Blogging New Year’s Resolutions 2014

Happy New Year!!!  It’s the first day of 2014 and I am really looking forward to the next 12 months.  If I’m honest, I have always found new year’s resolutions to be a bit cliché, though that is mainly due to the fact that everyone usually ends up picking “lose weight”, “join a gym” or “start a new hobby”, which is usually forgotten about after a couple of weeks.    That said, the start of the year is a great time to set down some goals to try and achieve, especially for your work/career life to help you really think about where you want to be this time next year.  That is why I decided to make a list of blogging New Year’s Resolutions to aim for over the next 12 months.

Now instead of setting myself specific goals, I wanted to get everyone involved and set some realistic, yet challenging blogging goals for us all to aim for.  Let’s take a look…

1. Double Your Website Traffic & Pageviews

All sites need traffic so it is only natural to want more for your own.  Set down the gauntlet and aim to double your traffic and pageviews over the next year (Jan 1^st – Dec 31^st).

This goal could be incredibly easy or extremely hard depending on your site.  If you have only recently just started out you will probably find that your traffic will double naturally month on month. On the other hand, if you have been running your site for a couple of years, you may find it much harder to double your traffic.

Either way, aim to grow your traffic over the next 12 months by looking at ways to improve your existing traffic generating streams.  Perhaps you could experiment with new streams or look to refine your current methods of attracting visitors.  Technically you should be doing this anyway, but putting emphasis on doubling it will help you approach this in the right way.

If you haven’t done so already, make sure to install Google Analytics as this will help you greatly to see how your website is performing.

2. Increase Your Average Visit Duration

The longer your visitors spend on your website, the more likely they are to; buy from you, click on an advert, sign up to your email list, etc.

Look to increase your average visit duration and improve on last year’s result.  This may seem easy, but I can guarantee that it is not.  You may be able to improve average visit duration in the short term, but it is much harder to do it long term.  Remember you are aiming to beat last year’s result, so you need to be consistent for the whole 12 months.

3. Lower Your Bounce Rate

Your site may be getting a lot of traffic, but if you have a high bounce rate it doesn’t really mean anything.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a website’s “bounce rate” refers to the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a site after only viewing a single page.

You want people to navigate around your website after finding it, so you need to look at ways in which to help people find your other content.  This could link in with the layout of your site, so you may want to look at using a different WordPress theme or change the look of your homepage to make it more interesting for people.

If you have a pretty high bounce rate this goal will be pretty easy to lower, but if you already have a respectable bounce rate then maintaining it, let alone lowering it, will be much tougher.

4. Double Your Social Media Referrals

Social media and social media marketing will continue to be important for websites in 2014.  This is because they can be a great way to send traffic to a site and raise the awareness of your brand online.

Over the next 12 months look at; Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and think about ways in which you can send more people to your website.  Each social media site is different, so you may want to try out different methods for individual sites.  Think about the content you share, how you interact with people, competitions you can run, etc.

I am the first to admit that this is an area that I need to focus on more for this site, so I am determined to make more use of social sites in 2014.

5. Double Your Social Media Followers/Friends/Likes, etc.

This links in heavily with the previous goal, but try if you can to double your social media followers.  So that means; double your Facebook page likes, double your Twitter followers, double your G+ page followers, double your LinkedIn connections, etc.

The more followers/friends/likes, etc. you can get, the more people there is to promote your content to and hopefully share that with their own friends (helping goal #4).  So look at ways to increase your followers and try to interact more online.

Bring On 2014!

These are just a few goals that you can aim for over the next year.  Each though will help you to look at different areas of your website and make improvements.  If at the end of next year you have managed to fulfil each of these, you will have a much better site all round (twice as good you might say).

What blogging New Year’s resolutions do you have?  Will you be aiming for any of these this year?  Please let us know and get involved by leaving a comment below.