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This guest post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from PiggyBankPie.

If you’re going to have a successful blog, you need to get smart with setting goals. Success does not just happen; you have to plan for it. I’ve found it to be a process of trial and error. I know a lot more about getting a new blog started now than I did two years ago - and I’ve made plenty of mistakes on the way. Here’s what I’ve learned about goal setting.

You’ve probably come across the acronym SMART before. It refers to setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. You can’t get much better advice than that. How does this apply to your blog? Let’s take a look.

Let’s say you want to build the number of feed subscribers. It helps to know exactly how many subscribers will meet your goal. This may change over time. When you start a new blog, you may be happy if your feed subscribers get into double digits. If your blog has been running longer, then only triple digits will do.

Setting a specific goal makes it easy to have something to shoot for, and you can still exceed it. Being specific also helps you with the second part of goal setting, which is making your goals measurable. If you can’t measure them, how will you know when you have achieved success? For example, you might want to attract a certain number of visitors to your blog, and you can use a stats program to measure when you have met that goal.

Next, your blogging goals need to be achievable and realistic. I always start my goal setting process by thinking big about what my perfect blog would look like. That’s the dreaming phase, where I think about what my ideal blog would look like. I write down my aims, and get rid of the ones that are unrealistic. Then I divide them up into short, medium and long term goals. That gives me targets to meet and realistic time frames in which to meet them. I also need to think about my own time. If I need to do something time consuming, like submitting my blog to 100 directories, I need to set that goal for a time when I can actually doing it - otherwise it isn’t achievable.

It also helps to break these goals down into little steps that you need to complete. For example, if I want to increase the number of email subscribers to my blog, I first need to burn my feed with Feedburner. Then I need to get an email subscription form and add it to my blog’s template. Finally, I need to let people know that they can now subscribe by email. I might do this by writing a post, and by adding a reminder to the end of each post.

Finally, your blogging goals need to be timely. Here’s how that might work. If you want to attract attention with a Diggable post, then don’t post it on a day when you have low traffic, or on a holiday when your regular readers might be away. The post might get lost in the shuffle and you will have wasted some really great writing. Instead, find out when your best traffic day is. Find out who else might be posting on something similar and tell them about your post. Sometimes that’s all it takes to build a buzz.

So when you’re ready to promote your blog, assess your goals and see if they are SMART. It will help you to focus and will save a lot of wasted time.