SMART Goal and Example with My Blog

If you’re a serious goal chaser, it’s highly likely you’ve heard of the famous acronym S.M.A.R.T.

I vaguely remember learning about it years ago and memorising its concept to pass an exam and get a grade.

But I had never applied it to real life, let alone my personal goal— until today.

If you have never used it as a goal-setting exercise, here’s an example I’d like to walk you through.

At the end of it, you’ll have a good grasp of what SMART means and how you can apply it as your goal-achieving framework.

It will ensure that every important component of your goals is covered, which therefore increases the chance of success in achieving your goals.

My Blog Goal

Like many bloggers, I have the ultimate goal of making a full-time income from my blogging.

I want to see this goal materialise in 10 months from today.

Which means I need to make more than 10 times what I do now.

It’s a lofty goal.

On the other hand, I’m really surprised at how steady Pinterest traffic — my main traffic source — has been over the months, even with sporadic blog posts published.

It has given me a little taste of what life could be like with passive income and a minimum amount of work, making me feel dreamy and hopeful.

It encourages me to work harder.

How to Apply SMART to My Blog Goal

So, to achieve my ultimate goal of making a full-time income blogging within 10 months, I need a few strategic objectives.

Objectives are steps you take that lead you to your ultimate goal.

With my blog, objectives can range from content creation to various methods of promotion.

To illustrate how the acronym SMART is applied to goal setting, I’ll be focusing on one short-term objective.

My SMART Objective

According to Social Marketing Writing, daily blog posting attracts the highest traffic.

It says:

Blogs that post daily get 5 times more traffic than those that post weekly or less.

It also states that when you accumulate 200 posts, your traffic increases by 4.5 times.

So, that gave me an idea.

I wanted to accumulate 200 posts and see if my blog traffic would indeed increase by 4.5 times.

I’ve set a SMART goal for it.

What does SMART Stand for

SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Let me walk you through each component of the SMART goal.

First, make sure you can sum up your SMART goal in one sentence.

This is my SMART goal in one sentence for the particular objective mentioned above:

I’ll accumulate 200 posts within the next two months.

And below is how I’m applying this neat acronym to my short-term objective.

Specific

Here, you define exactly what you want to achieve.

Your goals and objectives should be clear.

Use action words to describe them so that your intentions are crystal clear.

My objective is to publish 200 posts. I currently have 150 posts.

Counting this post I’m writing, I have 49 posts to write to reach 200.

So, I’m going to publish 49 posts to accumulate 200 posts.

It can’t be more specific and clearer than that, right?

Notice that it’s not “I want to” or “hope to.”

Use specific action words.

Measurable

Your effort needs to be quantifiable so that you can track your progress.

I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to publish a blog post every day or every other day, or perhaps a combination of the two.

Either way, it can be easily measured to ensure I’m on the right track as each post is quantifiable and added up to 200 posts.

Achievable

We need to make sure our goals and objectives are within reach.

By all means, aim for a challenging goal that pushes you just out of your limit.

At the same time, make sure that it’s attainable.

If I set an unrealistic objective like publishing 300 blog posts within the next 2 months, I would set myself up for failure.

On the other hand, accumulating 200 blog posts within the next 2 months is challenging yet doable, as I’ve proven myself with my 100-Day Challenge.

Relevant

Your goals and objectives need to make sense for your overall goal.

Accumulating 200 posts and publishing 49 more posts ties directly to my ultimate goal of making full-time income blogging.

Time-bound

Can you imagine what it will be like if you have no set date to reach your goals and objectives?

It’s great that you want to publish your first novel, lose weight, or pay off debt. But over what period? 6 months or 6 years?

Our goals and objectives need a clear timeline so that we can plan and prioritise how much mileage we need to put in today, tomorrow, or next week.

Final Thoughts

Run every goal through the acronym S.M.A.R.T. and ensure that every component of the goal is covered under the SMART framework.

It’s an excellent tool to ensure that every important aspect of the goal is appraised perfectly.

If your goal is missing any of the components of being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, it’s flawed and needs tweaking.

You can apply the SMART principle to a project, an objective, or a goal, from short-term to long-term.

It can be for a debt payoff plan, a no-spending-month project, losing weight, writing a novel or ebook, saving up for a trip, taking an online course, or reading a book.

Pick one goal and run it through the SMART framework.

You can’t go wrong with setting goals and achieving them. 

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