In any business, I would always recommend sticking with your plan for 3 months. Today, we’re going to focus on the benefits of a 3-month business plan for Bloggers.
This system works equally well for new Bloggers and established Bloggers. Here’s what we’ll cover in this blog post:
- What do you want to achieve in your blogging business long-term?
- Be realistic about where you are right now
- Why a 3-month business plan for your blog works best
- What do you want to achieve in the next 3 months?
- What are the key things you want to focus on in the next 3 months?
- What action do you plan to take in the next 3 months?
- Plan your time
- Don’t compare yourself to other Bloggers
- Don’t get sidetracked – Stick to your plan
- Believe in your plan – Believe in yourself
- Review your results only at the end of the 3 months
- 3-Month Business Plan For Bloggers Workbook
- Resources to help build your blogging business
Downloads the 3-Month Business Plan for Bloggers Guide and Workbook.
3-Month Business Plan For Bloggers
Ideally, you would work with the 4 quarters of the year but if you’re starting in the middle of a quarter, what I would recommend is that you carry on with your plan for the following quarter sticking with the same plan.
You can do a mini-review at the end of the quarter you start in but aim to NOT change very much at all.
- Q1 – Quarter 1 – January, February and March
- Q2 – Quarter 2 – April, May and June
- Q3 – Quarter 3 – July, August and September
- Q4 – Quarter 4 – October, November and December
What do you want to achieve in your blogging business long-term?
There are Bloggers making thousands a week and there are other Bloggers who want to make an extra £1000 a month as a side-line.
There are people who stick to a solid routine week in, week out no matter what and there are people who blog randomly when they feel like it.
There are Bloggers who work 60+ hours a week and Bloggers who work less than 5 hours a week.
And there are people who own a Blog and hire a whole team to write, manage social media, etc and those who do the whole lot themselves.
It’s really important for you to establish what you want to achieve long-term from your blog. There are no rules, it’s your blog and you get to choose what you want to achieve.
Here are a few ideas:
- I want my blog to make at least £1000 per month consistently from year 2 working on my blog as a side business for a few hours each week
- I want my blog to make a yearly profit of £50,000 working full-time on my blog
- I want my blog income to be more than my income from my full-time job within 2 years so that I can leave my job and blog full-time
- I want to hire a team of writers to work on my blog within one year
- I want to hire people to do all the jobs involved in running my blog so that I can focus on writing content only
What you want from your blog is very personal, so I encourage you to really spend some time getting clear about this.
Be realistic about where you are right now
You need to have a clear picture of where you are at the start of the 3 months. This is what I call your BASELINE.
Knowing your BASELINE is how you measure your Blogging Business progress at the end of the three months.
Things you’ll want to focus on may include:
- Your profit
- Your expenses
- The amount of time you work on your blog
- Things like social media results – For example, if you are focusing on Facebook, how much traffic is Facebook driving to your blog?
- Your pageview, sessions…
Why a 3-month business plan for your blog works best
3 months is a long enough time in your business to work out if something is working for you or if you maybe need to make changes. Anything less is not giving your plan long enough to see true results.
Here’s an example. You may decide that you’re going to focus on Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog. You commit to using Tailwind to schedule 5 new pins daily.
After the first 30 days, you may not have seen any results and think “This isn’t working” and be tempted to switch to something new. However, you haven’t given it enough time to establish if you’ll get good results or not.
Decide on your business plan for 3 months and stick with it
You have to give your plan time to see results
It’s so important to stick with your plan for the full 3-months. This way you’ll have a much better idea as to whether something is working or not.
Also, in any business, you’ll have so many people, especially online who’ll tell you that you need to do this thing or buy this course… And sure, those things might be a good idea BUT you cannot expect to do everything.
DECIDE ON YOUR PLAN AND STICK TO IT FOR THE FULL 3 MONTHS and then if you do find something isn’t working, you can then choose whether to stop doing something, make slight changes (if you’ve seen some results) or give it a bit more time.
The end of the 3 months is the time when you can decide if you want to focus on one of those new things.
TIP: Keep a notebook or online file where you make notes about any new ideas you want to try in your business but don’t be tempted to change your plan before the end of the 3 months.
What do you want to achieve in the next 3 months?
This section is where you will focus on your financial goals, time spent working on your blog, traffic goals and pageview/session goals…
Use the figures you added in the ‘WHERE IS YOUR BUSINESS RIGHT NOW’ section and then ask… What do I want to achieve by the end of this quarter in each of these areas?
What are the key things you want to focus on in the next 3 months?
The idea of the 3-month blogging business plan is to give you clear focus, measure results and stop you from getting side-tracked.
Here are some key things you might focus on:
- Updating old blog posts
- Publishing new blog posts
- Increasing affiliate income
- Adding products to an ETSY SHOP
- Engage email list
What action do you plan to take in the next 3 months?
Now you know what you want to focus your attention on over the next 3 months, now is the time to create your action plan to ensure you achieve the results you want.
