase ranking in Google search engine results. My website is currently among the top 5 google search results in most of the legal areas I practice in, but I want to be the number 1 search result in Google in every legal area in which I practice.
  • Incorporate podcasts and video sharing into the blog.
  • Attend 1 event in 2009 focused on law blogs.