Make it a number

INTRO
This post is a direct offspring of my post titled "focus". In the focus-post I noticed that just preparing on something doesn't bring results. What preparation brings in reality is readiness for action, but if action never comes all we have is an ongoing preparation cycle. Wanna prepare to live your life or just live your life? Ain't much of a brainer, eh?

BREATH, PUSH, PUSH, PUSH...
So you chose life, but what then? All work and no play makes you a dull entity (really!)... What you don't need is another plan, because you already formulated a loose plan in the focus episode, right? You need constant execution and with constant I mean daily posts. Look at the time stamp of this post for example. This post came week later than focus (this post gets referred a lot, eh?) and what a perfect example it makes. Don't be fooled to think that you can get the ball rolling with this little posting. Train Google to visit you daily and then it is time to give more time for post quality. Anyway it is always easier to edit and improve something that you already have than something out of thin air.

QUALITATIVE
This shouldn't be your first objective at first. It is very easy to set a goal "I'll post quality articles every week!", and end up with two articleS and nothing else. Try this goal instead "I'll post quality stuff.", and you end up posting nothing this week, because nothing just came up. This is mentality of a sloth.

One exception is allowed. Experienced bloggers know their limits and can grasp the ambiguous quality boundaries at ease. Ah, let's give another exception, who are we to push you around. Time - in time you should bring more quality into your posts to make it big or at least bigger, but you can't get there without first working a lot, hence the next paragraph.

QUANTITY
Now this is what I'm writing about, greasy fries, juicy steaks, lakes of dressing and super-sized colas. Make the amount matter and set concrete goals as your weekly tasks - 5 articles (over 400 words), 1 blog carnival, 10 blog comments, 10 forum comments and some digging and stumbling and whatever. This kind of goals keep you on right track, because they don't allow backboneless behavior as they are so transparent and concise. If these small goals are too big for you to reach, you will not reach success with your website either - end of story, and you can move on to the next movie.

Now the clever part. Keep a record of all your to-do items and by the end of the week your goal must be met. What this means is that occasionally you can take a day off, but only if you pull extra shifts every now and then. Weekly deadlines allow you some flexibility but keep you busy writing almost daily. You learn by working and quality of your work steadily improves over time. In the end, you will reach quantity and quality all in the same package. Success - make it a number.

RESOURCES
This post is part of Blogging blog carnival

Measuring success

THE PLAN
We have a scheduled plan. We have set a roadmap for traffic and for different stages of site content. Key element of this plan is Google Analytics, it will let us know, how are we doing.

DIFFICULTIES
We have a modest target figure for this month's visitor count - one hundred. However it is very difficult for us to reach that, since we don't know our way around in website traffic world - not yet. First part of the month went while planning and this second half seems to go to micromanaging our newborn website. Looks like actual content and traffic creation are still on background.

AFTER AN UPHILL
Comes a downhill or downhill or maybe everything continues flat. We don't know unless we have walked that path before. Still, I'm hopefull, now we have a clean looking xml template for new Blogger and Google Analytics is tracking YOU. We will have our traffic report for this month, but no time for keeping my fingers crossed, since I have to keep on typing.