Here’s what that might look like:
Expected time to spend working on the blog: 8-10 hours weekly
Money to invest: Up to £10 weekly
- Update 2 plus blog posts weekly including new Pinterest images – Interlink to other posts and look for ways to add affiliate links
- Draft 1 or two blog posts
- Publish 1 new blog post weekly
- Create and schedule a total of 5 pins for each new blog post
- Spend up to £10 weekly on Pinterest ads
- Schedule 5 pins daily (a combination of pins from new posts, updated posts and older pins)
- Schedule 3 posts to Facebook weekly plus post about updated posts and new posts
- Send 2 emails weekly
Plan your blogging time
Times can be flexible if you are flexible with the amount of time you can spend on your blogging work or you may need to be very strict with your time.
Either way, I would encourage you to overestimate the time each blogging task will take. You can use the extra time at the end of each week to connect on social media or draft more blog posts etc.
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR WEEKLY TIME SCHEDULE
- Creating Blog Content – Update old posts, Draft and publish – Total time 4 hours
- Pinterest – Total time 1.5 hour
- Facebook – Total time 30 minutes
- Email list – Total time 1 hour
- Creating new products for ETSY SHOP – 1 hour
Now, these are obviously approximate times. For example, with 4 hours a week to update old blog posts, draft posts and publish a new post. this could look like this…
- Publish one new blog post that’s already been heavily drafted (30 minutes)
- Update 2 blog posts (2 hours)
- Leaving me one and a half hours to work on drafting blog posts
Other weeks it may look more like this…
- Publish 1 blog post – 2 hours
- Update 2 blog posts – 1.5 hours
- Draft posts – 30 minutes
Even if you have fairly unlimited time to work on your blogging business, I still encourage you to have a rough idea of how much time you’ll spend on each key task.
There’s definitely no rule to say you have to stop when you’ve completed these tasks, but instead of going off on a tangent and randomly doing something completely different, do more of your planned tasks.
So, from the example above, you could do the following with any extra time…
- Draft more blog posts or fill in sections (subheadings) from a draft post to save time later when completing that post
- Create extra pins and schedule them
- Work extra on your ETSY SHOP products
- Schedule an email in advance
WORKBOOK NOTE: There is space in the workbook to write down the estimated time and actual time spent on each task (please note that these times don’t need to be exact, it’s simply to give you a realistic idea of how much time you need to dedicate to each area of your business.
Don’t compare yourself to other bloggers
Never compare yourself to another blogger, even one who started at the same time as you in the same niche. There are just too many factors that you may not be aware of.
For example, one blogger may have a huge amount of experience from a different blog or they may have extensive SEO knowledge or have a big amount of money to invest into the business each month.
When you start comparing yourself, you’ll get demotivated and be tempted to go off plan because you see something different is working for that particular Blogger.
Now, it’s always good to get ideas and advice from other Bloggers. Let’s say you listen to a podcast on How a Blogger gets a huge amount of traffic from LinkedIn.
If LinkedIn is not in your plan for this quarter, don’t suddenly start spending an hour a week on that platform. Instead, make a note to add it to your plan the following quarter.
Remember though. If you only have a certain amount of time to spend on your blog, you will need to cut time on a different area.
EXAMPLE: Pinterest v’s Facebook time
Jane has been driving a good amount of traffic from the work she does on Pinterest. She has no more than 10 hours to work on her blog each week. She’d like to start a Facebook group but she has to find extra time to dedicate to that task.
Jane decides that if she has 5 pins a day scheduled at least 1 month ahead at the end of the Quarter then she can plan to add up to 30 minutes a week to her Facebook group.
Don’t get sidetracked – Stick to your plan for the full 3 months
I am terrible at getting side-tracked and I have to be really strict with myself otherwise I wouldn’t get any work done.
When I first started my coaching business in 2009 (before I went blogging full time in 2017), I would work really long hours and I was pretty exhausted but I actually got very little done in that time.
Why?????
Because I didn’t have a plan. I was busy but not productive. It wasn’t working well at all.
Busy in business is not the same as productive and may well not lead to success
Make a plan and stick with it for 3 months – Then review
Believe in yourself – Believe in your plan
My background is in mindset coaching. I believe 100% that mindset matters. You have to create a plan of action for your blogging business that you believe in. Check out my top MINDSET TIPS FOR BLOGGERS.
Work on your mindset every day no matter what you want to achieve from your blogging business.
REVIEW THE RESULTS ONLY AT THE END OF THE 3 MONTHS
Your 3 months are up. You’ve stuck to your blogging business plan and now it’s time to review your results. There are 3 important steps:
Review what you got done
- Review what you’ve actually got done. Did you achieve all of your key tasks?
- If you did, can you increase your workload in the next quarter?
- If you didn’t, why not? What would you need to change?
Review results
Use your BASELINE from the start of the quarter to measure your results.
- What are the results for each of the key things you focused on?
- Do you want to continue focusing on each of the key areas of focus?
- Is there anything you need to stop doing?
- Is there anything you need to make changes to? Sometimes you may just need a small change to get better results
- Do you need to spend more time on a specific task?
- Do you need to add anything to your key areas of focus?
Create your action plan for the next quarter
- Review what you want long-term for your blogging business
- What are the key areas of focus for the quarter?
- What is your action plan?
DOWNLOAD the Guide and Workbook
Downloads the 3-Month Business Plan for Bloggers Guide and Workbook.
Resources To Help You Build Your Blogging Business
I hope you’ve found this blog post helpful. Check out my more RESOURCES PAGE for blogging essentials and good to haves.