How to Set Realistic Blogging Goals

My original blogging plan was this:

1. Write a load of good articles
2. Make millions of pounds

I am not joking. That was it. That was the whole plan.

(Let’s be real, it kinda still is, but it shouldn’t be yours.)

I am going to tell you two things I wish someone had told me years ago:

1. Only make goals you can control the outcome of.
2. Make a damn content plan. Not a content calendar (a more useless doucment has never existed). A PLAN.

Why most blogging goals don’t work

“Grow my blog.” “Get more traffic.” “Make money from my writing.”

These aren’t goals. They’re wishes. And you can wish as you’re…goaling (yes, that’s a word, trust me)

The problem with outcome-focused goals in the early stages of blogging is that the outcomes are entirely outside your control.

You cannot decide to have 10,000 monthly visitors by March. You can write the articles that might eventually get you there, but the traffic itself depends on Google’s timeline, your keyword choices, your domain authority, and roughly a hundred other factors you can’t directly influence.

Tying your sense of progress to a metric you can’t control is a reliable way to feel like you’re failing when you’re actually doing everything right.

The fix is shifting your focus to process goals — the things that are entirely within your control and that directly drive the outcomes you eventually want.

What’s the difference between process goals and outcome goals?

Outcome goals are the results: traffic numbers, income figures, email subscribers, page one rankings. They matter — they’re why you’re doing this — but they’re lagging indicators. They reflect work you did months ago and forces outside your control.

You can have them, but don’t live and die by them.

Process goals are the actions: articles published, keyword research sessions completed, Pinterest pins scheduled, internal links added. They’re leading indicators. They’re things you can do today, this week, this month, regardless of what Google is doing.

Every goal worth setting is a process goal. You build the machine first. The machine produces the outcomes later.

Here’s a simple test: if the goal depends on someone else doing something (clicking, ranking, subscribing), it’s an outcome goal. If it only depends on you doing something, it’s a process goal.

What do realistic blogging goals look like at each stage?

Goals need to shift as your blog develops. Here’s a rough framework for the first year:

Months 1–3: Foundation goals

• Niche decided and validated
• Content matrix planned (minimum 50 article ideas)
• Website set up and live
• Google Search Console connected
• 10-30 posts published

Months 4–6: Content bank goals

• 30-50 posts published
• A consistent writing routine in place (see How to Build a Blogging Routine That Actually Works)
• Email list set up, even if it has no subscribers

Months 7–12: Momentum goals

• 40–60 posts published
• Quarterly review habit established
• Get started on a secondary traffic channel

For a full breakdown of the timeline, What to Expect in Your First Year of Blogging covers it in detail.

The survivorship bias problem with other people’s goals

Income reports are everywhere in the blogging world. “$10,000 in month six!” “$50,000 last year from one niche site!”

What you don’t see are the thousands of blogs that didn’t hit those numbers, the people who started at the same time as the income report blogger and quietly gave up, and the context behind the ones that did succeed (existing audience, previous domain, a niche that happened to align perfectly with a Google update, ten years of SEO knowledge going in).

Income reports are survivorship bias in action. You only see the ones worth writing about.

Or lies. Sometimes they’re lies.

This matters for goal-setting because if you benchmark your progress against someone else’s highlight reel, you will always feel behind. Your month three looks nothing like their month three, because blogging doesn’t work like that.

Set goals based on your own starting point, your own available time, and your own niche. Then adjust them based on your own data.

How to set your 90-day blogging goal

Ninety days is the right horizon for a blogging goal. Long enough to make meaningful progress, short enough to stay focused and adjust if something isn’t working.

A good 90-day blogging goal has two parts:

One process goal: Something entirely within your control. Number of articles published. Number of keyword research sessions completed. Number of Pinterest pins created. Pick one metric, set a number, and track it.

Example: Publish 12 articles in the next 90 days.

One outcome wish: Something you’d like to happen, held loosely. Not a commitment, not a measure of success or failure — just a direction. Traffic, subscribers, a first ranking.

Example: See at least one article appear in Google Search Console impressions by the end of the quarter.

The process goal is the one you’re accountable to. The outcome wish is the one you’re curious about.

I don’t want you to think I’m not checking my stats multiple times a day. I’m a chronic analytics checker. Do not be like me.

How to do a quarterly blogging review

Goals without reviews are just intentions. Every 90 days, sit down and answer these questions:

What did I actually publish?

What does Search Console show? Which articles are getting impressions? Which are getting clicks? Are the keywords you targeted showing up? This data takes time to become meaningful but checking it quarterly (not daily) gives you useful signal without the daily disappointment spiral.

What worked? Which articles felt good to write? Which came together quickly? Which topics are you most confident about? Double down on those.

What didn’t? Were there topics you avoided, sessions you skipped, types of content that felt like a slog?

Content plan – does it need adjusting? Did a topic require more articles than you initially envisioned. I really wish I’d tracked this stuff from day one.

What’s the next 90-day goal? Adjust based on what you learned. If you set a goal of 12 articles and published 8, either the goal was too ambitious or the available time wasn’t what you expected. Set the next goal accordingly.

When to adjust a goal (and when to just keep going)

There’s no point in setting goals if you don’t review them. If you planned to write 30 posts but only managed three, you adjust your goals going forward – try for five or ten next time.

Adjusting a goal is rational. If you set a goal of 15 articles in 90 days and life handed you three sick weeks and a job change, adjusting to 0 is sensible. The goal was based on available time that turned out not to be available. You update the inputs, you update the goal.

Giving up is emotional. It’s deciding the goal was wrong because the process was uncomfortable, or because someone else’s blog is growing faster, or because you had two bad writing sessions and extrapolated them into a conclusion about your future.

The awesome thing about blogs is that they keep going when you don’t. Fancy dropping it for a year? It’s still up there, gaining momentum.

For more on staying in motion when motivation dips, How to Stay Motivated When Your Blog Has No Traffic Yet covers the mindset side of this directly.

The one goal that matters most in year one

If I could give you one goal for your first year of blogging, it would be this: publish your first 60 articles.

Not because 60 is a magic number. But because 60 articles means you’ve built a real content bank — enough for Google to understand what your site is about, enough internal linking to create topical authority, enough variety to start seeing which topics perform and which don’t.

With 60 articles, you have data. With data, you can set proper outcome goals. Before 60 articles, you’re mostly working with theory.

(You can also leave it by itself for a month or two just to, you know, see what happens).

Everything before that — the niche, the setup, the keyword research, the routine, the mindset — is in service of getting to 60 published, well-researched articles as efficiently as possible. That’s the mission. That’s the goal.

Frequently asked questions

→ Next up: The Tools That Will Save You Hours Every Week as a Blogger — because good goals are easier to hit when you’re not wasting time on the wrong things.