Getting organised and setting SMART goals

I have decided to follow an editorial calendar with lovilee this year. There will be a different theme every month with the first one being getting organised. I have some really exciting articles lined up this month. Some of the articles include topics such as where to start planning a wedding, how to set your creative business’ goals and as a part of the new monthly gardening articles we will be adding, there will be more on what you need before you try your hands at gardening.

I am also excited to again run the Creative Challenge for this year. The challenge for January ties in well with this month’s theme and is all about pretty storage. Read all about the challenge here.

During the holiday season I started thinking of my goals for the blog for 2017 and remembered a team building session we had at the company I worked for years ago on setting SMART goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation. If you have nothing to work towards you will have no need to do anything to attain it. That is why it is so important to set goals if you want to succeed at something.

In 2016 one of my goals on the blog was to prettify my Instagram feed, creating a feed that I could be proud of and one that, if I chose, wanted to follow myself. I have come a long way in achieving this goal and am so proud of it that I even dedicated a post to it a while ago entitled ‘5 Steps to Prettify your Instagram feed’.

What does the acronym SMART stand for?
S – Specific
M – Measureable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-specific

Obviously my goals are all time specific as they will be measured over the course of 2017, they are relevant to the blog and attainable I think in terms of my expectations and measured to my peers. Are they measureable? Definitely, I can measure the goals’ success by looking at my google analytics, which gives me my following statistics as well as readership ones.

My SMART goals for 2017 with regards to my blog and shop are

1. Being able to take some of my own images to use on the blog – lovilee has grown so much over the years with regards to look and feel that the standard of the images I take and publish would, I feel, degrade the it. I have done some steps to try and reach this goal by getting the right gear, researching tutorials and practicing. See my first post with my own images here.
2. Sharing more DIY tutorials – to achieve this Lauren Kim and Colleen from Lieflingkind will be part of the lovilee team on a more regular basis and if I get my photography skills up to date I can share more of the things I create behind the scenes.
3. Growing my blog following – This is a goal that I set every year, but this time I would like to set a specific target, like growing my followers on Instagram by at least 100%. By sharing swoon worthy images and quality content I hope to achieve this over the next year. I have also split up the RSS feed content so that you can either subscribe to get wedding articles or alternatively kids, lifestyle and decor images delivered straight to your inbox or both. Thus, the power is in your hand to select what inspiration you’d like to receive. (sign up for our feed here)
4. Bettering my blog SEO – Over the past six years I have tried to do everything on the blog myself. The design, graphics and the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I have however realised that my skills are lacking in this regard, so have started contacting other experts in the fields to assist.

Remember that we do not always reach our goals in a way that we desire, one of my favourite saying however is ‘Reach for the moon, even if you fail, you will land among the stars!’.

What are your SMART goals for 2017? I would love to hear, so leave me with a comment below.

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