When I decided to start a blog, I researched, read a few posts online, watched some YouTube videos, borrowed a couple of books from the library and started the process of building the website and working with WordPress. It was very much a case of plunging right in.

Months later, I wish to expand my knowledge and learn how to manage the WordPress site to full benefit. To this end I’ve taken advantage of some of the free courses they offer online.

Set three goals

As a new student of WordPress.com Blogging University, I’ve been set a task – to write down three concrete goals for my blog.

Some questions to help me focus:

• Why do I blog?
• If your blog exceeded your wildest dreams, what would it look like?

Why do I blog?

I started the blog to fulfil a need for information I couldn’t find during the period I was on maternity leave, leaving permanent employment and on career break. This is because nobody else was really blogging on the subject of re-entering the library profession when I was on career break. Or if they were, they were hard to find!

It can feel like there are lots of resources for new library career professionals, with even more being developed all the time. But there are very few for those at a mid career point and fewer still for those who have walked a less conventional path.

I genuinely believe that there are other people like me in the information profession who have taken a break and face a challenge to get back in who would like to follow a blog like mine.

If your blog exceeded your wildest dreams, what would it look like?

It would have lots of interaction. I’m getting a lot of awareness of the blog but that interest mainly takes place in other areas, personal messages, twitter feeds, email, and private conversations. I would like to see a lot more communication happening within the blog itself. I know from my previous experience as a library educator and online moderator a question asked by one person is usually of interest to another. Therefore I suspect that the conversations I’m having privately with one individual about library returner issues are of relevance to someone else.

Generation of ideas for blog posts has not been an issue but having the time to place them up onto the site has. I’m probably quite behind with features than I’d initially planned to be. Serious bloggers appear to publish at least once per day. I genuinely don’t know how they do it! If this blog exceeded my wildest dreams I would also be uploading posts frequently. But I’d further want this fantasy extended to include a self-cleaning button for my home!

So the three goals are:

1. 2-3 posts a month
2. Build engagement
3. Increase followers by 50% in three months

Achievable?! What do you think?