In the past I have talked a lot about the importance of analyzing and setting goals for the future. It has been almost a year now that I have been blogging and trying to make money online. In fact, January 17th will be my one-year blogiversary.
This past year has been, by far, the best year of my life. I have learned an incredible amount of useful knowledge, met a ton of extremely cool people, and made more overall professional progress than any year previously.
To my relief, I completed almost all of the goals I set for 2007, including creating a sustainable, enjoyable business and hiring part- and full-time employees.
Since it is now a new year, here are some of my plans and goals for 2008.
- Continue to have fun. I’ve been working crazy long days for months now, and have learned if I am not having fun working, I could easily lose incentive. When work is fun, it’s win-win.
- Blog more. Blogging is what got to me to where I am today. I want to get back to a more consistent, regular schedule of blogging and use it as a centralized location for information that has helped me. Hopefully it can help other people too.
- Build a social network. That may sound like an unlikely goal, but it is something which is now much easier to do thanks to new developer-driven social networking platforms.
- Redesign my blog. You would think that someone who has a custom blog design firm would have a custom-designed blog. Although I have significantly modified my blog design, it is not an original theme. I am still using a free theme from Ed Merritt. The truth is that I have simply been way too busy designing other people’s blog to focus on redesigning mine. I recently started customizing a new blog design for myself, so hopefully I will be able to finish that within the next month or so.
- Work out 3-5x per week. Being on my own schedule is great, but I always seem to get too distracted by work. I don’t need to talk about the benefits of working out, but it will truly improve effective working time. I plan to do more.
- Release phase 1.5 of UBD. This is something we plan to release within the next few months.
- Respond to more comments. Comment interaction is often the best content of the post, and I regret that I have not made it a priority in the past. My goal is to spend more time writing back to my readers and commenting on other people’s blogs.
- Attend more tradeshows. Blog World Expo and Pubcon were, by far, the most fun I have had this entire year. Not only were these events very beneficial professionally, it was also very rewarding to meet lots of new and familiar people. I highly recommend that everyone try to attend at least one industry show a year. UBD staff are already signed up to exhibit at Blog World Expo 2008 in September!
Those are some of my goals and plans for 2008. Last year was an exciting and interesting time for me professionally, and I am sure this year will be even more so.
What are YOUR goals/plans? Remember, we are all more motivated to follow through once we’ve made a public commitment!
