Do you set goals when blogging?

It helps to have a concrete reason you’re doing it. For example:

• Creates a reference for you to look up later.
• Helps you retain knowledge or improve comprehension.
• You like teaching others
• You want to meet developers

If you can’t find a reason to do it then it’s not worth it and you won’t stick to it.

Blogging is 100% worth doing when you have a clear set of goals and objectives.

I see a lot of folks try blogging and they don't get any leads or drive traffic and as a result think it's not worth the effort. Most of the time it's because:

1. They aren't thinking about keywords
2. They aren't leveraging their posts as a conversion opportunity
3. The posts just aren't that good

Your blog isn't a sounding board for your company, it's a growth engine to drive traffic, improve your SEO, and convert site visitors into leads. You don't have to spend 10+ hours a week managing your blog, but taking time to think about:

1. The personas you are marketing to
2. The broad topics you want to be known for
3. The keywords related to those topics
4. The keywords you can reasonably rank for
5. The ways you can optimize your posts to convert (ie have a subscribe form)

Will go a very long way to improving the ROI of your blog.

I just started recently so my current goal is to post once a week - every Thursday.
Depending on how it goes I may decide to bump that up to twice a week (probably Monday/Thursday) just to see what happens.

One other goal of mine is to keep it ad free. I really, really despise blogs that just flood you with ads/content.

I'm looking to keep it minimal, focus on the writing and if there's a way to make any money, say on medium or through referring products I actually believe in, that's cool, but that's not the end goal.

I'm not sure if you're looking for more concrete goals such as number of reads/visitors/funneling to some product but mine is just a personal blog that I'm using as a way to get ideas out there so I can't speak to that yet.