I kind of feel like you always need to be working towards something. It gives you drive and a sense of purpose and when I’m left without something to aim for I kind of feel adrift or like I’m fighting against the tide. I kind of talked about that a little in my post where I reflected on avoiding stagnation and just resting at one place.
At the one year anniversary, I set myself 5 goals so that seems like a good number to try again for this year.
Number 1: Continue to have fun. This is a must. An absolute priority. I feel the writing and the sense of community I have been trying to create here at 100 Word Anime will all just kind of fall apart if I’m not enjoying doing what I do.
Number 2: Continue to work on improving content. Write posts I am happy with and think about the content I am producing. This is more or less an ongoing goal for the blog and will hopefully always be a priority, but I really do think I need to work on this over the next twelve months.
Number 3: Increase the average number of daily views by about 25%. So I’m kind of looking at an average of 250 daily views and I would love to increase that to 312 (let’s round it to 310) by the next anniversary. It seems like a doable kind of goal given the previous rate of growth and it gives me a target to aim for.
Number 4: Reach the $100 a month goal on Patreon and remove advertising from my blog. I feel this is an achievable goal. With over 2000 followers, if even 5% of them committed to $1 a month (which is only $12 a year) I would hit this target. I am working toward this goal by trying to increase the content patrons get access to.
Number 5: Work to increase the average number of comments per post. At the moment I think I’m at 10 comments per post. I think I’d like to see that increase to 15 by the end of the next year. Mostly because I love talking to people about anime and I love to know what they thought of an episode or a show. What they loved, what they hated, whether they agree or disagree with my thoughts. I’d really like to see this kind of engagement increase.
So those are my main goals for the third year of the blog. I’d love to know what you would like to see on the blog over the next year and what you like about the blog, or what you would like to see improved. Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message via the contact as I’d really appreciate your feedback.
Stay tuned for the final posts of the anniversary celebration as we have Arthifis, Aldael and then the wrap up still to come. Catch all the anniversary posts here.
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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You are very insipiring keep up the good work.
Thank you.
I should really set my goals myself even though I’m so new to blogging. I think the goals you set are very reasonable given the content of your blog. I’ll be sure to try and add more comments (I always get nervous for whatever reason) so hopefully one or more of your goals come true!
Thank you. I know it is really nerve racking the first time you leave a comment on someone’s blog as you don’t know how they’ll respond, particularly if you disagreed with something in their post. Still, I’ve found most the ani-blogging community on WordPress are very open to discussion and sharing ideas even when you disagree and most people really appreciate it when someone takes the time to comment.
You’re welcome! It really is a game of chance at times, but like you said the community (that I follow/comment thus far) are really welcoming. Maybe I should make it a goal to comment more often~
Heck, it’s nerve racking to reply to a comment for the same reasons…
Seem like good goals to me 🙂
Seems like a lot of the same goals from last year but with higher targets. Good to see that having fun is still at the top.
I’d be interested in a frank discussion with you sometime about how you plan to achieve some of these. Usually if I don’t get enough views or comments I kind of shrug uselessly and hope for better next time (which is the opposite of how I approach every other problem in life). It would be nice to get some understanding of how others go about it.
I’m not really sure about how to increase comments, other than making the blog itself a place where people feel comfortable expressing an opinion and inviting comment. If anyone did have advice on that, I’d love to know it.
Increasing views I know that days where I’m not at work I do much better because I’m active on Twitter and I can spend longer reading other blogs and interacting with others. I almost always get view spikes when I’m off work for a couple of days and have been spending time online. How to increase views when I’m working though, I don’t really know other than continuing to work on making my content something people want to view.
Very reasonable goals. I think each and every blogger should print out all them (if they have a Patreon) lest they forget the essentials of running a blog.
Speaking about what would I want from 100 Word Anime, I think simply more of the same. Keep aiming for your goals and have as much fun as you can, and other things will take care of themselves, reader satisfaction included.
Thanks Aldael.
I think that’s probably the difficulty at the moment is I’d like to try some different things, but I don’t want to stop doing what I’m already doing and with the time I currently have, doing what I’m currently doing is pretty much all I can handle consistently. Still, I’m going to keep working at it and hopefully I’ll get there.
Well, the adjustments need not be drastic. When you have time, you can experiment a bit, and see how it goes. Try probing a little bit and the results will at least help you a better grasp of all the possibilities and your preferences.
It’s not pleasant to understand that capabilities are limited but however everything goes, you have the support of the readers either way.
congratulation and good job